Category: INFORMS

Don’t Forget to Vote!

If you are an INFORMS member (if you are interested in operations research, why aren’t you a member?), you should have received an email yesterday directing you to a website to vote for the next set of members of the Board of Directors.  That email has all the information you need to vote:  your member number and a code word.  You go to the website, enter those two numbers, get a form and spend a minute or two voting.  The candidate bios and platform statements are clickable from the ballot, so you don’t even have to research before hand (though if you want to, the candidate information is available).  A few points:

  • Your vote really does count.  The year before I got elected President, the Presidential vote resulted in a tie.  One extra vote either way would have prevented a run-off.
  • The candidates are chosen by a Nominating Committee (something the Past President chairs), though people can put themselves on the ballot by petition.  The latter used to happen more often:  it seems pretty rare these days.
  • INFORMS uses approval voting, where you can vote for as many candidates as you want for each position.  In many cases, I end up voting for all of the proposed candidates.  This is particularly true if I do not know the candidates, or I know them both equally well, and if I think they will do about equally well in positions.  Sometimes I have stronger feelings, so vote for one (or decidedly don’t vote for one!).  While it is equivalent in terms of the winner to vote for none as to vote for all, in terms of meeting quorum requirements, it is better to vote for all.  By the way, approval voting works much better when there are three or more candidates (or more than one position to be filled from the same set of candidates).  Approval voting to choose the winner between two candidates, as this election is, doesn’t add much (though I like the opportunity to vote for all or, rarely, none).
  • A number of candidates are running unopposed.  INFORMS allows its Vice Presidents to have two terms in a position.  Often, the nominating committee will decide to run someone up for reelection unopposed.  It doesn’t always happen, but it is the norm.
  • INFORMS does not announce number of votes in an election.  I was on the Board when that rule was created (and may even have formulated the rule).  The ideas was to not embarrass candidates who lose a blow-out election.  Now, I am not 100% convinced this is a good rule:  there is information in the votes (for instance, knowing the number who voted for none of the candidates versus those who voted for all).  Even the nominating committee does not know the number of votes, so, for instance, a candidate who came very close to winning might not get nominated again, while a candidate that the electorate soundly rejected might get renominated the next year.  Perhaps it is time for INFORMS to rethink this rule.

I sat on the INFORMS Board for six years, and am now completing six years on the IFORS Board.  Sitting on boards is generally interesting and rewarding (it is sometimes mind-numbingly dull, but I treat that as useful training in discipline).  I have met some really fascinating and wonderful people through the boards, and those contacts have been useful years after our terms ended.

We should be greatful that people are willing to give their time to boards like INFORMS.  If you are a member, now would be a good time to spend a couple minutes voting.

INFORMS: 30,000 members or 5,000?

When I was elected President of INFORMS in 2000 (my Presidential Year was 2002:  they ease you into the job!), I was very proud to become President of a 14,000 member society (at the age of 42:  don’t let the grey hair fool you).  14,000?  Actually probably 12,000.  Maybe 11,500.  Where did all the members go?  As I looked into things, I was pointed to (thanks Les Servi!) Bowling Alone, which gave exhausting statistical evidence that social capital activities of all types (including professional society membership) were decreasing.   The importance of social capital and the need for societies to increase social capital opportunities became the theme of my presidency.  We did some good things during my year, and many of those have continued.

But INFORMS remains a 10,000-12,000 member society.  Financially, this is currently not much of an issue:  “membership” on the INFORMS books loses money. But the times, they are a’changing.  The main moneymaker for INFORMS is publications, with a very strong emphasis on academic library subscriptions.   INFORMS would be a financially healthy organization if all it did was publish Management Science.  But you don’t need to be a diviner to see that this is not a stable base.  Academic libaries are cutting budgets and alternative publication outlets are increasing in importance.  Even now, I need to stress to my colleagues from a computer science background that they (currently) need to publish in journals:  for them, conferences provide the primary outlet.

Even beyond the financials, having a strong membership is a good thing for our field.  While I was convinced by Bowling Alone that a decreasing membership is not the sign of the death of a field, not everyone buys that argument.  If operations research is as important as, say, economics, why are there 20,000 members of the American Economic Association but only 10,000 members of INFORMS?  (By the way, the AEA table gives a good picture of the issues every society is facing:  is economics really 20% less relevant now than it was in 2001, as given by the AEA membership numbers?).

So, to get to the crux, can INFORMS be a 20,000 (or 30,000 or 50,000) member society?  The US Bureau of Labor Statistics believes there are 58,000 OR analysts, and predicts this to increase to 65,000 in 2016.  I would guess that no more than 1,000 of these are members of INFORMS (I would not fall in this category, and I am pretty typical of INFORMS members).  Is this our market?  How would we get them?  Or are there people in our traditional group (Ph.D.s or students towards that degree, primarily in academia but many in practice or academics with a practice bent) that we should be aiming for?  Or perhaps retention is the issue:  we lose 20-30% per year (I believe), meaning we have to attract 2,000-3,000 new members per year just to stay even.

Or should INFORMS be happy decreasing to to 5,000 members, perhaps while still providing services to a larger group?  Would this be a bad outcome?

I’m on a few committees for INFORMS that look at these issues, but, now that my Board time is done, I don’t speak for INFORMS.  So I am interested in your views, loyal reader of MTORP:  What should INFORMS do?  The easy answer is to provide more at a lower cost.  That is going to be hard to do.

We can provide less at a lower cost: imagine a $30 membership where you get nothing more than a subscription to OR/MS Today (a fantastic magazine).  Everything else is a la carte.  You want to go to a conference:  no member discount (or perhaps you have to be a member, so you have saved $30);  you want a journal:  here’s the cost;  want a subdivision:  they all now charge real dues.  $30 gets you in the door:  everything else has a price tag.  Jim Orlin provided one vision of a lower cost membership.

Or perhaps we increase membership to $250 (it is currently $144).  We upgrade the website to create a true social network.  Everything becomes cheaper (for members!).  But we lose lots of members who don’t want to pay $250.

But I don’t want to provide too many possibilities:  I’d like your views.  What would you like INFORMS to do, and why?

Further workshops at INFORMS Practice

Over at the INFORMS Practice Conference Blog, I have entries on Gurobi and ILOG, an IBM Company. Both presentations were inspiring in their own ways.

Gurobi Post:

It goes without saying that these statements are my individual views of the workshops, and are not the official word from either the companies or INFORMS.

The world of optimization software has been turned upside down in the last year.  Dash Optimization (makers of XPRESS-MP) was bought by FairIsaac (or FICO, as it is now called). ILOG, makers of CPLEX, was bought by IBM.  And three key people from ILOG, Gu Rothberg and Bixby, split off to form Gurobi (no prizes for guessing how the name was formed).  Gurobi held its first (I believe) technical workshop at an INFORMS Practice Conference, and had tons of interesting news.  Since “Operation Clone Michael Trick so He Can Attend All Interesting Workshops” failed, I spent the first half hour of the 3pm workshop session at the Gurobi sesssion before moving onto another session.  Here are a few things presented.

Bob Bixby presented an overview of the history of Gurobi.  Their main goal over the last year has been to create a top-notch linear and mixed integer programming code.  I was surprised that they were able to do this in the March 2008-November 2008 period.  Since then, the optimization code has been essentially static while the firm works on things like documentation, bug fixes, user interfaces and so on.

The business model of Gurobi has three main parts:

  1. Focus on math programming solvers
  2. Flexible partnerships
  3. Technology leadership

The partnership aspect was quite interesting.  They very much value the relationship they have with Microsoft Solver Foundation (whose presentation I attended this morning), along with the partnerships they have with AIMMS, Frontline, GAMS, Maximal, and other groups.

Ed Rothberg presented the stand-alone user interface (to be released May 6), which has been implemented as a customization of the Python shell.  Some of my colleagues (in particularly those at the University of Auckland) have been pushing Python, but this is the first full scale system I have seen, and it is very impressive.

Beyond that, I can only go by the handouts, since I did some session jumping, but a few things are clear:

  1. As an optimization code, Gurobi is competitive with the best codes out there, being better than all on some instances, and worse than some on others.
  2. Gurobi is taking parallel optimization very seriously, stating that single-core optimization is nothing but a special case of its multi-core approach.
  3. Python is a powerful way of accessing more complicated features of the system.

Gurobi is already available as an add-in to other systems.  It will be available in a stand-alone system in a week or so. Further versions are planned to come out at six month intervals.

CPLEX/IBM Post:

Continuing my coverage of a few of the Technical Workshops, I reiterate that the views here are neither those of the companies nor of INFORMS.  They are mine!

Ducking out of one technical workshop, I moved on to the presentation by ILOG (now styled ILOG, an IBM Company, since IBM’s acquisition earlier this year).  It was great to see the mix of IBMers and ILOG people on the stage.  Like many (about 2/3 according to a later audience survey), I was worried about the effect of having IBM acquire ILOG, but the unity of the group on stage allayed many of those fears.  The workshop had two major focuses:  the business strategy of having IBM together with ILOG and, more technically, details on the new version of ILOG’s CPLEX, CPLEX 12.

When it comes to business strategy, IBMers Brenda Dietrich and Gary Cross put out a persuasive and inspiring story on how IBM is focusing on Business Analytics and Optimization.  How can you make an enterprise “intelligent”?  You can make it aware of the environment, linked internally and externally, anticipating future situations, and so on.  And that requires both data (as in business intelligence) and improved decision making (aka operations research).  As IBM tries to lead in this area, they see the strengths in research meshing well with their consulting activities and with their software/product acquisitions.  The presentation really was inspiring, and harkened back to the glory days of “e-business” circa 1995 with an operations research tilt (with the hopes of not having a corresponding bust a few years later).

When it comes to CPLEX 12.0, there continues to be improvements.  These were given in three areas:

  1. improved MIP performance.
  2. parallel processing under the standard licence.
  3. built-in connectors for Excel, Python, and Matlab.

The improved performance was characterized by two numbers.  For instances taking more than a second to solve, the improvement was about 30%;  for harder problems taking more than 1000 seconds, CPLEX 12 is about twice as fast as 11.2 (on the problems in the extensive testbed).  Strikingly, the CPLEX testbed still has 971 models that take at least 10,000 seconds to solve, so there is still lots of work to be done here.  The improvements came through some new cuts (multicommodity flow cuts) as well as general software engineering improvements.

I think the news on parallel (multicore) processing is particularly exciting.  If our field is to take advantage of modern multi-core systems, we can’t have our software systems charging us per core.  There are some issues to be handled:  the company doesn’t want people solving 30,000+ separate models on a cloud system simultaneously for the price of one license, but some system for exploiting the 2-8 cores on most current machines must be found.  I am really pleased that this will be available standard.

I was also very happy to see the Excel add-in.  As an academic, I know that my (MBA)  students are most comfortable working within Excel, and I will be very happy to introduce them to top-notch optimization in that environment (once ILOG figures out its pricing, which was unclear in the presentation).

Overall, I found this an inspiring workshop on both the business strategy and the technical sides.  IBM should also be recognized for bringing in a clicker system to get audience feedback:  that made for a very entertaining and useful audience feedback session.

One final point: IBM claims to have 800 “OR Experts”, which is a pretty good number.  If all of them became members of INFORMS, we would gain about 650 members, by my calculation.

Microsoft Solver Foundation: YAML?

Is the Microsoft Solver Foundation Yet Another Modeling Language? I have some views at the INFORMS Practice Conference Blog. Best part of the workshop: the tagline “The Right Decision”. Perhaps INFORMS should have used that instead of “The Science of Better”.

Microsoft Solver Foundation became public late in 2008, and I have been curious what it is all about, so I sat in on this morning’s technical workshop. Two hours and six pages of notes later, I think I have a better idea.  At its heart, Solver Foundation is a pure “.NET” based library for mathematical programming.   At some level, that is all the justification it needs to exist.  There are a lot of .NET shops out there, so being able to work purely within .NET is a real plus to them.  For those of us who are not working in such an environment, there are still a number of nice aspects to Solver Foundation (SF), including

  1. Modeling Breadth.  SF is based on a very general algebraic modeling structure (think Mathematica), so it is, in theory, not limited to “just” mixed-integer programming.  Current solver support includes constraint programming, MIP, quadratic programming, and nonlinear programming, but the underlying structure is extremely general.
  2. Built-in parallelism to take advantage of either networks of machines or multicore systems.  Since much of the improved speeds in computers these days comes from the addition of cores (even notebook computers can have four or more cores), it is critical that systems take advantage of this.  The example given in the talk was a “horse race” between alternative optimization codes: SF will easily let you run CPLEX, XPRESS, and other solvers in parallel on the same problem, terminating when the fastest solver on that instance terminates.
  3. Integration with Visual Studio and, particularly, Excel.  My (MBA) students really like to work within Excel, which has limited our use of modeling languages.  SF gives hope that we can embed real, scalable, models within Excel easily.
  4. Symbolic and rational arithmetic possibilities.  For some models, roundoff errors create huge problems.  SF solvers have the ability to work in rational arithmetic (keeping track of numerators and denominators) to provide exact calculations.

For me, the best parts are the ability to combine constraint programming with mixed-integer programming, and the hope that maybe I can teach some real operations research to my MBA students through SF’s links with Excel.   Of course, it is inspiring to hear a Microsoft person talk about the multi-billion dollar market they hope to reach through optimization.

My favorite part:  the tagline “The Right Decision”.  That pretty well sums up operations research.

Baseball and Operations Research

Blogged at the INFORMS Practice site on how to make a trip to a baseball game a legitimate business expense.

I just arrived in Phoenix, and I’m off to this evening’s game between the Giants and the Diamondbacks.  There is an operations research connection, of course:  both the teams and the umpires are scheduled with operations research.  So this is kinda like a site visit:  I’m there to be sure exactly two teams show up, along with four umpires!

More serious posts tomorrow when I attend some of the Technology Workshops.

Blogging for the INFORMS Practice Meeting

I am one of a stable of guest bloggers for the INFORMS Practice Meeting. Rather than double post, I’ll move over to that blog for a few days (unless I have something to say that isn’t appropriate for an INFORMS blog), with pointers from here.

My first entry there: Tough Choices!, where I complain about an embarrassment of riches.

I’m getting organized to head off to the INFORMS Practice Conference.  I fly out Saturday, and will meet up with some friends to go to the Diamondbacks game.  Sunday is shaping up to be a very full day.  I really enjoy the Technology Workshops, where software companies in operations research talk about their recent products and plans for the future.  This year is shaping up to be particularly interesting due to all the activity in the market.  Since last year’s meeting,

  1. Dash Optimization (makers of Xpress-MP) has been bought by FairIsaac, which is now named FICO
  2. ILOG has been bought by IBM, and is now styled “ILOG, an IBM Company”
  3. Gurobi has been founded by some of the people who used to be with ILOG
  4. Microsoft Solver Foundation has started
  5. Dynadec has been formed to market Comet, a hybrid optimization, constraint programming, local search solver

and undoubtedly much more that I missed along the way, but will find out at the conference.  All of these companies and many others and more will be presenting “half day” workshops on Sunday:  they are really three hour workshops so you can get in three of them during a very long day.  The hard part is trying to figure out which three of the twelve workshops to attend!

INFORMS Practice Conference goes Web 2.0 Crazy!

The upcoming INFORMS Practice Conference has embraced new social networking technologies as no INFORMS conference has ever done. You have your choice of

  1. Blogging. A conference blog with a half dozen guest bloggers (including yours truly).
  2. Twittering. Just use the #ipc2009 tag
  3. LinkedIn. I’m not sure the value of a LinkedIn group, but I want to be part of the gang!

Let’s see, what’s left? Facebook? Club Penguin?

This makes a great experiment in what helps people best engage with a conference.

I’m ready for my close-up Mr. DeMille, the Operations Research Version

If all goes according to plan, the members of INFORMS will receive an email over the next two days.  The email outlines some reasons why you should attend the upcoming INFORMS Practice Meeting (note that you need to register by April 1 in order to get a discount on the registration fee).  Part of the email is a video featuring … me!  In my two minute schtick, I try to give you some reasons why I like the INFORMS Practice conference so much.

I found the video really hard to do.  I vacillated between spontaneous and rigid.  When spontaneous, I had enough verbal tics that it was unwatchable.  “I, um, really like the INFORMS Practice Conference, you know, um, because, um…”  Arghh!  The other extreme made me look as though madmen had captured my loved ones and were forcing me to to read their manifesto against my will.  So I tried to split the difference in the final video.  Perhaps now it looks like I am being forced to read the manifesto with a verbal tic.  As my wife said “It was fine, but you are no actor”.  Despite that, you really should think about attending the INFORMS Practice Conference:  it is inspiring to see what our field does in the real world.

If you can’t wait for the email, you can check it out here.