Entrepreneurial Operations Research Jobs

Since Operations Research is a very practical field, it is not surprising that companies often spin out of universities led by OR professors.  SmartOps was started by my colleague Sridhar Tayur, LogicTools was founded by MIT Professor David Simchi-Levi, former INFORMS President Don Kleinmuntz founded Strata Decision Technologies, and on and on.  Entrepreneurship and Operations Research mix very well.

One new aspect (at least new to me!) is getting National Science Foundation support to create these firms.  Tuomas Sandholm of Carnegie Mellon has received such a grant and is creating a firm Optimized Markets.  He is looking for people to join this startup.  At least for some of the jobs, the structure of the position is unusual:  an initial year is spent as a postdoc at CMU, followed (if everything works out) with a position at Optimized Markets.  Some job announcements follow.

These look like interesting jobs for the right type of person.

 

ENTREPRENEURIAL R&D POSITION AT CARNEGIE MELLLON UNIVERSITY AND OPTIMIZED MARKETS, INC.

The US administration is appropriately interested in facilitating the transfer of university-generated technologies into the commercial world.  The National Science Foundation has a new selective program for facilitating this.  Prof. Sandholm received a grant from that program to commercialize some of the technology and know-how being developed in his Electronic Marketplaces laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University.  He founded a startup company, Optimized Markets, Inc., for the commercialization.

The position is first for a year as a Research Associate or Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University.  After that, conditional on good progress, the person will transition into a position of significance at Optimized Markets, Inc.

The company has ambitious plans in many application areas in the intersection of electronic marketplaces and integer programming.  The particular product that the person will be working on in the first couple of years is in advertising campaign sales and scheduling for TV, Internet display, video, mobile, and cross-media advertising.

This is a truly exceptional opportunity for someone who wants to change the world with technology.

The position is open immediately.

Requirements:

– Strong knowledge of integer programming
– Strong skills and desire to build significant production-quality optimization software that is fast in practice
– PhD in operations research, computer science, or equivalent field
– Strong command of C++
– Desire and ability to work hard in a fast-moving environment
– Desire to change the world with technology

Desired additional qualities (not required):

– Experience in developing commercial software
– Command of Ruby on Rails and Java
– Experience in Software-as-a-Service/cloud
– Good written and oral communication skills
– Ability to work independently and as part of a team

The position offers the following:

– Opportunity to learn from, and work with, the world’s leading experts in integer programming and market design
– Opportunity to work on highly novel approaches to integer programming and tree search
– Opportunity to learn from a serial entrepreneur and a mentor network how to become a successful entrepreneur
– Opportunity to work on exciting new real-world problems
– Opportunity to have your work fielded and change the world
– Opportunity to publish
– Salary plus stock options in a promising startup
– Opportunity to join an exciting new startup in a position of significance

Candidates should email a letter of application, CV, and a list of references to:
Tuomas Sandholm
Professor
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
sandholm AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/

——————-

OPTIMIZATION SOFTWARE ENGINEER POSITION AT OPTIMIZED MARKETS, INC. / CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

The US administration is appropriately interested in facilitating the transfer of university-generated technologies into the commercial world.  The National Science Foundation has a new selective program for facilitating this.  Prof. Sandholm received a grant from that program to commercialize some of the technology and know-how being developed in his Electronic Marketplaces laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University.  He founded a startup company, Optimized Markets, Inc., for the commercialization. The company has ambitious plans in many application areas in the intersection of electronic marketplaces and integer programming.

The first product for the Optimization Software Engineer between Optimized Markets, Inc. and Carnegie Mellon University to work on is in advertising campaign sales and scheduling for TV, Internet display, video, mobile, and cross-media advertising.

This is a truly exceptional opportunity for someone who wants to change the world with technology.

The position is open immediately.

Requirements:

– Strong skills and desire to build significant production-quality optimization software that is fast in practice
– Strong command of C++
– BS or MS in computer science, operations research, or equivalent field
– Desire and ability to work hard in a fast-moving environment
– Desire to change the world with technology

Desired additional qualities:

– Strong knowledge of integer programming / tree search
– Experience in developing commercial software
– Command of Ruby on Rails and Java
– Experience in Software-as-a-Service/cloud
– Good written and oral communication skills
– Ability to work independently and as part of a team

The position offers the following:

– Opportunity to learn from, and work with, the world’s leading experts in integer programming and market design
– Opportunity to work on highly novel approaches to integer programming and tree search
– Opportunity to learn from a serial entrepreneur and a mentor network how to become a successful entrepreneur
– Opportunity to work on exciting new real-world problems
– Opportunity to have your work fielded and change the world
– Opportunity to publish
– Salary plus stock options in a promising startup
– Opportunity to join an exciting new startup in a position of significance

Candidates should email a letter of application, CV, and a list of references to:
Tuomas Sandholm
Professor
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
sandholm AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/

Summer Internship at IBM Research, AI for Optimization Group

Just saw this announcement of a summer internship

A summer internship position is available for 2013 in the “AI for Optimization” group within the Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences department at IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York.  The internship will last for about 3 months and will be scheduled between March and October, 2013.

Candidates should be exceptional Masters or PhD students in Computer Science and related areas, and not have already received their PhD by the internship start date.  The successful candidate is expected to have strong interest and some experience in one or more of the following:

 +  Developing Novel Technologies based on AI and OR to advance the state of the art in combinatorial optimization (e.g., Heuristic Search, Mixed Integer Programming (MIP), Linear Programming (LP), Satisfiability (SAT))

 +  Robust Parallelization of search-based algorithms (e.g., using parallel Branch&Bound; information exchange) exploiting novel computing architectures such as BlueGene, multi-core end-user machines, large compute clusters, and the Cloud

 +  Advancing Simulation-Based Optimization approaches to solve real-world problems and/or to improve optimization methods themselves by, e.g., employing techniques from Machine Learning, Local Search, and Genetic Algorithms for automated algorithm selection and parameter tuning

 +  Applications of Optimization to Analytics, Production Modeling, Sustainability, Systems, and Databases

Interested candidates should send their CV as well as names and contact information of at least two references to all of the following:

Ashish Sabharwal [ashish.sabharwal@us.ibm.com]
Horst Samulowitz [samulowitz@us.ibm.com]
Meinolf Sellmann [meinolf@us.ibm.com]

I wish I didn’t already have my PhD!

Operations Research and a Baseball Job

Analytics is getting to be more and more important in sports, and sports teams and leagues are looking to people with analytical skills to fill key roles in their organizations.   The MIT Sports Analytics conference is a big deal, attracting more than 2000 attendees, with an active job placement service.  The MBAs at my own school (the Tepper School) now has a sports analytics club, with a speaker series, case competition and more (including fun things like fantasy sports competitions) and many of these exceptionally bright and ambitious students are eager for jobs in the sports industry.  While some of this may be due to the success of Moneyball, much more of this is due to the fact that computers and decision making have gotten much, much better in the last years, making analytics a key competitive advantage.  And when you get past dashboards and basic data analysis and visualization, you move into using data to make better decisions.  In other words, you move into operations research.

It is clear that many clubs in Major League Baseball get it.  I see it when talking to people with my local team, the Pittsburgh Pirates (a team that I am sure will break .500 any year now!), and I just got a job announcement that shows that the next closest team to me, the Cleveland Indians, get it too.  They are looking for a VP-Technology, but it is clear that they see this as a job involving decision making, not just infrastructure.  From the ad, the primary purpose is:

The Vice President of Technology is responsible for developing, implementing, measuring and maintaining
plans that advance the organization’s achievement of its guiding commitments through enhanced
Baseball Operations and business decision-making tools, increased effectiveness of systems, hardware,
technology infrastructure and improved fan experience through fan-centric technology implementations.

I love the “decision-making tools” in that description.  Sounds just right for an operations research person who also understands technology.

 

Come work at Carnegie Mellon!

I teach (and, now, administrate) in the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.  Unlike most engineering-oriented universities, CMU does not have an Industrial (or Systems) Engineering department, so operations research people are scattered throughout the university.  The Tepper contingent is a big one (senior faculty include Balas, Cornuejols, and Hooker) and is augmented by others in the school with operations research interests (people like Sridhar Tayur who is in our operations management group).  But there are lots of OR people elsewhere, including Chemical Engineering (Ignacio Grossman, for instance), Mathematics (Alan Frieze), and Computer Science (Tuomas Sandholm).

The Heinz College of Public Policy and Information Systems has a large contingent of operations researchers, including Al Blumstein, one of the founding researchers in our field.  And the Heinz College is hiring in our area!  Here is the announcement:

Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College  is currently expanding its program targeted at analysis, design, and eventual implementation of Urban Systems and is seeking to recruit tenure-track faculty to be key participants in those developments. Heinz College (www.heinz.cmu.edu) consists of a School of Public Policy and Management and a School of Information Systems and Management.

We are seeking individuals from a diversity of related disciplines, including economics, transportation, operations research and the management sciences, statistics, and systems engineering with specific attention to civil engineering.

Our interests in Urban Systems include transportation systems, public-safety systems, and the built environment. While these problem domains are diverse, to be addressed effectively an interdisciplinary perspective is required. We are thus seeking candidates who are open to collaborating with researchers from other disciplines. We have developed relationships with a number of cities, including Pittsburgh and New York, as sources of data, experimental opportunities for improved system designs, and expertise in the realm of problems associated with their operating systems.

All candidates should have a PhD (or should demonstrate that one will be achieved shortly) in relation to one of the identified disciplines and have demonstrated research competence. Interested applicants are asked to send their application to the Urban Systems Search Committee at urban-sys-heinz-college@andrew.cmu.edu. An application should include a cover letter indicating their particular interests and their sense of fit with the Heinz College, a CV, copies of any published papers, and three sources of reference letters.

We will be conducting interviews at the October INFORMS meeting in Phoenix. For consideration at these meetings, applications should be submitted at least one month in advance.

If this sounds like you, please consider applying.  I look forward to having even more operations research on this campus!

Learn Operations Research, Make Millions

Russ Ohlendorf received his bachelors degree in 2006 and now, a mere five years later, he will be making $2.025 million in 2011.  The degree was in operations research and financial engineering at Princeton.  It just goes to show how far you can go in operations research:  salaries in the millions are possible!

Perhaps Russ has some skills beyond operations research, since he is a starting pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates which, against all rules of logic or fairness, is part of Major League Baseball.  Still, I’m marching right into my dean’s office and asking for a raise to match the highest operations research salary in Pittsburgh!

Postdocs and Special Year at the IMA

In 1987-88, I spent a great year in Minneapolis as a postdoc at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (and this picture of me comes from that time). Every year at the IMA has a special theme, and the theme my year was “Applied Combinatorics”. There were about a dozen of us postdocs that year: 11 combinatorialists, and me, the OR guy, who I guess satisfied the Applied in year’s title. It was a fantastic year. The other combinatorialists were scary-smart and doing amazing things. One of the postdocs was Bernd Sturmfels who was working on Grobner Bases at the time and has gone on to an amazing career in applying algebraic methods in optimization, statistics, and other fields. I look at his list of 190 papers and 15 books and realize what a slacker I am!

The year at the IMA was important for my career. It gave me the chance to finish my dissertation papers and move on to new research. I met a great group of people and learned about some aspects of an academic career without being saddled with teaching or administrative duties.

Depending on the year, the IMA may be more or less interesting to operations researchers. Next year (2011-12) looks to be a good one. It is on “The Mathematics of Information”. There are a couple versions of the description of the year. I like the one on the Geomblog:

During the academic year 2011-2012, the annual program at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) at the University of Minnesota will be in the Mathematics of Information. Information, broadly defined, plays an ever increasingly large role in our scientific and technological endeavors, as well as our daily lives. Collectively, we search the web over billions of times per day, we keep our medical records in digital repositories, we share videos and photos over the web, and we listen to music on MP3 players. Our ability to collect, store, and generate vast quantities of data far outstrips our ability to analyze, process, and understand these data. Many scientific, engineering, and medical applications depend on our ability to handle enormous amounts of complex information. Network engineering involves massive datasets at high speeds, medical imaging generates large data with intricate geometric relationships, and astronomical observations include data at different wavelengths or spectral bands. Our current technology and scientific tools for information lag far behind our ability to collect enormous amounts of data, our need to analyze that data as efficiently as possible, and, finally, our ability to use that analysis to make sound, timely decisions.

“Sound, timely decisions” is what operations research is all about.

The postdoc deadline was January 7, 2011 but applications will be considered until February 4, 2011. So get a move on if you are interested!

There is also funding for more established researchers to spend time at the IMA. It is a great way to get started in new research directions and to rub off the administrative barnacles that attach if you stay at one place too long.

OR Job at Waste Management

I don’t normally do job postings on this blog:  there is OR/MS Today and INFORMS Job Placement Service and so on for that, but sometimes a job catches my eye.  A company is looking for a Masters level OR specialist to provide analysis for them.  They run a nice sized network:  hundreds of sources and transfer points with presumably thousands of trucks linking them.  It is clear there are lots of interesting things you can do with the network.

It is a little unusual since it is a waste product network, involving transporting waste to landfills, energy plants, recycling plants and so on.  This is one industry that strikes me as being pretty resistant to the peaks and valleys of the overall economy (as opposed to, say, financial portfolio optimization).

Here is part of the description:

Waste Management, Inc. is the leading provider of comprehensive waste and environmental services in North America. The company serves nearly 20 million municipal, commercial, industrial, and residential customers through a network of 367 collection operations, 355 transfer stations, 273 active landfill disposal sites, 16 waste-to-energy plants, 134 recycling plants, and 111 beneficial-use landfill gas projects.

Waste Management currently has a opportunity for a Operations Research Specialist at our downtown Houston, TX, headquarters.

Job Summary

Formulate and apply mathematical modeling and other optimizing methods to develop and interpret information that assists the entire Waste Management organization with decision-making, policy formulation, or other managerial functions. Additionally the Operations Research Specialist frequently concentrates on collecting and analyzing data and developing decision support software. The Operations Research Specialist will develop and supply analytic support for optimal time, costing, pricing, or logistics networks for evaluation and/or implementation.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities include the following:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform the essential duties satisfactorily.  Other minor duties may be assigned.

· Formulate mathematical models (linear and non-linear) of problems, relating constants and variables, restrictions, alternatives, conflicting objectives, and their numerical parameters.

· Conduct simulation (discrete event) studies of existing and proposed systems, including definition of data requirements; capture and validation of information, model formulation, design experimentation, and application of appropriate statistical analysis.


The skills needed are a mix of simulation and optimization skills:

Demonstrated ability to apply operations research techniques including decision analysis, optimization, simulation and statistical and stochastic modeling.

· Significant experience utilizing mathematical programming software packages such as IBM ILOG CPLEX, LINDO, or Xpress.

· Demonstrated ability to develop simulation models and conduct studies utilizing commercial simulation software such as Arena, AutoMOD, Witness, etc.

· Strong problem solving and analysis skills: ability to identify root causes of problems, create effective practical solution approaches, implement solutions under the tactical demands of business operations.

· Programming experience, preferably in C or C#.

· Committed and highly motivated team player with strong communication skills.

· Demonstrated work and familiarity with data mining and visualization tools.

· Experience with working as part of an integrated solutions development team to provide value to systems engineering and development for specific decision support application

If you are interested in this, contact Maurice Bobb of Waste Management for more information. And if you get the job, be sure to write back to me on the sort of problems you look at. This could be a really fascinating operations research job.

Are You Ready to Lead INFORMS?

INFORMS is looking for a new Executive Director. This is a full-time staff position, unlike the volunteer elected positions like President and the various Vice-Presidencies. This position is one of the most important in our field, and certainly the most important job that does not require a PhD in operations research (though such a degree would be valuable!). It is only through the efforts of the staff that the main activities of INFORMS gets done. Even activities that are primarily volunteer-driven (like local chapter meetings, for instance) are aided by support staff at the INFORMS office. Without a good leader, INFORMS will be much less capable of getting things done, to the detriment of our field.

Here is the full announcement from the INFORMS mailing list:

INFORMS has retained JDG Associates, a firm with expertise in association executive recruitment, to conduct the search for a new INFORMS Executive Director. We welcome any suggestions from the membership of possible candidates for the position. The ideal candidate will be a strong leader, experienced in strategic planning and able to strengthen existing key programs (publications and meetings), in addition to introducing new service offerings in the field of analytics. Previous association management experience is preferred. Experience or knowledge of operations research, management science and/or business analytics is a plus.

Please contact Paul Belford, Principal, JDG Associates, Ltd, 1700 Research Blvd, #103, Rockville, MD 20850; 301-340-2210; belford@jdgsearch.com

If you know someone, be sure to let the search firm know about them! Here is some more information about the position from JDG.

NSF Operations Research Position open

The National Science Foundation is looking for a program director for operations research. I wrote about this position the last time it came open, when Robert Smith became director.

The NSF is incredibly important to the health of the field of operations research. In addition to the “regular” grant activities (CAREER grants and basic research grants), the program director has the opportunity to make the case for having OR as part of interdisciplinary and exploratory research directions. I hope someone good finds this an interesting opportunity. Robert Sloan has an interesting article on the joys of being a program director in computer science.

Summer Internship at Solver Foundation

I get a fair number of emails of the sort “I am studying at ….and I would like to work under your supervision as a summer intern”.  Most of the time they go on to say things like “I want to work under your supervision on stochastic optimization, supply chains, e-commerce” or an of a dozen things that suggest they 1) don’t know what I do, and 2) don’t really care to find out.  That is probably the economically efficient choice, since I don’t take on summer interns, and have even written about it.  I don’t know where this myth of summer internships for people from around the world comes from (unless there are a large group of people who welcome this?  Let me know!).

Once in a while, however, I see a summer internship and think:  “Wow!  I wish I was 20 (or 25) again!  That looks like a great opportunity!”  The Solver Foundation team just posted such an opportunity.  From the announcement:

The Solver Foundation team is looking for an intern for this summmer! A short description is below – this is a software development position, where the focus is on practical application of numerical optimization techniques. I believe in a practical, challenging, and hopefully rewarding experience where interns work on real code that relates to their areas of interest. If you’re interested, here’s what you should do:

  • Apply for the position here. Make sure you apply under the “Software and Hardware Development” category.
  • After you have applied, send a resume to natbr at microsoft dot com. We cannot guarantee a response to every inquiry due to volume.

A word of warning – this position is not for everyone. If things like simplex, L-BFGS, and KKT conditions are unfamiliar to you, this position might not be the best fit.

If you know what simplex, L-BFGS, and KKT mean, then this looks like an interesting way to spend the summer.  And they are pretty open with regards to education:

Bachelor’s, MS, or PhD students with deep knowledge of numerical optimization methods and software are particularly encouraged to apply.

This sounds a bit better than the Associate Dean gig I currently have, but I think I am stuck here.