Month: June 2012

Become an Operations Research Editor!

While the popular conception of a university professor is someone who stares at arcane notation on a whiteboard until interrupted by the need to teach pesky undergraduates, there are many more activities that are part of the professorial portfolio.  We drink coffee with colleagues, gossip about departmental politics, attend conferences in far-flung locales, referee papers, train doctoral students, write blog entries, tweet, volunteer for professional societies, and much more.  There are a ton of things that can go into a professional life.

One key professional role is that of editor of a professional journal.  Editing a journal is not a job to take on lightly.  It requires a 3-5 year commitment and that commitment is contuous.  Except for editing the “big journals” like Management Science or Operations Research, an editorship is not terrifically time consuming, requiring just a few hours per week.  But it requires those hours each and every week:  nothing will kill a journal quicker than an on-and-off editor who only responds when crises have grown so large as to not be ignored.

In return for that time, the editor can have a unique and personal effect on a journal.  The editor’s judgement will determine the quality of the journal, and the editor’s energy will define the scope and creativity in the journal.

There are two journals that are looking for editors for which this scope and creativity issue is particularly important:

  1. INFORMS Journal on Education.  ITE is an online-only journal of INFORMS with a goal of advancing education in OR/MS.  The journal has published pieces on educational theory, case studies, surveys, curricula, and much more.  I have found the journal to be very useful as I prepare my classes, and I have published in it.  This would be a great post for a creative researcher with a passion for educational issues.  Nominations are due June 30, 2012
  2. Surveys in Operations Research and Management Science.  I am even closer to this journal, since I am one of the thee (along with Jan Karel Lenstra and Bert Zwart) co-editors.  This journal was designed as the followup to the well-regarded Handbooks in ORMS that Jan Karel Lenstra and George Nemhauser handled for a decade or so.  The idea was to publish high quality surveys (like in Handbooks) without the lead time required by the Handbooks.  Like many new journals, it has been a real task to get off the ground, but we will have published three years worth of journals at the changeover.  This journal needs a highly-energetic, well-connected editor who can give it near undivided attention over the next few years to put the journal on solid footing.  It is an Elsevier journal which gives it some disadvantages (some choose not to work with commercial publishers) and advantages (editorial support is very, very good).  I’ve greatly enjoyed working with Jan Karel and Bert and the rest of the team on this, but it needs an individual or group which is less scattered in their interests than I am at this point.  Applications are due July 31, 2012.

Taking on a journal is a big responsibility, but it can be very rewarding. Short of doing Lanchester Prize level work, it is one of the best opportunities you have to have a real effect on the field.

All Hail the Mighty Rose (and Mary and David and the rest of the gang at INFORMS)

A bit over a year ago, INFORMS took over sponsorship of OR-Exchange, a question and answer site for operations research and analytics.  And when I say “sponsorship”, I mean they agreed to host the site and provide all the infrastructure for the system.  It was a generous offer to a community that had been struggling to find a reliable home.

Since then, OR-Exchange has, in some ways, thrived.  There are more than 600 questions, more than two thousand answers, and scores of participants.  Almost every question gets some sort of answer, and often three or four useful responses.  The site has avoided (much) spam through the diligence of the administrators (users who receive enough karma through their engagement with the site).

But it has not all be “rosy” (a bad pun, for reasons you will see!).  The system response has been, charitably, atrocious, with countless errors, time-outs, and just plain slow days.  The INFORMS people tried, but nothing seemed to help much and the open-source community that created the underlying software (OSQA) couldn’t help enough to get things working well.

So those of us who believed in OR-Exchange put up with the slowness because the system was useful.  And fun.  But we did hope for a day when the system worked better, hoping that would encourage more to join us.

This week, that day has come.  Through the work of new INFORMS IT head-honcho Rose Futchko along with INFORMS people such as David Wirth, Mary Leszczynski, and (in earlier efforts) Herman Strom and undoubtedly others (let me know so I can add to the Hall of Heros), the problems seem to have been fixed.  The system is noticeably faster and more stable.  For proof, I offer the following giving the load times of the front page of OR-Exchange every hour for the past seven days (lower is better: every horizontal line marks 10 seconds).  See if you can figure out when the new system went in.

Of course, it might go all pear-shaped (in a wonderful expression I learned in New Zealand) over the next days, but things are looking awfully good (“Don’t jinx it Trick, ye eejit you!”).

If you haven’t yet discovered the joys of OR-Exchange, now would be a pretty good time.  You are far less likely to be greeted with a 500 error!

Operations Research at Business Schools: The Bad!

Right after returning from Egon Balas’ 90th Birthday tea, as I thought good thoughts about the role operations research plays in business schools, I read some disconcerting news from the College of of Business and Economics, University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, from Dr. Nicola Petty:

On Wednesday the Council of the university at which I have been employed voted to close down the Operations Research programme. The university wants to “concentrate” and OR didn’t make the grade, despite two academics taking voluntary redundancy, and a concerted effort to streamline the programme so that it is financially viable. It is the end of an era.

Let me begin by saying that I love New Zealand and its universities.  I spoke at a number of them in 2007 when I was the New Zealand Operational Research Society Visiting Speaker, and I spent a wonderful couple of days at the University of Canterbury.  Christchurch is a beautiful town that has had a tough time of it recently.  And I have no direct knowledge of the challenges the university faces, or what went into the decision.

That said, I have to ask:

What the heck is that university thinking?????

Here we are, entering a golden age of analytical decision making.  We are in a world where companies are drowning in data but are unable to make sense of it to turn data into better decisions.  Where companies like IBM put business analytics front and center in their strategic plans.  Where a key managerial skill is understanding data and applying analytical approaches to problems.

What kind of management program would purposefully cut their business analytics capabilities in this world?

Stunning.

As an academic administrator in a business school, I guess I am happy to see our “competitors” making themselves weaker.  More for us, I guess.

As someone in operations research, it is depressing to see how some academic administrators just don’t get it.  It gives the rest of us academic administrators a bad name.

If you are a student planning to study management, please ask the question:  am I going to get the skills I need to survive and thrive in a data-rich environment full of complicated decisions?  A management school that is running away from analytics is a school that is living in the past.


Operations Research and Business Schools: The Good!

Way back in 1988, I was a fresh Ph.D. out of Georgia Tech doing a postdoc at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota.  While I had plans to spend another postdoc year, likely in Europe (and I ended up doing so, in Germany), I did decide it would be good to lock up an academic job before I left.   Email did exist at the time, but the norm was to send things out via “regular” mail.  So I went down to the copy center at the University and picked out a suitably heavy-weight paper for my vita.  I sent out a dozen or so responses to job ads and made a few phone calls (or asked my advisor to make a few calls) and was invited to visit a half-dozen or so places.  Perhaps it was  different era, or perhaps I was relaxed knowing that I had another year of postdoc funds if needed, but it certainly felt more relaxed that it appears to be these days.

One place that seemed eager to have me out was this “business school” at Carnegie Mellon:  The Graduate School of Industrial Administration.  Now, I came out of engineering and I certainly believed that my future lie in engineering.  Here is a sign of how little those of us in engineering knew about business schools:  the previous year, a fellow doctoral student went out on the market and interviewed at a number of places before finding a job at a business school.  At the time, we were all a bit surprised since he had a good dissertation and we (other doctoral students) thought that it was good enough to get a top engineering job.  Too bad he was stuck in a business school, we said:  must be a tough job market.  That school was the University of Chicago, then and now a preeminent business school that much of the field would kill to get a job at. Business schools were really not on our radar.

But I was polite, so I agreed to head out to Carnegie Mellon.  It was my first job interview, so I told myself the school would be a great place to practice my talk before moving on to the real contenders.

I hadn’t planned on liking CMU and GSIA as much as I did.  The people I talked to were much different than those at engineering schools.  Of course, there were some top-notch OR people (more on them later) but I also talked to economists and political scientists and even a psychologist or two.  They were involved in fascinating research that was a little less … transactional than much of engineering research (“Do this since the grant depends on it”).  And the Deputy Dean of the time, Tim McGuire (now at Management Science Associates) was very persuasive about how exciting things can be in business schools.

But even more persuasive was Egon Balas, an intellectual leader in the operations research since the 1960s.  While I did (and do) find him a bit intimidating, Egon had (and has) a tremendous love for integer programming, and amazing energy in research. He also had spend decades keeping up the tradition GSIA had of having a great OR group.  Founders such as Herb Simon, Bill Cooper, Al Blumstein, and Gerry Thompson had been (or in Gerry’s case, still were) part of GSIA, and the OR group was, in 1988, pretty amazing: Gerard Cornuejols and John Hooker joined Gerry and Egon to form the group.

I received an offer from GSIA and from some top engineering schools, and, to my surprise, I decided that my future lay in the business school.  And that is not a decision I have regretted.  GSIA (now Tepper) continues to have a top-notch OR group.  Gerry retired, then passed away, but we added R. Ravi, Javier Pena, Francois Margot, Willem van Hoeve, and Fatma Kilinc-Karzan.  Gerard Cornuejols continues to do amazing work, having recently won the von Neumann Theory Prize.

With the larger faculty size comes a stable and important role within the business school.  Operations research is seem as a key competitive advantage to our school.  While there are many aspects of this advantage, I’ll point to two:  the increased role of business analytics, and the role rankings play in business school success.  If you don’t believe me on the latter, I’ll point you to the list of journals Business Week uses for their intellectual capital ranking.  If you have people who can publish in Operations Research, you can be a more successful business school.  I recently heard my Dean, a hard-core finance researcher, say “We need more OR faculty”:  music to my ears!

And, the best part is, Egon Balas is still with us and still active.  He turns 90 this week, so we had a tea for him (we had a big conference when he turned 80;  we can do that again for his 100th).  A bunch of us did short video clips to wish Egon happy birthday.  Here is mine:

As you might guess, I am proud to be part of the operations research group here at the Tepper School. The school has been very good for operations research … and operations research has been very good for the school.