Category: INFORMS

Have you Registered for INFORMS Practice?

The INFORMS Practice Conference is one of my favorite conferences. It is here that I get most of my stories for my classes and get inspired about the areas I work in. I also get inspired about Operations Research in general: it is a great field, and this conference shows the wonderful things we do.

If you haven’t been to a Practice Conference, it is nothing like the big fall conferences.  The Practice Conference is seen as a “Listener’s Conference”:  unlike the main conference where anyone can present, only invited speakers present at the Practice Conference.  The quality of talks given by invited speakers ranges from good to unbelievably amazing (in contrast with the fall conference where the lower bound is much, much, much lower).  There are very few parallel sessions (no more than 5 or 6) and there are lots of opportunities for interaction, greatly enhancing the social capital of the conference.

Unfortunately, it is not a cheap conference.  Running a conference of the quality of the Practice conference takes money.  So if you are planning to go, be sure to register by February 27 to save yourself $150 or so.

Of course, one highlight of the conference is the  Edelman Competition.

I already have my registration in!

New Life for the Operations Research Resources Page?

I have previously written about my frustration handling the INFORMS OR/MS Resources Page.  I wrote:

As announced last year, it is unclear whether this resource page will continue. On one hand I started this back in 1994, so it is sad to see it go after 15 years. On the other hand, the internet has changed a lot since then. There was no Google back then, so simply finding stuff was hard to do. Now, it seems that the age of “hand edited” links is at an end (if it wasn’t so five years ago). Keeping these pages up to date is ferociously difficult. And the spammers are unrelenting (and I don’t have the heart to change software again to combat them). So, there is every possibility that these pages will go away on April 15, 2009.

Jim Orlin may well have made the suggestion to save the Resources Page.  In short, he suggests combining the strengths of the Resources Page with the strengths of Google.  We can use the URLs within the resources page to seed a specialized google search.  I have tried to do this in the past (in fact, long before google with my own crawlers) but it never worked quite right.  Google seems to have it right now.

I see a number of real advantages of this approach.  For the user, when you want OR/MS pages, they need not be lost in the long google output.  For the Resources page, if you want to show up on the search, you need to keep the URL up to date and accurate.  The searches will be better because the URLs will be verified as OR/MS relevant.  Overall, I think this is the change that could breath new life into the Resources Page.

Want to check out the search?  I’m still working on it, before I put it on the resources page, but here it is in an experimental version:

The Edelmans are here!

The January-February 2009 issue of Interfaces is now online, which means the papers from the 2008 Edelmans have now arrived.  My only disappointment is that my “OR Techniques for Consultants” course was moved up 7 weeks, so this year’s students had to make due with last year’s papers.

The papers include:

Keep the Operations Research Name!

A few years ago, INFORMS spent significant amounts of money on its “Science of Better” campaign in an effort to brand the phrase “Operations Research”.  This was not an easy or uncontroversial decision.  Even choosing “Operations Research” was controversial.  Practically everyone agrees that it is a lousy name for a field:  it is uninformative and easily confused with many other fields.  But it is the historical name for the field, and trying to rebrand our field with a new name looked (and looks) hopeless.  So “Operations Research” it is, and the Science of Better campaign tried to get people to associate the phrase with success, competitive advantage, and all sorts of other good things.  People like Tom Cook, Irv Lustig, and many others put in tremendous efforts to get this campaign going.

By its nature, an advertising campaign for an idea is a hard thing to do, particularly for a society  of just 12,000 or so.  Spending a million or two was possible, but not tens or hundreds of millions.  That 30 second ad at the Super Bowl was right out.  The campaign did lots of interesting things, some of which (like the website and the enhanced Edelman Award) continue, but it is hard to find a meter that moved because of the campaign.  Despite that, I am very happy we had the campaign:  it reminded a lot of us as to the value of our field, and let others know of that value.

However, just as cities like Pittsburgh get tremendous advertising by being backdrops for national sporting event telecasts, our field gets its best advertising just in how departments and schools get mentioned.  In the New York Times today there is an article on how students at Princeton are having trouble getting jobs on Wall Street.  While the overall tenor of the article is depressing, the phrases that include operations research are very nice:

Despite being in the rigorous Operations Research and Financial Engineering program, …

…vast armies of Wall Street recruiters have traditionally taken over the historic Nassau Inn nearby to woo not just Operations Research and Financial Engineering whizzes but innocent art history majors as well.

Sure, it would be better to have been part of an article on how everyone in operations research is getting a $250,000 job and guaranteed life-fulfillment, but having the New York Times readers associate “operations research” with rigor and woo-ability is an association that we literally cannot buy.

So if you are part of a department (either in academia or business) considering replacing “operations research” with a trendier name (“analytics”, “business intelligence”, “information engineering” and so on), you might want to fight that move:  consider the fate of all the groups who went with “eBusiness” and “web” ten years ago.  And those of you who changed to something more “with-it”:  come on back!  There is still room under the umbrella for you.  You can be part of the “operations research” success.

Note added 7PM: I see the tagline on the Edelman Page is “The Best of Applied Analytics”.  Even INFORMS (INFAA?) isn’t immune to trendy names.

End of INFORMS Resources page? No really!

Last year, we had a brief discussion on the value of the INFORMS Resources page.  Since then, things have simply got worse.  Spammers overwhelm the system, keeping things updated is horrendously difficult, and it is unclear if more than a handful of people are interested in it.   As I write on the page:

As announced last year, it is unclear whether this resource page will continue. On one hand I started this back in 1994, so it is sad to see it go after 15 years. On the other hand, the internet has changed a lot since then. There was no Google back then, so simply finding stuff was hard to do. Now, it seems that the age of “hand edited” links is at an end (if it wasn’t so five years ago). Keeping these pages up to date is ferociously difficult. And the spammers are unrelenting (and I don’t have the heart to change software again to combat them). So, there is every possibility that these pages will go away on April 15, 2009. The only thing that can stop this is finding someone to take over the administration of this area with energy and enthusiasm to do something new. If you are interest contact me (Michael Trick) at trick@cmu.edu. And, if you believe in the site, it would be useful to be sure your site is here and is accurate. Even if it is only in place for a few months, it would be useful to have! Further discussion of this on my blog.

If you have submitted a site recently and it is has neither appeared nor have you received an explanation, please resubmit: we had some problems with the system that have now been corrected. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Anyone interested in taking this on?  Or think they can convince me this is a great use of my time?

Doing Good with Good OR

INFORMS is sponsoring a student project competition for projects having significant societal impact.  I know there is a lot of great work going on using OR to do things like route Meals-on-Wheels trucks, site ambulances, improve blood collection practices and so on.  Let’s see what is out there!  Application deadline for the competition has been extended to December 15, so get those letters in!

Operations Research as a path to academic administration

For most young researchers, administration is a word filled with horror.  Why would anyone want to be an academic administrator when you could spend your days exploring the wonder of operations research?  And many days, I (a not so young researcher) agree with them.  There is almost nothing better than spending time thinking, writing code, teaching, and doing all the wonderful things that make up the academic life.  However, after a decade or two, for some there comes a wish to have a broader effect.  Will yet one more paper on a better cutting plane or another game-theoretic analysis of a supply chain really affect very much?  Or perhaps after sitting through yet another unproductive, useless meeting, the thought comes “I can do better than these jackasses!”.  And the administrative path begins.

Some of the people I admire most in our field have done significant academic administration.  For instance, Patrick Harker was the editor of Operations Research when he was picked to be Dean of Wharton, one of the most important business school deanships around.  He is now President of the University of Delaware.

I think operations research is actually pretty good training for administration.  In OR, you learn to make decisions based on facts and data, rather than biases and preconceptions.  Within the business school, we often get to know many of the faculty as our methods can be used broadly (and are often considered “honest brokers” in conflicts between the bigger areas of finance and marketing).

This trend has grown strong enough that there is even a “Dean’s Meeting” at INFORMS.  From the excellent conference daily news:

Operations research trains a professional to become a better thinker, problem solver, and educator. As more and more members of INFORMS are discovering, the field also trains you to become a better university administrator.

Dozens of operations researchers across the country are becoming deans and provosts – and even presidents – of universities large and small, in the U.S. and throughout the world. Some examples: Prof. Arjang Assad, formerly of the Robert H. Smith School at the University of Maryland just became the dean of the University of Buffalo School of Management. Also this year, James Bean, the former president of INFORMS, became Senior Vice President and Provost of the University of Oregon.

I hadn’t realized that Jim Bean had moved up to Provost at Oregon.  Congratulations Jim!

Greetings from Washington

I am at the Washington INFORMS and have just come back from the first session (on experiences with COIN-OR).  Sixty-eight parallel tracks!  Looks like there might be 5000 people at this conference.  It is amazing how big the conference has become.  I was on the INFORMS Board around 2000 when the decision was made to go from two conferences/year (a holdover from the ORSA/TIMS and TIMS/ORSA conferences before the societies merged in 1994) to just one.  At the time, we were getting 1500-1800 people per conference.  The discussion was “Maybe we could get 2400 people if we ran just one conference”.  No one was bold enough to suggest our yearly count would reach 3000-3600, let alone grow enormously!  But INFORMS is the one place to go where you know you will see most or all of your colleagues every year.  While I prefer smaller conferences, this is still a must-go-to event, simply for the mix of people to see.

Weather in Washington is beautiful and the conference hotel, while huge, seems to work, so this is shaping up to be a great conference.

On the blogging front, the ICS (INFORMS Computing Society) blog has posted from the conference, and I expect others to appear shortly.  If you are at the conference, don’t forget to drop by the COIN-OR booth (Booth 504) this evening (Sunday) around 8 to say hi to the blog-ORs!  And stop off to see Steve Baker, author of the Numerati.

Get your registration in for the INFORMS Practice Meeting

I really like the INFORMS Practice Meeting.  It is much different than the regular INFORMS conference.  The key difference is that not everyone speaks.  At regular INFORMS (or EURO or IFORS), practically everyone there will give a 20-25 minute talk on their own research.  At the Practice Meeting, speakers are carefully selected in order to present the best practical work, along with the most important methodological advances (generally in the form of tutorials).  As an example of the talks, here is the “Supply Chain” track:

  • Procter & Gamble – William Tarlton, Supply Chain R&D Manager, Personal Beauty Care Products, on implementing inventory optimization at P&G.
  • Pepsi Bottling Group – Arzum Akkas, Senior Project Manager, Supply Chain Technology, on retail out-of-stock reduction in a direct store delivery environment .
  • Pennsylvania State University –Terry Harrison, Professor of Business, Professor of Supply Chain & Information Systems, and Thomas Robbins, Instructor in Supply Chain & Information Systems, on services supply chain.
  • Xilinx – Alex Brown, Principal Engineer and Supply Chain Architect, on collecting and using demand information from customers and distributors to improve forecasts and supply chain performance.
  • IBM  –Markus Ettl, Manager of Supply Chain Analytics & Architecture, IBM Research, and Blair Binney, Manager of Demand/Supply Planning Process Transformation, IBM Integrated Supply Chain, on how analytics and collaborative processes improve distributor and IBM performance in the supply chain.
  • University of North Carolina – Brian Tomlin, Assistant Professor of Operations, Technology and Innovation Management, on supply chain risk management.

This is a great mix of academics and business executives, and I guarantee that the speakers will have spent significant time honing their presentations.

Of course, the conference is pretty pricey, but if you are doing (or considering doing) OR in practice, or if you teach courses on the practical use of OR, this is a must see conference.  The hotel deadline is in a couple of days.

I’ll be there, and perhaps do a bit of live blogging along the way.