Month: June 2010

Watch the Edelmans!

I have said numerous times that the Edelman Prize presentations and papers are my favorite part of the operations research world.   It is fantastic to see and read about such great work in operations research.  The presentations often feature a Cxx of the firm.  Watching business leaders explain the importance of operations research never gets old to me.  And some of them actually read the script with feeling and (seeming) understanding (others look like they are reading under duress, with uzi’s pointed at them from just offscreen).

The Edelman’s have all been recorded through the years, and INFORMS (the professional organization that runs the Prize)  has experimented with how best to distribute the results.  We have gone from video tapes to DVDs to YouTube snippits.  There was always an issue of monetizing the presentations.  If this is our field’s best work, surely we can make money on it!  But making money limits distribution.

At least for now, INFORMS seems to have given up the money aspect, and even any membership aspect, and offers the most recent Edelman presentations for the low, low cost of a site registration.  Once you register, you can see all sorts of neat videos.  In addition to the Edelman finalists, there are Richard O’Neill’s talk on energy markets  (he is the chief economic adviser to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), Chris Tang’s talk on supply chain risk management, and the Wagner Prize finalists.  For all, there is a proprietary presentation which shows both the powerpoint slides and the speaker.

I do have one big complaint about this setup, however.  The system, as currently designed, appears to fall into a trap that operations research often sets for itself.  If you know you want what the system offers, it is easy to work with:  registration is fast and relatively non-intrusive.  But the listing of the videos is “behind the wall”, so someone interested in, say, energy markets, has no idea that this site would have a great talk on the subject.   Why aren’t all the talk titles and abstracts freely available?  Better yet, why bother with registration?  Based on the privacy agreement, it does not appear that INFORMS can even market to those who register.  Why hide anything?

For those of us in the know, this is a tremendous resource!  For those of you who have not yet discovered the beauty, fun, interest and (particularly) importance of operations research, I strongly urge you to go to the site and explore.  It might change your life.

Become Rich and Famous at INFORMS Online

Well, not rich in the financial sense, but rich in social capital and other rewards.

INFORMS is looking for the next editor of INFORMS Online.  I was the founding editor of IOL, with a term from 1995-2000, and it was one of the formative experiences of my life.  I learned a lot about operations research, INFORMS, organizing things, inspiring people, and myself during that time.  In that time, the IOL team took INFORMS into the internet age.  A person I admire greatly said that the best part of the merger of ORSA and TIMS (the predecessors of INFORMS) was that something like INFORMS Online could happen and I am very proud to have been part of that.

Back then, in the dark ages, the job of Editor was very hands-on.  The editorial team and I hand-coded much of the visible portions of IOL.  We installed database programs and wrote codes that handled the membership directory and the conference database.  In short, we did a lot of grunt work.  You can still see some remnants of that period:  if you go to IOL and check the tab on your browser, you will see a little square icon saying “OR/MS” in white and blue (you can see it on the graphic next to this post).  I hand-created that, picking out the blocks using a freeware icon editor in 1997 (when Internet Explorer 4 was released, supporting such icons).  It is still there:  my little bit of fame on the internet.

The job of editor of IOL is a lot different now.  Between INFORMS’s wonderful staff and IOL’s content management system, there is little actual coding done by the editor.  Instead, the editor and his or her team gets to think of all the ways that IOL could be used to advance INFORMS and the field of operations research.  How can we create real communities?  What services do subdivisions need that IOL can provide?  How can we better advertise all the wonderful things our field does?

Being Editor of IOL lets you meet with a wide variety of people in operations research (and become a little famous along the way).  It does take work:  we estimate it takes around 4 hours per week, but the effort depends on the goals and aspirations of the Editor.

If you are interested, nominations are due by the end of August.  And self-nominations are perfectly fine, and even expected.

ALIO/INFORMS Talk on Benders

My talk at the ALIO/INFORMS Conference in Buenos Aires was on combinatorial benders’ approaches to hard problems.  I really think this approach is an important one that is not yet utilized enough.  You can get the talk here (apologies for the powerpoint:  I wanted to convert to beamer but was too latex-stupid to get things done quickly enough).  A paper on benders for sports scheduling is here, while one for transportation planning will be added when I get back.

The talk went well, I thought:  people seemed engaged, and I had fun giving the talk.  No wireless mike, so I opted to go without a microphone, so I hope those in the back could hear me.  Generally I prefer if people use microphones, but this was not the first time I did not take my own advice.

Off to Buenos Aires

I am off on Friday to Buenos Aires (via Atlanta)  for the ALIO/INFORMS conference.  I am giving a tutorial Monday on combinatorial Benders’ approaches and am tearing my hair out trying to get a structure to the talk.

If anyone else is going down (particularly a fellow blogger), drop me a note:  we can do a “Bloggers (and Readers) Beer” together.

I’ll try to blog some of the interesting activities at the conference:  INFORMS doesn’t seem to be organizing things the way they do at the annual meeting so the blogging will be a bit more informally done.

Correction… Operations Research is Not Taking Over the World, Yet

After trumpeting the glorious news that Japan had an operations research-educated Prime Minister, I suppose I should note that Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama is resigning after eight months of rule.  With operations research in his arsenal, perhaps he simply fixed everything in those eight months.  But that does not appear to be the case (according to CNN):

In his first speech as Japan’s 92nd prime minister, Hatoyama made promises that he would conduct a clean and transparent government, launching a task force to monitor government spending.

But soon afterwards, allegations of illegal campaign financing tarnished his administration’s image. Some of his cabinet members were investigated for corruption.

His approval rating took further hits over his failed promise to move a major U.S. Marine base off Okinawa to ease the burden of the island, which hosts the majority of the United States military presence in Japan. Earlier this month, calling his decision “heartbreaking,” he announced that the base would remain on Okinawa, although relocated to a different part of the island.

C’mon Yukio, it is a facility location problem!  We’ve been solving those for decades!

Let’s hope the less-than-stellar past eight months don’t tarnish all of us in operations research who aspire to higher office.

[Thanks to my former doctoral student Ben Peterson who called me out on this issue.]

New Use for Abstracts

For a previous post on data mining, I received the following comment from “liseli bakire”:

Abstract
The purpose of this article is to investigate some managerial insights related to using the all-unit quantity discount policies under various conditions. The models developed here are general treatments that deal with four major issues: (a) one buyer or multiple buyers, (b) constant or price-elastic demand, (c) the relationship between the supplier’s production schedule or ordering policy and the buyers’ ordering sizes, and (d) the supplier either purchasing or manufacturing the item. The models are developed with two objectives: the supplier’s profit improvement or the supplier’s increased profit share analysis. Algorithms are developed to find optimal decision policies. Our analysis provides the supplier with both the optimal all-unit quantity discount policy and the optimal production (or ordering) strategy. Numerical examples are provided. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons. Inc.

Looks vaguely relevant, though not really pertinent to the topic.  My spam filter had no chance on it:  it passed it through as legit.  But why this abstract?  Ah, “liseli” has a porn site linked to the name (and it turns out the name means “high school virgins” in Turkish).  All part of the cat and mouse game as people try to get links on to the all-powerful “Michael Trick’s Operations Research Blog”.   But extra points for actually using an operations research oriented abstract!

By the way, the paper with that abstract is by Kevin Weng and Richard Wong, “General models for the supplier’s all-unit quantity discount policy, Naval Research Logistics, 1993.  Looks like an interesting paper!