Category: INFORMS

Touring Pittsburgh and High School Teachers

With more than 2500 registrants so far, it looks like the INFORMS Pittsburgh Meeting will be a very big one. But touring Pittsburgh does not seem to be high on people’s list. If you or a guest are attending the conference and want to go on one of the guest tours, be sure to sign up now! If we don’t get critical mass, we won’t be able to offer the tours. Don’t let the treasures of Pittsburgh go undiscovered!

Also, if you are a High School teacher who wants to learn more about operations research and can get to Pittsburgh, check out the High School Teachers Workshop which is really an outstanding day!

Pittsburgh INFORMS information

We are about 6 weeks away from the Pittsburgh INFORMS conference.  On the plus side, we have been blessed with outstanding local and global support (ILOG has supported upgraded conference bags, SmartOps has sponsored a new Tuesday reception, IBM Center for Business Optimization has sponsored a new Prize Ceremony and much, much more).  On the minus side, I hope readers here have hotel rooms, since the city is definitely filling up!

Pittsburgh has a lot to offer.  The local committee is putting together a local guide.  If you have been here (or live here now!) and have comments to offer, please let me know and I will update the guide.

We now have receptions for all of Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday (November 5, 6, and 7).  If you are one of the first dozen or so people to find me at the reception and say “Hey Mike, I read your blog”, I will be happy to buy you a drink!

Looking for Another Editor!

I am on the search committee to find Matt Saltzman’s successor as Editor-in-Chief of INFORMS Online. I was the first such editor, then Matt took over for the last six years. It was great being the first editor (1995-2000): there was so much to do that anything we did was better than what we had. Matt has worked hard to bring IOL up to a higher professional level, so now the webpage doesn’t look like something an amateur put together in an afternoon (which is what I did!). Behind the scenes, Matt and his team put IOL on a much stronger technical base.

Now, after 11 years, even the role of IOL Editor is undergoing change. Why have an OR professional be the Editor of IOL? After all, the Editor of OR/MS Today is not an OR professional: he is a journalist. Should IOL be any different?

I think having an OR person as editor of IOL is still very valuable. The goal of IOL is to create community, and outsiders would have a hard time figuring out what community would be valuable to an OR/MS person. What we need is a technologically savvy person with a broad interest in OR and advancing the field.

This position is absolutely key to INFORMS and to our field in general. I hope there are many applications, and many thoughtful discussions of the role of Editor of IOL.

The full Call for Nominations is here:

Continue reading “Looking for Another Editor!”

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.

Resource Pointers

I was vexed to see that there was a bug in the software at the INFORMS Resources Page that sprung up in the transition to a new machine at INFORMS Online.  For the past two months, no submission to the system was being logged.  The worst part is that no one seemed to notice!

This system used to be “Michael Trick’s Operations Research Page”, and was, I think, a key resource on the web in OR/MS.  Now, with the advent of google, it is unclear what role these resource collections have.  If you know roughly what you are looking for, simply googling terms seems the right way to find things.  If you don’t, however, these resource collections can be useful.  But they are incredibly painful to keep up to date (about 15% of the pointers at the site are not valid, but keeping on top of them takes a lot of time).  Two-thirds of the submissions are not OR/MS related, so the editing process is pretty tedious.  So is the effort worth the usefulness, or is this just another aspect of the web that had its time?

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!

More OR and Sports

I missed this earlier article from the Wall Street Journal entitled “The NBA Tries to Make Teamwork a Science” on how teams in the National Basketball Association are trying to measure “team” effects of their plays (thanks Otis Smith for pointing this out). Basketball, more than many sports, relies on smooth teamwork for a team to be successful. This leads to an interesting data mining issue. The article link expires in 7 days, but here are a few excerpts:

In a league long dominated by high-flying superstars, more teams are focusing this season on teamwork — and turning to surprisingly scientific methods to measure it. New technology makes it easier to track the performance of every combination of five players that steps on the court, in a long list of game situations, from out-of-bounds plays to pick-and-rolls to zone defenses. As different player mixes yield different results, teams are beginning to quantify the elusive concept known as chemistry.

[Wolf Pack: Eddie Griffin (far left) and Kevin Garnett (center) click on the court.]
Wolf Pack: Eddie Griffin (far left) and Kevin Garnett (center) click on the court.

Say, for example, that after a coach inserts two particular players into a game, the opposing team has trouble scoring. Getting ready for the next opponent, the coach might flip open his laptop, punch a few keys, and see how his team did defensively in other games when the same two players were on the court together. He’s able to do this because teams are increasingly turning to software that dissects plays, follows every pass and shot and tracks each player’s part in every possession.

Not surprisingly, it is people in Operations Research that come to the rescue. Wayne Winston is best known for the textbooks he has published on a range of operations research-related topics. But he also has been working with NBA teams on the issue of teamwork: Continue reading “More OR and Sports”

Teaching Operations Research and Management Science

One of the ironies of academic life is that a large portion of it is taken over by an aspect that few of us have formal training in: teaching! The average high school teacher has a firmer foundation on pedagogic theory than almost any university professor. This is particularly problematic in operations research since the education most of us received (research oriented knowledge/teaching methods) is far removed from what we are expected to teach (undergraduate/MBA “practical” instruction). So many of us spend a year or two mimicking our previous education (“Here’s a great proof for you!”) rather than teaching students what they really should know. And given my clearly enthusiastic belief in the usefulness and relevance of operations research, that is really a shame: instead of inspiring students, we turn them against our field.

INFORMS has had its Teaching Management Science Conference over the past few years. This year’s version will be in San Francisco in July. The program looks to have a good mix of theory (how do students learn) and practice (successful examples from top faculty). You can even stay in dorms to get the full “Live life as a student” aspect.

Edelman Competition


This year’s Edelman Competition will take place in a few days at the INFORMS Practice Conference. The Edelman Competition presents projects in practical operations research that have a significant impact on an organization. This year’s finalists include work from Travelocity, the TSA, Warner Robbins Air Logistics, Center and more. I really like the Edelman: the finalists put papers into Interfaces, and those papers are a tremendous resource for my MBA classes.

Of course, every competition could be improved. I was mulling on the thought of turning this competition into a reality show. Lock a bunch of ORers in a plant for six weeks with cameras everywhere, and watch them try to out-optimize each other to be the last one standing. Probably wouldn’t compete with American Idol, but I certainly would watch it!