Blogging for the INFORMS Practice Meeting

I am one of a stable of guest bloggers for the INFORMS Practice Meeting. Rather than double post, I’ll move over to that blog for a few days (unless I have something to say that isn’t appropriate for an INFORMS blog), with pointers from here.

My first entry there: Tough Choices!, where I complain about an embarrassment of riches.

I’m getting organized to head off to the INFORMS Practice Conference.  I fly out Saturday, and will meet up with some friends to go to the Diamondbacks game.  Sunday is shaping up to be a very full day.  I really enjoy the Technology Workshops, where software companies in operations research talk about their recent products and plans for the future.  This year is shaping up to be particularly interesting due to all the activity in the market.  Since last year’s meeting,

  1. Dash Optimization (makers of Xpress-MP) has been bought by FairIsaac, which is now named FICO
  2. ILOG has been bought by IBM, and is now styled “ILOG, an IBM Company”
  3. Gurobi has been founded by some of the people who used to be with ILOG
  4. Microsoft Solver Foundation has started
  5. Dynadec has been formed to market Comet, a hybrid optimization, constraint programming, local search solver

and undoubtedly much more that I missed along the way, but will find out at the conference.  All of these companies and many others and more will be presenting “half day” workshops on Sunday:  they are really three hour workshops so you can get in three of them during a very long day.  The hard part is trying to figure out which three of the twelve workshops to attend!

2 thoughts on “Blogging for the INFORMS Practice Meeting”

  1. After reading a past post you did about math on the Kindle, I can’t help but wonder if the Kindle DX came up at the meeting. I am particularly interested in hearing what you think about the larger screen, support for pdf and the ability to switch to landscape mode on the screen. Do you think this will change your mind about math on the Kindle?

  2. Yes, I think I will check out the DX. Though I hate spending another $500 after paying for the Kindle 2!

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