Category: Personal

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!

The True Measure of a Person’s Real Worth

Inspired by Jon Cryer‘s comments on (finally) winning an Emmy last night:

You know, I used to think that awards were just shallow tokens of momentary popularity but — I realize they are the only true measure of person’s real worth as a human being.

I thought I would ‘fess up about an award or two coming the way of yours truly (“Aaah, shucks, you shouldn’t have!”).

First, the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo has tapped me for their 2009 Alumni Achievement Medal.  While I only spent two and a half years as an undergraduate at Waterloo (I had spent two years at the University of Manitoba), those years were incredibly important to my path.  I got my B.Math. degree  from two departments:  Computer Science and Combinatorics and Optimization.

edmondsYou have to love a place with a Faculty of Mathematics and a 29 faculty strong Department of Combinatorics and Optimization.   I was particularly attached to C&O and was inspired to enter the field of operations research due to the training I got there.   I was strongly affected by two faculty members on the opposite sides of practically any spectrum.  The first was Jack Edmonds, who founded combinatorial optimization with his work on matchings and his recognition of the key divide between polynomial and exponential algorithms.  While that work was done in the 1960s, Jack has remained a prolific and influential researcher to this day.  From Jack, I learned the beauty of this field.

The second person I was strongly influenced by will be less familiar to most:  Richard N. Burns.  Rick did research primarily in nurse scheduling.  We worked together two summers on my first operations research projects.  The first project was for Domtar, a Canadian paper products company, on scheduling a cardboard cutting machine.  For this project, I got my first computer (this was 1980 or so):  a CP/M based system.  It was a fantastic project that taught me both the pleasures and the frustrations of doing real-world operations research.    Exhilarating when things went well; devastating when the code just wouldn’t work.  But finally we got things to work well and the system went into use.  In retrospect, I now see that the work we were doing could be seen as an early precursor to branch-and-price, a topic that has fascinated me ever since.

While the Domtar project was a research project, the second project I did with Rick was a consulting project, putting together a nurse scheduling system.  By the time we had added in time tracking, accounting, payroll, capacity planning, and a few other things, I learned the definition of mission creep:  I am not sure that system ever got finished!  But that too was a great experience.  I enjoyed working with Rick very much, and from him I learned the pleasures of applying operations research in the real world.  I’ve lost track of Rick (he seems to have retired from academia, so I don’t even have a photo of him:  if any of you do, please pass it along!) but he continues to have a strong effect on me.

As you can imagine, Rick and Jack were quite different in their approaches to the world of operations research (if you know both of them, you know they were different in lots of other ways too!) but when it came time for a recommendation of where to go to graduate school they both, independently, suggested the same place: Georgia Tech Industrial and Systems Engineering, which turned out to be the ideal place for me.

I am thrilled that the Faculty of Mathematics picked me for their Alumni Achievement Medal.  The list of past recipients is very impressive indeed!  I pick up the medal at a banquet on Thursday which Alexander and I will drive up for (Ilona being in Europe at the moment).

The second award is … well, maybe I better wait until the INFORMS San Diego Meeting to talk about that.

Finally, though not really an award (perhaps a penalty might be a better term), I am now the Associate Dean, Research here at the Tepper School.  Given the research traditions of this school (and not just in OR!), I am really pleased to be part of making a great school even better.

Not at ISMP

The International Symposium on Mathematical Programming of the Mathematical Programming Society occurs every three years, and I generally like to attend them.  They are like INFORMS conferences in size, but have many more talks (and people!) that I want to see.  This year’s ISMP is being held next week in Chicago.  Unfortunately, I won’t be there:  I will be in Cork Ireland attending an advisory board meeting of the Cork Constraint Computation Center.

If anyone is blogging from ISMP, please let me know so I can be sure to point to your entries.

Note added August 26. Check out the comments for pointers to Nathan Brixius and Tallys Yunes who are blogging the conference.

Time for Baseball

The baseball season started a few minutes ago with Atlanta playing Philadelphia.  I’ve been working with Major League Baseball for more than a dozen years, and my (along with partners, of course) company, The Sports Scheduling Group, produces the schedules for MLB (our chief scheduler Kelly Easton does all the hard work, but I do the final day assignments), as well as for the umpires (which I do, based on some fantastic work done a few years ago in a Tepper School  MBA project, further developed in Hakan Yildiz‘ dissertation).  The start of the season is always a time of anxiety for me (not strong anxiety, but a gnawing fear):  what if I forgot to put in a game?  What if Philadelphia shows up tonight, but Atlanta’s schedule has them in Los Angeles?  It is a rather silly worry, since thousands have people have looked at the schedule at this point, so it is unlikely that anything particularly egregious is happening.

Still, I was happy tonight to see Brett Myers toss the first pitch to Kelly Johnson (a ball).

And know that he did so because of operations research.

Check out ILOG’s DIALOG blog!

I am in Minneapolis, flying back to Pittsburgh after spending a couple days in Winnipeg for a memorial service for my Mom.  My Mom’s passing has a number of effects, large and small.  On the large side, my son Alexander has lost both his gradmothers in the past six months, which makes me sad:  every kid needs plenty of grandparents to spoil them!  Now my Dad will have to pick up all the slack.

On the small side, I had to cancel a trip I was looking forwad to:  ILOG’s DIALOG conference in Orlando.  First, it is Orlando, which looks pretty sweet for a Pittsburgher in February.  Second, with all of the changes for ILOG in the past year, I was looking forward to meeting people and seeing how the optimization side of ILOG was making out.  No chance to do that, unfortunately, but ILOG has significant blog coverage of the conference, which I recommend.  Most of the guest bloggers are rules-oriented (my absence messes up the optimization covererage, I guess) but it was good to read that the plenary of Tom Rosamilia (head of WebSphere) sees how optimization fits in (from James Taylor’s blog entry):

Tom identified four essentials for survival:

  • Adapt to embrace change
  • Streamline processes to make them more dynamic and manageable
  • Optimize to allocate resources efficiently
  • Visualize to transform insight into action for faster decisions

This is not quite the way I see optimization (either it is much more than resource allocation, or resource allocation has a much broader definition than I usually give it!), but at least we hit the main points.

Over- versus Under-Planning

My wife and I have been arguing recently about my family’s tendancy to over-plan.  The Trick way does tend to have plans with lots of contingencies, which perhaps a reason operations research appeals to me.  The Weyers (my wife Ilona’s surname) approach is a little more … take it as things come.

The Think-OR blog has a wonderful OR joke that pretty well summarizes how us over-planners work.  I think it is instructive that both Ilona and I think that the story vindicates our chosen position.

Larry Wein on Post Traumatic Stress

I missed Larry Wein’s op-ed in the New York Times on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), so thanks to Güzin Bayraksan for pointing it out in her blog.  Entitled “Counting the Walking Wounded”, the piece argues that the number of soldiers expected to get PTSD is quite a bit higher than previous estimates (which were in the range of 15%):

We found that about 35 percent of soldiers and marines who deploy to Iraq will ultimately suffer from P.T.S.D. — about 300,000 people, with 20,000 new sufferers for each year the war last.

If you check out the blog for my son Alexander, you will see that we are in the midst of our own “traumatic stress”:  nothing like a soldier in Iraq, of course, but between the passing of my mother and the destruction of our kitchen by a broken pipe, not to mention starting up teaching again and a few other things in my life, I feel mini-PTSD coming on!  Fortunately, playing catch with Alexander is pretty good therapy.

Solving real problems in Norway and Ireland

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Europe and visited two different (yet similar) research groups. The first was in Oslo, Norway, where I visited the applied math group at SINTEF. I think the best US analogy to SINTEF is the RAND Corporation, a name with cold-war connotations, but still very active in providing research and analysis on public policy issues. The group I visited uses operations research approaches to solve a dizzying array of problems, most based in Norway. Some examples of what they do include clearing transactions on the Norwegian stock exchange, nurse rostering, forestry management, transportation scheduling and much more. They also provide schedules for the Norwegian Football League, so they wanted to chat with me on my sports scheduling experiences. In addition to the technical aspects, we talked about the challenges of working with sports leagues. Frustrations with sports leagues seems to be a world-wide phenomenon.

Visiting the new 4C facilities
Visiting the new 4C facilities
I then moved on to one of my favorite academic-based organizations, the Cork Constraint Computation Center (4C) at the University of Cork. This center was started by Gene Freuder (one of the key founders of constraint programming) when Ireland made a very big investment in the field. 4C has grown to have more than 50 faculty, postdocs, researchers, and graduate students, so it is a very big operation. I sit on its scientific advisory board, which is great fun, since Gene has brought together some really interesting and accomplished people. During the visit, we saw demos by a number of the students, including work on natural gas purchasing, telecommunications network design, and water resource operation. 4C has spent its lifetime so far in a building by itself, but the University is building a new math and computer science building, so 4C will move into that (in the picture I am flanked by David Waltz of Columbia and Barry O’Sullivan of 4C). We did a tour of the building (hence the hardhats, something not normally needed in operations research), and the space looks fantastic.

I was struck by the similarities between 4C and SINTEF, even though one is an academic institute and one is a nonprofit research center. Both are heavily engaged with problems of practical interest and both worry greatly about funding. Since I teach in a business school, funding is not much of a worry for me (at least until the MBA students stop coming), but I envy the real problems these groups work on, and the validation they get through their interactions with companies. I get that in my own work with sports leagues, but I saw a dozen problems I wish I was working on during my visits.

On a personal note, I enjoyed Oslo very much (and I always enjoy Cork). The weather was terrible, and the prices very high (even though the US dollar had gone up quite a bit). But the food was great (even the Lutefisk, helped by the huge amount of bacon served with it) and the people were great to talk to. Thanks to my hosts Tomas Nordlander (SINTEF) and Gene Freuder (4C) for having me out.

Giving Talks

I am in Auburn Alabama where I just gave a talk to the industrial and systems engineering department on sports scheduling.  I must say that when I left Pittsburgh this morning, I had somewhat mixed feelings.  Of course, I love giving talks, and it is great to go out and see a university I have not seen before.   And I know some people at Auburn and I like them and the research they do (check out Kevin Gue‘s animations of order picking in warehouses:  who knew order picking was so captivating!).  Further, the meetings with people I don’t know offer great opportunities for social capital (I ended up enjoying all of my meetings, particularly the one with Emmett Lodree who is doing really neat work on disaster response and inventory).

But as the alarm went off at 4:30AM so I could make a 7AM flight to Atlanta and then drive an hour and half from Atlanta to Auburn, I was wondering of the value of giving another talk.   I have given versions of my sports scheduling talk a few dozen times (though it is vastly different than what it was even one year ago) and, while it is a fun talk, some of the thrill is gone.

But recently I read a blog entry by Sze San Nah, a doctoral student at the University of Sydney, on her giving her first talk (at the IFORS conference in South Africa).  In her blog entry, she goes through the excitement and terror of giving a talk at a professional conference.   And I thought back on my first talk.  It was at an ORSA/TIMS (or TIMS/ORSA) conference in the mid-1980s.  I was to give a talk on an improved algorithm for polymatroidal flow (a paper I am still extremely proud of:  it was published in Math of OR).  The paper was stuck in a session on manufacturing networks, and the chair of the session introduced it as “Here’s a paper that I can’t even understand the abstract.  I don’t know what it is doing here”.  He proceeded to spend the rest of the session looking out the window.  After that introduction, practically everyone in the room stood up and left, seeing that there was going to be very little manufacturing in my talk.  Fortunately, I think my co-author Craig Tovey had rounded up some people, because about 10 people came into the room, just to hear me talk.  So I stumbled through my talk, and it ended up going reasonably well.  But I was very nervous.

Since then, I have given perhaps one hundred talks at professional meetings and another fifty talks at various universities and research institutions.  And I think the key to giving a good talk is to keep some of the nervousness that Sze San Nah talks about, without letting that nervousness take over.

To come back to Auburn, I had a great day here.  Nervousness was easy, since there were sixty or more people in the room.  But the talk went well, if a little rushed. I am glad I decided not to ignore the alarm clock this morning!