Category: INFORMS

What Panels would you Like to See?

The organizers at this Fall’s INFORMS Meeting (theme of the conference: “Willie, Lance, and Optimizing the Music Scene in Austin”) have asked me to organize a series of panel discussions (or other “not four papers, each of 22.5 minutes” form) on topics of interest.  These panels should not be on technical topics but rather on issues of professional interest.  What would make for a good panel?  Here are a few possibilties:

  • Blogging, Twitter, and Facebook: Role for Operations Researchers (of course!)
  • Editors Panel:  How to be a successful author, referee, and editor
  • Funding Agencies: How and why to get funding
  • The Academic/Industry Interface: How Industry can Support Academia and vice versa
  • Role of Operations Research in Business Schools
  • Role of Operations Research in Undergraduate Education
  • Department Heads Panel: The Future of Industrial Engineering Departments
  • Dean’s Panel: Operations Research as a Path to Academic Leadership

What would you like to see?    Do any of the above particularly resonate?  What would you add? Other than a panel discussion (or four 22.5 minute talks, and please hold all questions until the next conference), what would be an interesting format to present some of this?

If you have some suggestions of possible panel organizers or members, please feel free to email me those personally.

Say Hi! to the New INFORMS Website

INFORMS has a new website and it looks great. I was the founding editor of INFORMS Online way back in 1995, building off some preliminary work done by Jim Bean and ManMohan Sodhi. Over the years, IOL changed quite a bit but I could still see lots of the original work my original editorial team had done. With this new site, INFORMS has revamped everything from scratch (well, not quite from scratch: I still see a bit of previous work in places like the membership directory, though that may change, and things like the Resources Page have only undergone a facelift, not a revamp). I’m still exploring the nooks and crannies, but my initial impression is that this is a much better face for the organization and for our field.

They are still in the process of doing the changeover, so some things are not working right (see their blog entry for more information), but overall it is a huge improvement over the previous website.

Journal Impact and Costs

I am a co-editor of a “new” journal Surveys in Operations Research and Management Science published by Elsevier. I’ll write more about that journal and my thoughts about it in another post. I expect to be blasted by some people whose opinions I value about teaming up with a commercial publisher, but I did have my reasons!

I spent time this past weekend in Phoenix at an Elsevier editors conference where there were about 70 editors from a wide variety of fields (lots of medicine and chemistry). During the weekend, there were a number of presentations on things like blogging and electronic paper handling and so on. One session I enjoyed very much was about bibliometrics: measures to determine the impact of a journal. I had kinda known some of this before, but it was interesting to get a synopsis of how these things work.

The standard “impact factor” comes from the different companies that have owned the Science Citation Index and now the ISI Web of Science (Thomson Reuters). Briefly, if you want to calculate the impact factor (IF) of a journal in 2005, you look at the 2005 articles from that journal, add up all the references to those articles published in any ISI journal in 2006 and 2007 (no later), and divide by the number of articles in 2005. There are lots of details to argue over: what is an “article”? What is a “reference”? What journals should be ISI? and so on.

Even the basic structure certainly gives one pause in determining impact. This definition of impact means that all the wonderful citations I get for my old papers on voting in Social Choice and Welfare, a set of papers from the late 80s that are currently in vogue, are never measured for the impact of that journal for any year: they fall outside a two year window. For some very fast moving fields (say, genetics), this two year window might be appropriate. But for others, including operations research I would say, this window seems to measure the wrong things, ignoring the peak for many papers.

Further, there are lots of ways to manipulate this value (I will point out that the Elsevier presenter explicitly stated that journals should not do anything specifically to manipulate any impact factor). I have heard of journals that, upon accepting a paper, provide authors with a list of reference suggestions from that journal within the two year window. “No pressure, mate, but you might consider these references… helps us out a lot, you know!” Pretty slimy in my view, but it is done.

What I found most interesting is that there are other measures of impact, some of which seem to be gaining traction. The most intriguing is a measure that uses the same eigenfactor approach that Google uses in its PageRank. Imagine journals as a network, with edges giving the number of times an article in a journal references the other journal. This gives an influence diagram, and eigenvalues give (in a well defined way) the importance of a node relative to number of references.

It is certainly not clear that number of references is a good proxy for influence, and not every reference is the same. Consider “In the fundamental work of [1], disproving the absurd argument of [2], which built on [3,4,5,6,7,8]”: all those articles are referred to once, but I know which one I would like as my article. But, if you are going to base a measure on counts of references, I would certainly trust an eigenvalue-based approach over a pure counting approach.

The approach, outlined in detail at eigenfactor.com, has the further advantages that it uses a five year window and it ignores journal-level self-citations. The five-year window gives more time for citations to count towards a paper, without giving a huge advantage to older journals. Ignoring self-citations gets rid of the easiest method for a journal editor manipulation. So I like it!

The site eigenfactor.com lets you look at journal eigenfactor and per article influence rankings. There are a couple of different classifications of journals, so let’s look at JCR’s “Operations Research and Management Science” list. The 2007 per article rankings are:

  1. Management Science
  2. Mathematical Programming
  3. Operations Research
  4. Mathematics of OR
  5. Transportation Science

Eigenfactor scores (which measures the overall impact of the journal) moves things around a bit:

  1. European Journal of Operational Research
  2. Management Science
  3. Mathematical Programming
  4. Operations Research
  5. Systems and Control Letters

EJOR is on top since the journal has a good per article impact factor and publishes lots of articles.

INFORMS Journals do pretty well with 4 of the top 5 in the first list and 3 out of five of the second.

What is really neat is to look at the cost to get those eigenfactor values. It would cost $93,408 to subscribe to the 58 journals (this is the individual journal costs: undoubtedly the large publishers bundle their subscriptions, as does INFORMS). Paying the $656 (in 2007) for Management Science is 0.7% of that cost but gets you more than 10% of the total eigenfactor in this field. Subscribing to the top 11 journals in this ranking would cost $5723 (and get you 7 INFORMS journals) and get you more than 1/3 of the total eigenfactor. Adding the 12th would get you European Journal of Operational Research but at $5298 would practically double your cost while increasing your total eigenfactor amount from 37.8% to just 49.4%. Other amazing prices are with Engineering Optimization that costs $4338 for much less than 1% of the field’s eigenfactor and International Journal of Production Research which costs $7684, albeit for 8% of the total eigenfactor.

Now, there are lots of caveats here. Most importantly, while reference numbers are a proxy for impact, they are not equivalent. If you have a paper that applies operations research to a real problem, publishing in Interfaces might have the most impact, even if the journal is ranked 21st by eigenfactor. And when it comes to costs, I am not sure anyone really pays “list price” in this day of aggregation (and prices for individuals are much lower for many journals).

When you are arguing with your librarian on which journals to cut (or, more rarely, add), you might want to look at some of this data. And might I suggest the full suite of INFORMS journals? At $99 for an individual for online access (and under $5000 for institutions), this should give you the recommended daily allowance of eigenfactors at a very affordable price. Makes a great stocking stuffer at Christmas!

INFORMS Fellows Luncheon

From the INFORMS Blog:

I just got back from the Fellows Luncheon.  The INFORMS Fellows are recognized for having made significant contributions to the field of operations research and the management sciences (be it in research, practice, service, administration, or education).  It is an extremely impressive group, and I very much enjoy the lunch, since conversation around the table is generally both insightful and entertaining.

I was President of INFORMS the year the Fellows program began, so I got to welcome the inaugural group.  To get the Fellows program started off, some classifications of people were automatically made Fellows.  So, for instance, all the past winners of the John von Neumann Theory Prize were automatically made Fellows.  When it came to past Presidents of the organization, the rule was pretty explicit:

[Fellows would be] all past Presidents of TIMS, ORSA, and INFORMS up to but not including Michael Trick (*)

Ummmm… OK.  I think I was the only person explicitly declared not to be a Fellow!  It made sense at the time “Don’t want to vote for yourself, you know!”, and they did make me a Fellow a few years later.

Now, no one gets in automatically:  every new Fellow is selected by the Selection Committee.  This year’s class is a very impressive group:  Aharon Ben-Tal, Srinivas Bollapragada, Margaret Brandeau, Awi Federgruen, Nimrod Megiddo, David B. Montgomery, Michael Pinedo, Kathryn E. Stecke, John Tomlin, Garrett van Ryzin, and C.F. Jeff Wu.  The fact that eleven were made Fellows is not arbitrary:  the number is limited by a certain fraction of the size of the membership.  When I checked the list of Fellows, I was struck by some of the amazing people who are not yet Fellows:  we still have years and years of amazing classes to induct.

You get to be a Fellow by getting nominated, and then getting elected by the selection committee (which is voted on by the current Fellows).  If you know someone who should be a Fellow (or think you should be!), the next round of nominations will be due next summer.

A few points that struck me during the lunch

  1. The more members we have, the more Fellows we can elect;  this process would be easier if we had more members
  2. It would be nice for Fellows to do something more than have a nice lunch and beget more Fellows:  the group is a great, underutilized resource
  3. It was fantastic to see a number of the older Fellows who came in specially for the lunch.   Our field has a great history (and future!) and it was good to be reminded of that history with the extremely impressive people in the room.

(*) Not the exact wording, but it was pretty close to that!

Modeling as a Teachable Skill

New post on the INFORMS Blog on a panel discussion I attended on how to teach modeling:

I just attended a nice “panel discussion” on Teaching the Art of Modeling, put together by Jim Orlin (MIT), Stephen Powell and Rob Shumsky (both from Dartmouth).  This was not your normal INFORMS session!  The panelists decided to do this as an “active learning” session, so audience members had to work throughout the session.  The first exercise was to think about how to model a hypothetical, but real-sounding problem:  “Suppose the Red Cross was considering paying people for their blood donations.  How would you provide them with a model that could help them understand the tradeoffs.”  That (paraphrased) was all the information we got.  We were then given 10 minutes or so to work individually on addressing this.  The idea would be that this would be the first 10 minutes of whatever multiple-hour process we would go through to get a “real” model.  Where would you start?

For many, the starting point was brainstorming:  putting down a whole set of issues to be considered and items that might go into the model.  For others, it was graphing some of the anticipated relationships between key issues.  Others still used techniques such as influence diagrams to help organize their thoughts.  Be a hard-core mathematical programming, I thought in terms of objectives, variables and constraints, and was pretty far along with my nonlinear, nonconvex mixed integer program when time was called.

Stephen Powell then asked some audience members what they did, eliciting the strategies given above.  He has experimented with this problem with students and learned a number of things about what they do (presumably either inexperienced or novice at modeling).  First, even for students who have taken modeling courses, it is surprising how little of what we teach gets used in this context.  Students, when faced with a fuzzy modeling problem, often do some combination of the following:

  1. They grab on to data like a lifeboat, prompty multiplying or dividing every number in sight in the hope of getting the “right answer” the professor is looking for.  The Red Cross example has no numbers, so they might make some up just to get going.
  2. They dispense with modeling and go straight to the answer: “This is a bad idea because …”
  3. They adopt inefficient methods and are unable to step back and recognize how inefficient they have become.
  4. They overuse brainstorming relative to any aspect of structured problem solving that they might have been taught.

If there is a column of numbers, you can bet that many students will immediately run a regression!

After discussing these results (there are a couple papers in the Journal of the Operational Research Society on “How Novices Formulate Models” that covers this), Jim and Rob were given a problem new to them (on a model for deciding on the best morgtage to get) and they showed how an influence diagram approach would be used to begin understanding and modeling.

Powell and his co-author Robert Batt have a book entitled Modeling for Insight (Wiley:  one of the exhibitors here) .

It was great to see a session that required the audience to do some work!  While I was not completely convinced by the modeling approach presented (give me my objective, variables, and constraints!), I was convinced about active learning as a way to make 90 minutes go by much faster and in a much more effective way.

Moving on to San Diego (both my blog and I)

I’ll be guest blogging at the INFORMS Conference in San Diego, so I’ll be posting over there for the next few days. There are 12 guest bloggers, so the conference should get some pretty good coverage.  I’ve got a news feed on my main page sidebar trying to track the blog, twitter feed, hash tags, and so on.

I have put in my first post on the extra preconference steps needed on the social network side:

When I started attending INFORMS (actually ORSA/TIMS) meetings in the 80’s, the preconference steps were clear:  pack, find the (paper) airline tickets, print out my talk onto transparencies, go to conference, wander around wondering what was going on.  There are few extra steps now:

  1. Follow @informs09 on twitter
  2. Check out the #informs09 tag on twitter, and remember to use it on own posts.
  3. Sign up for the daily e-news to stay up to date on conference news and activities.
  4. Subscribe to the INFORMS 09 blog (or remember to check back a lot!) to follow the official news and the twelve (!) guest bloggers.
  5. Join the Conference Linkedin Group (122 members and counting).
  6. Pack
  7. Find memory stick with talk
  8. Print out boarding passes
  9. Go to sunny San Diego

The extra steps are worth it.  No more wandering around wondering what is happening!  See you soon!

Show Off Your Best Work in Operations Research Practice

I am a huge fan of the Franz  Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences (best work in operations research practice) given by INFORMS.  The applications are uniformly inspiring and the presentations go way, way beyond the norm for our field.  The full papers, published every January in Interfaces, are ones that I actually look forward to (something I don’t do for my own papers!), and form a big part of an MBA course I teach here.

Being an Edelman finalist is a tremendous commitment:  in addition to the full paper, the presentation generally requires the cooperation of a Cxx of the firm  (for suitably high xx: EO is great!).  Don’t try to get by with half-baked work here:  you won’t get past the initial phase.  But if you become a finalist (let alone a winner), the fame is worth it!  This is a great opportunity to get the attention a level or three higher than you might otherwise (and give the Cxx the opportunity to brag on your behalf).

If you are doing operations research that is truly changing how an organization works, I strongly encourage you to enter it in the competition.  The initial phase only requires a 2-3 page description.  See the full details here.  Deadline is October 21, so get typing!

Become Famous by Winning the COIN-OR Cup!

COIN-OR_CMYK-296Do you use COIN-OR (open source software for operations research)?  According to the log files, lots and lots of people do!  If you are doing something interesting with COIN-OR and are planning to attend the San Diego INFORMS Meeting, I strongly encourage you to enter the COIN-OR Cup!  You could join John Forrest, Jonathan Eckstein+Bill Hart+Cindy Phillips, John Tomlin and the team from the Environmental Protection Agency + Sandia National Labs (including Jonathan Berry) as a winner of this prestigious Cup!  Fame and drinks will be yours forever!  Despite appearances, you do not need a John or Jonathan on your team to win, though it seems to help.

More seriously, if you have used COIN-OR in a neat application (or have advanced COIN-OR in a significant direction), it would be great to hear about it through an application for the award.  This would let the COIN people know of all the great ways the software is being used and help bring together the COIN-OR community.  The deadline is October 2, so don’t delay.  And thanks to IBM for sponsoring the reception (which is always a real highlight for the whole COIN-OR community).

INFORMS Needs Writers

I recently had an exchange on twitter on why the OR community is not more effective on using twitter, facebook, and so on to get the story out. People like Laura McLay, Aurelie Thiele, and many others listed on the sidebar do have blogs and many of us twitter and facebook away, but we are a pretty small group. As I replied in Twitter, “We have lots of stories, but not enough storytellers”.

If you are a student (or recent graduate) have wanted to do some writing about operations research, INFORMS is ready to give you a chance, and will even provide some walking around funds. From an email making the rounds:

INFORMS

Writer for the INFORMS Annual Meeting Daily E-News: October 11-14, 2009.

INFORMS seeks 3 OR/MS students or graduates to cover on-site the sessions, events, and breaking news during the 2009 INFORMS Annual Meeting to be held in San Diego, CA, October 11-14, 2009. The writer is expected to produce content for a daily electronic newsletter throughout the duration of the 4-day meeting. The writer may have experience regularly publishing news articles in professional or collegiate news outlets or equivalent experience.

Qualifications:

– Current or recent enrollment in a college-level OR/MS program and/or equivalent experience is required
– Must be proficient with Microsoft Office (Word and Excel)
– Laptop with wireless capabilities is required
– Experience with digital photography and ownership of a digital camera is required
– Must be able to attend the conference all 4 days

INFORMS will provide a daily stipend of $100 and reimbursement for local transportation/parking cost if necessary. Please forward a resume and two writing samples (approximately 500 words each) to Ms. Mary Leszczynski, Managing Editor, mary.leszczynski@informs.org. For more information on the meeting, please visit: http://meetings.informs.org/SanDiego09/.

INFORMS Podcasts on Crunching the Numbers

INFORMS (and its Director of Communications, Barry List) has been putting out podcasts on operations research oriented topics every couple of weeks for the past few months.  The title of the series is “Science of Better:  Crunching the Numbers”.  According to the site, this is:

A series of podcasts with unexpected insights into the way that math, analytics, and operations research affect people like you and organizations like your own. In every segment, an expert explains how he or she changed the world by crunching the numbers.

They now have a good collection of topics. The most recent podcast is with Larry Wein, who talks about homeland security, terrorism, and, of course, operations research.  Previous podcasts include a discussion on how analytics can help battle HIV/AIDS, how to understand the economy using supply chain concepts, how INTEL uses operations research to make decisions, and how to save on health care costs with OR.  I look forward to seeing what Barry has next for us!

At 20-30 minutes each, the five current podcasts are just the things to have on your mp3 player for long flights.