Category: Conferences

EURO Gold Medal winner

The EURO conference in Prague has begun. I really like Prague: it is a beautiful city with great bars, restaurants, museums, and even an OK english-language bookstore or two.

The first order of business here is the opening session (somewhat after the truly first, 8AM technical talks). Awarded at the opening session is the EURO Gold Medal, bestowed as follows:

The EURO Gold Medal is the highest distinction within OR in Europe. It is conferred on a prominent person or institution, for an outstanding contribution to the Operational Research science. The award is officially bestowed in conjunction with a EURO Conference, if there is a suitable candidate.

One advantage of having a conference at a university (along with such disadvantages as funny room layout, confusing directions and an air of “this isn’t what we normally do”: I will say the organizers have done a great job in making things as easy as possible with transit passes, lots of student helpers and so on) is available wireless. So I am in the auditorium, ready to announce the EURO Gold Medal first on the blogosphere.

And the laureate is Aharon Ben-Tal of the Technion, Israel. He works in continuous optimization, so I am not particularly well versed in his work. This is from his web page:

Prof. Ben-Tal’s research work is mainly in the area of nonlinear optimization. His theoretical work is concerned with extremum principles for problems in a general setting, with regard to the underlying decision space, and the underlying smoothness of the functionals. He was among the first to develop a comprehensive theory of second-order optimality conditions for nondifferential problems.

Prof. Ben-Tal is also involved in research in stochastic mathematical programming. He introduced the concept of entropic-penalty for problems with randomness in the constraints, and developed a duality theory which established a link between stochastic programming and the Expected Utility principle in economics. Recently he developed, together with Prof. A. Nemirovski, the Robust Optimization methodology. The focus of Prof. Ben-Tal’s work in recent years is in computational methods for solving large-scale continuous optimization problems. The algorithms he develops are used in designing optimally complex engineering structures, water distribution networks, and techniques for medical image reconstruction. The above projects are carried out in the MINERVA Optimization Center, a 2 million DM endowed research center.

Prof. Ben-Tal was a member of the International Council of the Mathematical Programming Society. He served as Area Editor of the journal Mathematics of Operations Research, and is currently a member of the Editorial Board of the journals Convex Analysis and SIAM Optimization. He received Awards of Excellence from the Technion both for research and for teaching.

The work with the most impact is the work he did with Nemirovski in creating the area of robust optimization.

On my way to Prague

I’m in the Hong Kong airport on the way from Auckland to Prague. I have about 22 more hours to go before I arrive at my hotel. It is great spending a year in New Zealand, but it is definitely a long way from anywhere!

Hong Kong airport is beautiful and incredibly well organized. I compare this to the alternative routing through Los Angeles, and there is absolutely no comparison. LAX is chaotic, rude, and very difficult (in my admittedly limited experience). Here, transferring flights involved no formalities at all: just a quick security check and into the departure areas, absolutely full of shopping, lounges, bars and restaurants.

I am on my way to the EURO conference. It is too bad this conference conflicts with the INFORMS “International” in Puerto Rico. Both are conferences I would like to attend. But the IFORS executive is meeting in Prague, so that is where I am going. I’ll try to provide an update or two along the way.

Conference Listing Software

One of the things I did with INFORMS Online was put in a system for conference listings.  The system began with some commercial software but I ended up modifying it so much that it is almost unrecognizable.  The system has been very successful (a few hundred OR/MS conferences get added every year, and the upkeep is relatively low).  But the system is buggy (people “losing” their conferences is the most common problem) and I cannot keep reminding myself on how it works in order to debug it.  Further, there are some things we would like (RSS feeds and ical compatibility) that this cannot do.

So I would like a new system.  There is an add on for word-press blogs (like this one) that allows event entry, but it is pretty darn clunky.  I am now experimenting with it on this page (see the right hand column), but I am not crazy about it.  Has anyone seen systems like the one at INFORMS that they like and (even better) have experience with?

MIT Conference on Sports Business

MIT is holding a conference this weekend on Sports Business (unfortunately it is sold out) with a focus on Analytical Sports Management. This workshop is an interesting mix of sports insiders, economists, operations researchers, media executives and more, with a strong emphasis on those in the business. No talks directly on scheduling (my particular emphasis) but a cool looking conference nonetheless.

INFORMS Computing Society Conference

The INFORMS Computing Society Conference will hold their annual meeting in Miami from January 3-5, 2007. While ICS has a large contingent at the INFORMS Annual Meeting, this conference has a much different feel. Rather than being part of a 3500 person conference, the ICS Conference aims for around 100-150 participants, all interested in the interaction between OR and computer science. A highlight of this conference will be the presentation by Robert Atlas, director of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Labs. AOML looks at things like hurricanes, climate change (or stability, for this politically charged issue!), and coastal effects. This area is a great one for OR: there are lots of policy issues that can use an analytical input.

The deadline for abstract submission for this conference is October 1, 2006.

Open Source and Optimization

I am attending a conference at DIMACS on COIN-OR, which is an activity to encourage and support open source development in operations research. At the moment, most of COIN-OR revolves around linear and integer programming codes, but there are efforts in nonlinear programming, metaheuristics, and other areas.

COIN-OR addresses one of my pet peeves about research in OR (including my own!): developed codes are very rarely available and even more rarely useable by others. So people either reinvent previous work or simply compare new results to old results (perhaps trying to correct for computer speed). COIN-OR tries to develop a repository of open source codes. So, for instance, if you are doing research on a new type of cut for integer programming, you can simply add a short code to a full-featured IP code and see the results.

The codes being developed are very impressive, though a little overwhelming for a casual user. But different people are working for different target audiences. I hope the audience “I want to put together a branch-and-price algorithm in an afternoon” (e.g. me!) is addressed a bit more in the future.

One of the key goals for COIN-OR is highlighted on the home page:

Our goal is to create for mathematical software what the open literature is for mathematical theory.

If we are to advance as a field, we need much, much more of this sort of effort.New COIN-OR logo

COIN-OR is an example of a strong community in our field. It is great watching people who have only emailed over the past years meet each other for the first time.

And in breaking news, COIN-OR has chosen a new logo, as illustrated here.

Off to Iceland!

Iceland GeyserI leave tomorrow for Iceland for the EURO 2006 conference. Busy time: in addition to the IFORS Administrative Committee Meeting, I am giving a semi-plenary on “The Society of Operations Research” (more on social capital and OR) and introducing Saul Gass as the IFORS Distinguished Lecturer.

They expect more than 1700 participants at this conference, almost triple their initial expectations of 600. This has been a huge issue for the organizers since it is a busy period in Reykjavik and there are only about 3000 rooms in the city. They have done an amazing job!

Since INFORMS Pittsburgh is also looking larger than expected (with more than 3200 abstracts submitted) it is clear there is quite a bit of enthusiasm for conferences. I am not sure why that is… perhaps the economy is better so people have more travel funds.

I’ll try to post some thoughts from the conference, along with some Reykjavik pictures.

Cutting Edge Pittsburgh

For those of you wondering whether Pittsburgh will be interesting enough for this year’s INFORMS Conference, cnn.com has a posting on Cutting-Edge Pittsburgh. Based on the number of abstracts submitted (more than 3100 to date;  the SF meeting in 2005 ended up with 2877), it certainly seems possible that this conference will be INFORMS’ largest ever. Between this and the amazing registration numbers at the EURO meeting (if you don’t already have a hotel room, be prepared to scramble: we have filled up Reykjavik), it is certainly easy to see OR as a vibrant, growing field!

Luk Van Wassenhove and IFORS Distinguished Lecturer

Luk Van Wassenhove was the IFORS Distinguished Lecturer at this year’s INFORMS conference. Here he is receiving congratulations from Tom Magnanti (right), President of IFORS.

Luk spoke on “Closed Loop Supply Chains: Past, Present, and Future”. Closed-loop supply chains are those where the supply chain bringing goods from consumers back to suppliers is also important. Luk gave an interesting historical perspective on this rather young field. He suggested that the field has gone through 5 phases:

1) Technical remanufacturing. Research into how to best remanufacture/resuse returned items, with little regard to how they come back or where they go after remanufacturing.

2) Valuing reverse logistics. Research and interest in how items coming back to a supplier can create value for that supplier. These models are more market driven than just waste stream recovery, and address the front end acquisition of items.

3) Coordinating decisions, bringing the forward supply chain together with the reverse supply chain. Once the magnitude of the problem is realized, the reverse chain impacts the forward chain, and vice versa.

4) Closing the loop, with dynamic decisions over the lifecycle of products. One aspect of this is the need to spend money to make money. Consider a “recycled” computer: one that is only a few weeks old is much more valuable than one that is months old. In such a case, investments might need to be made to increase the speed of the reverse supply chain.

5) The final phase of research, which perhaps should have been the first one, is “Is there a market”? While this area has increased in academic stature, and there are visible, but isolated, examples in practice, how can these insights be embedded in real firms. This brings in issues of accounting (how should returns be valued) and marketing (how should cannibalism be handled between original and remanufactured products)?

This was an ideal plenary session: broad, understandable and interesting.

OR Exhibits

I just got back from Washington, where a friend of ours, a scientific illustrator, had an opening for his work at the AAAS. It is a very impressive show, with a mix of illustrations of insects, plants, dinosaurs, and extinct mammals. The attendees of the opening were a real mix. Some had a scientific background, but most were enthusiastic amateurs.

It is too bad that OR doesn’t lend itself to this sort of amateur interest. Martin Gardner‘s Mathematical Games column (and some of his successors) did appeal to the nonprofessional, and often had a strong OR flavor (that’s how I got my start). But having an exhibit, attracting a mix of people, seems unlikely.

The closest we come to this is some of the optimization art done by Robert Bosch of Oberlin (I am sure there are others, and I would like to hear about them). Bob works in dominoes, traveling salesman tours, and many other media to create art through optimization. See, in particular, his site dominoartwork.com for samples of what he does.

OK, that makes two things I want to do since I started this blog: solve world hunger through improved logistics and have an opening at a prestigious museum. Looks like this blog is going to cause more problems than it solves!