Category: INFORMS

Time for another INFORMS Conference

It is that time of the year again:  it is the Annual INFORMS Conference, being held for the first time in Austin, Texas.  Should be a fun time, and it is certainly warmer there than it is here in Pittsburgh.

INFORMS has a conference blog going, so I’ll be posting there for a bit (with a copy over here).  I’ve also put a feed in the sidebar here that includes both the blog and and  #informs2010 tweets.

I hope to see many of you in Austin.  I’ll be at the 8AM session that Laura McLay has put together on Social Networks and Operations Research, so perhaps that is a good meetup session!

The End of the INFORMS Practice Conference …

and the start of the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research.

The INFORMS Practice Conference has long been one of my favorite conferences.  In addition to the inspirational Edelman Competition presentations, the organizers do a great job of identifying presenters for a range of industries, illustrating the wide applicability of operations research.  The conference is on a much more manageable scale than the INFORMS Annual Meeting (or EURO meetings) and is typically held in an interesting location.

The INFORMS blog  has just announced that the name for this conference series will change to the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research.  Business analytics is a term that has gained a lot of recognition recently (we recently added a track to our MBA program called “business analytics”).  INFORMS has a pretty good definition of the term:

Business analytics facilitates realization of business objectives through reporting of data to analyze trends, creating predictive models for forecasting and optimizing business processes for enhanced performance.

While all of those aspects are “operations research” it is that last phrase “optimizing business processes” that really links business analytics to the OR/MS world. Previous approaches like “business intelligence” did not really integrate aspects of optimizing business processes.  But with this definition “business analytics” really is “operations research” and vice-versa.

I have struggled with the adoption of the phrase “business analytics”.  INFORMS (and its founding organizations ORSA and TIMS) has had innumerable discussions on what our field should be named and even now INFORMS embeds two alternatives: Operations Research and Management Science, the ORMS of INFORMS.  Do we need another name?  And there are aspects of “business analytics” that seem to me to be a stretch to call operations research:  once you start tossing in dashboards and scorecards and the rest of the buzzwords, I start racing back to my safe world of cutting planes and submodular functions.  But it is all about using data and models to make better decisions.  And if the market likes “business analytics” then I’m good with it.

I worry about the longevity of the term.  Will this term last or in five years will it feel like “e-business” does today?  It does strike me as a term that has the chance of being around for a while, particularly if it is embraced by organizations like INFORMS.

One big problem for the phrase:  there is no good phrase to identify those that do it.  “Business analysts” is not right:  analyst comes from analysis, not analytics.  “Business analytickers?”  I think not.  On the other hand, “operations research” has that problem too.  “Operations researchers” just doesn’t sound right.

So I am good with the title.  However, can we call it the “INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research”, its official name, not the “INFORMS Analytics Conference” as given in the INFORMS blog title?  Including the “operations research” name is going to be important to the branding of this conference.  At least as far as us ORers are concerned.

Exciting Times for the INFORMS Meeting

Lots of great things are being planned for the upcoming INFORMS Meeting. Let me highlight two.

First, there is a wonderful series of panel discussions planned (if I say so myself:  I organized this particular track).  The idea is to explore issues of professional interest (rather than technical tracks, which are interesting in their own right but not what we were aiming for here).   I previously asked for advice and feedback on topics, and ended up finding some great panel organizers.  Here is the list we ended up with:

Sunday Nov 07, 08:00 – 09:30 : Panel Discussion: Social Networking and Operations Research
Chair: Laura McLay
Sunday Nov 07, 13:30 – 15:00 : Panel Discussion: OR in Engineering Schools
Chair: Mark Daskin
Monday Nov 08, 08:00 – 09:30 : Panel Discussion: INFORMS Journals
Chair: Terry Harrison
Tuesday Nov 09, 08:00 – 09:30 : Joint Session Invited Panels /JFIG: Success as a Junior Faculty
Chair: Burcu Keskin
Tuesday Nov 09, 11:00 – 12:30 : Panel Discussion: Operations Research/Management Science in Business Schools
Chair: Jeff Camm
Tuesday Nov 09, 13:30 – 15:00 : Panel Discussion: Academic Administration and Operations Research/ Management Science: A Good Combination?
Chair: Cynthia Barnhart
Tuesday Nov 09, 16:30 – 18:00 : Panel Discussion: Skills and Career Paths in Industry
Chair: Ranganath Nuggehalli

I think there is nice variety in the topics.  I am particularly looking forward to the session on social networks.   Laura McLay, Aurelie Thiele, Anna Nagurney, and Wayne Winston will discuss how twitter, facebook, blogs and so on can be used in the operations research world.  Sounds like a great way to start of the conference.  I’ll definitely be there live tweeting/blogging.

The second big activity I am looking forward to is “Forrest-Fest”.  I am a big fan of COIN-OR, the open source initiative in operations research (for a few more weeks, I sit on its Strategic Leadership Board).  John Forrest was one of the key people in the founding of COIN, and continues to play an extremely active role in code development and debugging.  John is “retiring” from IBM;  COIN-OR is turning 10 years old.  The combination is obvious!  It is time for a famous COIN-OR Party!  You can check out their extensive set of talks at their wiki.  The COIN-OR reception is always enjoyable, and is promised to be “thoroughly optimized”.  I do worry the shape of people Monday morning:  robustness constraints are often ignored during the Sunday reception.

Between the program and the city of Austin, I am very much looking forward to the conference.  I hope to see many of you there!

INFORMS Optimization Awards

The INFORMS Optimization Society just announced their 2010 awards.

I [Nick Sahinidis, President of the Society] am delighted to announce the winners of the 2010 INFORMS Optimization Society Prizes:
– George L. Nemhauser, winner of the first Khachiyan Prize for his life-time achievements in the field of optimization
– Zhi-Quan (Tom) Luo, winner of the 2010 Farkas Prize for his outstanding contributions to the field of optimization
– Anthony Man-Cho So, winner of the 2010 Prize for Young Researchers for his paper “Moment inequalities for sums of random matrices and their applications to optimization,” Mathematical Programming, DOI: 10.1007/s10107-009-0330-5
– Shiqian Ma, winner of the 2010 Student Paper Prize for his paper “Fast multiple splitting algorithms for convex optimization,” co-authored with Don Goldfarb.

A very impressive group!  I have worked with Nemhauser, and he and I are co-owners of a small sports scheduling firm.  I’d like to think sports scheduling helped a little bit in getting this award, but since our most cited paper together is only his 14th most cited paper (it is my 5th most cited, both stats according to Google scholar), I guess he is really getting it for his work on more fundamental issues in integer programming (and other areas!).

Congrats to all the winners.  You can find out more about their work, and even see them all together at the upcoming INFORMS meeting:

The detailed award citations for this year’s prizes can be found at http://optimization.society.informs.org/prizes.html.  The four prize winners will present their work at a special session at the INFORMS meeting in Austin, scheduled for November 7th from 13:30 to 15:00 and entitled “Optimization Society Prizes.”

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.

Follow INFORMS Practice from your Own Home

Sadly, I’m not at INFORMS Practice, but the blog entries and tweets make me feel like I am there (or perhaps they remind me I am not). Lots of interesting things happening and the conference hasn’t even started yet! Coming up shortly: the technology workshops, followed by the Welcome Reception tonight. I’ve got the tweets in my sidebar, and highly recommend following the conference page for the blog entries.

Doing Good with Good OR, 2010 edition

INFORMS is again sponsoring a student project prize on the theme “Doing Good with Good OR”:

Doing Good with Good OR-Student Competition is held each year to identify and honor outstanding projects in the field of operations research and the management sciences conducted by a student or student group that have a significant societal impact.

The projects must have, or are likely to have, a significant societal impact, and operations research and management science methods and tools (broadly interpreted) must be central to the success of the projects described. “Societal impact” should be construed to mean an impact on individuals, communities and organizations that goes beyond that associated with a private-sector for-profit initiative. The projects might also strive to include innovation through theory, creative computational methods, and should address implementation challenges.

Last year, David Hutton of Stanford won the award for work on screening Hepatitis B.

The submission deadline for this year’s award is May 15, 2010.

INFORMS Practice Tutorials

The INFORMS Practice meeting coming up in Orlando has an extremely impressive set of methodology tutorials planned.  Here is the list:

360i
M. Kevin Geraghty, MS, Vice President, Research & Analytics, on “Marketing in Online Social Spaces.”

Business Forecast Systems, Inc.
Eric A. Stellwagen, BA, CEO & Co-Founder, on “Beyond Time Series Forecasting: Improving Forecasting Accuracy by Modeling the Impact of Promotions, Business Interruptions and Other Aperiodic Events.”

Chevron Corporation
Franklyn G. Koch, MS, Decision Analysis Practice Leader, Chevron Projects Resources Company, on “How Game Theory Yields New Insights to Decision Analysis in the Energy Industry.”

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
Richard O’Neill, PhD, Chief Economic Advisor, on “Better, Smarter Electricity Markets: How Better Optimization Software Can Save Billions.”

Forio Business Simulations
Michael Bean, MS, President, on “How to Create Web-Based Simulations and Interactive Data Visualizations.”.

Georgia Institute of Technology
Ellis L. Johnson, PhD, Professor & Coca-Cola Chair; Industrial & Systems Engineering, on “A Framework for Choosing Optimization Software.”

Hewlett-Packard Corporation
Pramod Singh, PhD, Analytics Solution Architect, on “Marketing Campaign Optimization Is Hard (Especially in the Future).”

IBM Research
Robin Lougee-Heimer, PhD, Research Staff Member; Program Manager, COIN-O.R., on “Using Open-Source Solvers in Prime-Time Applications.”

Innovative Decisions, Inc.
Donald L. Buckshaw, MS, Senior Principal Analyst, on “The Balance Beam Process for Prioritization and Weight Elicitation.”

Intechné
Sanjay Saigal, PhD, President, on “Fueled by Randomness: Practical Probability Management.”

Intel Corporation
Erik F. Hertzler, MBA, Capital Supply Chain Staff Engineer, TME Capital Planning Group, on “Using Option Contracts with Suppliers to Reduce Risk and Build Win-Win Relationships.”

SAS Institute Inc.
Michael Gilliland, MS, MSE, Product Marketing Manager, Forecasting, on “Why are Forecasts So Wrong? What Management Must Know About Forecasting.”

Schneider National, Inc. & Princeton University
Ted L. Gifford, MS, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff and Hugo Simao, PhD, Senior Operations Research Engineer, on “Approximate Dynamic Programming Captures Fleet Operations for Schneider National.”

University of Cincinnati, College of Business
Jeffrey D. Camm, PhD, Professor and Head; Quantitative Analysis & Operations Management, on “The Art of Modeling.”

Xerium Technologies, Inc. & Vanguard Software Corporation
David Bryant, Vice President, Operations and Brian Lewis, PhD, Vice President, Professional Services, on “Global Optimization for Complex Production Scheduling Decisions.”

Veritec Solutions
Warren H. Lieberman, PhD, President, on “Effective Pricing.”

A few points: it is surprising how many tutorials are being given by non-academics: it will be fantastic to get a real-world view on these issues. Second, I am very impressed with the range of topics being discussed. Third, I would really like to see about 2/3 of these, but know that I will only have time for 2 or 3 (since Monday is fully scheduled for me for the Edelman competition). This is going to be frustrating! I think I will volunteer to do the conference scheduling in order to maximize the number of tutorials I can see.

If you are interested in this conference, note that the super saver registration deadline is March 1.

Reading Material While Snowed In

We had a record (21 inch) snowfall on Friday night, if you consider the 4th biggest snowfall of all time (since the 1860s) a record.  Since then, our city seems to be trying to turn this into our own little Katrina, showing very little planning or execution in getting the city back in working order.  City schools are closed and our street has yet to see a plow.  Once a car is painfully extracted from its snow cocoon, a curious Pittsburgh rite begins:  the placement of the kitchen chair.  Since the city is unable to actually remove any snow (it only pushes it around a bit), no on-street parking spaces are cleared except laboriously by hand.  Since it would be manifestly unfair for someone else to use the vacated spot, a kitchen chair is the accepted marker for “If you take this spot, I will curse you and your children and let the air out of your tires”.  Coincidentally,  I have my property tax check waiting to go in the mail.  What exactly am I getting for this high charge?

Anyhow, enough of the rant.  Being snowed in (for three days and counting, and furthermore…. OK, …calm) allows me to read my favorite issue of my favorite journal.  The January-February 2010 Interfaces is now available, and we all know what that means:  the Edelman Papers!  The Edelman, of course, is INFORMS big prize for the practice of operations research.  Every year, a few dozen nominees get whittled down to a half dozen finalists.  These finalists then prepare a fancy presentation, ideally involving a Cxx for suitably impressive xx.  They also put together a paper describing their work.  This is then published in the January-February of Interfaces.

I was a judge in the last competition, so I know the work of the finalists very well.  But it is inspiring to read the final versions of their papers.  I have a course on the applications of operations research that I teach to our MBAs and Edelman papers are generally a highlight of their readings.

In the 2009 competition, the finalists were:

CSX Railway Uses OR to Cash In on Optimized Equipment Distribution
Michael F. Gorman, Dharma Acharya, David Sellers

HP Transforms Product Portfolio Management with Operations Research
Dirk Beyer, Ann Brecht, Brian Cargille, Russ Chadinha, Kathy Chou, Gavin DeNyse, Qi Feng, Cookie Pad, Julie Ward, Bin Zhang, Shailendra Jain, Chris Fry, Thomas Olavson, Holger Mishal, Jason Amaral, Sesh Raj, Kurt Sunderbruch, Robert Tarjan, Krishna Venkatraman, Joseph Woods, Jing Zhou

Operations Research Improves Sales Force Productivity at IBM
Rick Lawrence, Claudia Perlich, Saharon Rosset, Ildar Khabibrakhmanov, Shilpa Mahatma, Sholom Weiss, Matt Callahan, Matt Collins, Alexey Ershov, Shiva Kumar

Marriott International Increases Revenue by Implementing a Group Pricing Optimizer
Sharon Hormby, Julia Morrison, Prashant Dave, Michele Meyers, Tim Tenca

Norske Skog Improves Global Profitability Using Operations Research
Graeme Everett, Andy Philpott, Kjetil Vatn, Rune Gjessing

Zara Uses Operations Research to Reengineer Its Global Distribution Process
Felipe Caro, Jérémie Gallien, Miguel Díaz, Javier García, José Manuel Corredoira, Marcos Montes, José Antonio Ramos, Juan Correa

Any one of them could have been the winner: I really liked all of the work. HP ended up winning(now that I see the author’s list, they certainly had the numbers on their side!). I get to judge again this year, and am once again looking forward to doing that.

So, back to the hot chocolate and the fuming about municipal services… hmmmm… I wonder if I can convince our mayor to use a bit more operations research?