Operations Research is hot at IBM

IBM announced today that it is forming a new consulting group for business analytics and optimization, called Business Analytics and Optimization Services.  With 4000 people, this is a pretty serious operation!  You can check out the news release and the Business Week coverage.   I’ll pass over the fact that IBM doesn’t use the phrase “operations research” in this announcement, and note that this group combines its consulting arm (formed with the acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers a few years back) with the strengths in research (in Watson and other places), two groups with world-leading operations research skills.  From the press release:

Working with more than 4,000 consultants dedicated to this effort will be experts from IBM Research’s world renowned laboratories with more than 200 mathematicians and advanced analytics experts. The company also made significant investments in Services Research for the past 10 years to build technologies and intellectual property that optimize new services offerings — all culminating in this new consulting practice in support of IBM’s Smarter Planet strategy, which recognizes the need for improved business insight.

I did work with PwC before it was acquired, and continued for a period after they became part of IBM. There was a large group of people who really got operations research, and we did some great work for the Internal Revenue Service and the US Postal Service. I am excited that IBM sees the value of operations research (OK, business analytics and optimization) sufficiently to put together such a large group.

This move is very much in keeping with IBMs previous acquisition of ILOG. From the Business Week article:

The consulting business may drive sales for a lot of IBM’s own technologies, as well. The company has built up a strong position in business analytics software in recent years, partly through acquisitions. In 2007 it paid $5 billion for Canada’s Cognos, a leader in business intelligence. Last year, IBM broke into business-process optimization with a $340 million acquisition of ILOG, a French company.

This is an exciting move, and I think it will have a significant effect on how the sort of mathematics we do is used in industry.

Added 3:15PM ET, April 14. Be sure to check out the IBM site for the new initiative. With people like Brenda Dietrich and Bill Pulleyblank involved, I think it is safe to assume that operations research is going to have a big role.

NSF on Twitter

Following up on my issues with twitter, (like why?), the National Science Foundation has its own twitter account.  What a great way to get word out about all the great stuff the NSF does!  This is something professional societies (like INFORMS) should emulate.  I don’t think my own life is interesting enough for an hour by hour update, but NSF is certainly interesting to follow.

Are USENET groups irrelevant?

Long before the web, there was Usenet, an internationally distributed discussion system.  Through Usenet, people could discuss topics of interest, with topics  organized in a shallow tree structure.  In the pre-web days, it was exciting to talk to people around the world, back at a time where even having an email address was not to be assumed.  In a world where technical reports were distributed by mail (I remember the excitement when the batch of orange covered reports from the researchers from the University of Maryland arrived, since they sent out their work en masse), the immediacy of Usenet was startling.

Usenet, at the time, had strong self-enforced rules (Usenet has no central server, and no owner):  no commercial postings, no binaries in non-binaries groups (without the web, distributing software was more difficult, though ftp existed for that), no off-topic messages.

In 1993, Mohan Sodhi (then a doctoral student at UCLA) went through the arduous process of creating the newsgroup sci.op-research (see the google archive), which began with the charter:

The Charter:

The main purpose of this group is to act as the umbrella group from which different O.R. interest groups will branch off in the future, as envisioned by the Technology Committee of the ORMS Board.

In the interim, the newsgroup will support the RESEARCH, APPLICATION and TEACHING of operations research through the unmoderated exchange of information through various activities including:

(RESEARCH AND APPLICATION)
— Posting information about accepted papers
— Asking questions and posting summaries of replies
— Posting Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and other lists such as
-Ajay Shah’s list of Free C/C++ programs for numerical methods
-Arthur Geoffrion’s list of mail reflectors relevant to O.R.
-John Gregory’s FAQ on LP
Those interested in a particular area could bring out regular FAQs answering questions or likely questions from those new to their area.
— Posting information about ARCHIVES (e.g. those at Rutgers, Bilkent)
(TEACHING)
— Sharing teaching approaches
— Announcement of new textbooks; Discussion on existing textbooks
(APPLICATION)
— New product announcements
— Users’ impressions of commercial software (No advertisements.)
(OTHER)
— JOB announcements in universities and industry

The newsgroup became reasonably popular, generating 100-200 messages per month, almost all on topic.  I have read the newsgroup since its beginnings, and posted perhaps 10 times per year on average.

Over time, the strength of the unmoderated, free flowing discussion in newsgroups such as sci.op-research became a drawback.  Popular newsgroups attracted spam and cranks.  “Trolls” came, whose sole goal was to start a flame war with outrageous posts.  Usenet, in short, became a seedy backwater of the internet, with its role taken over by blogs, discussion forums, and other more organized structures on the web.

sci.op-research avoided the worst of this, since we were not big enough to attract much attention.  I had my problems with some of the discussion.  Some was uncivil in my view (“How can you possibly be teaching this if you know so little!”) and some was just annoying (“Can you answer this homework question please” or, worse, “The answer to that obvious homework problem is 6”).  But there was enough information there to make it worthwhile both to read and to post the occasional question, answer, or announcement.

When I redesigned this blog, I included a feed for the sci.op-research (and comp.constraints) newsgroups in the right column, doing my little bit to point people to the discussion (it is a sign of my age that I even know what Usenet is:  I think the under 30 crowd has no idea about it).  But I had to take it down:  the newsgroup is currently getting porn ads, two or three per day, which I would prefer not to be posting (my Dad reads this blog!), along with an incessant set of ads for “instructor’s manuals” for courses.

I think sci.op-research still could play a role:  where else do you go to ask a question of a large groups of people (google suggests a readership of 1123)?  But, outside of a few diehards, it doesn’t seem like much of a community, a feel it very much had in the mid-1990s.  With no central structure to do things like get rid of spam, it seems hard to envision a future for it.  Can it survive, or are we looking at the end of one form of interaction?

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.

Closed Loop Supply Chains

There is a new paper on the OR Forum by Dan Guide and Luk Van Wassenhove that looks at the research trajectory of “Closed Loops Supply Chains”.  Closed loop supply chains are supply chains where there is at least as much interest in getting things from the customer to the supplier as vice versa.  Sometimes the drive for this is environmental (think European electronics laws to try to reduce metals in the refuse system) and some is economic (think of a printer manufacturer getting back used cartridges to try to cut down on the refill market, or firms that restore used items for further sale).  Luk and Dan’s paper is a nice, personal, view of the research that has gone on in the last years.

For about eight years (1997-2005), I headed up the Carnegie Bosch Institute.  Part of what we did was sponsor conferences and workshops on emerging topics in international management.  One of our success stories was early support for closed loop supply chains (or reverse logistics).  I am really pleased to see how the field has developed.

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.

Much more on the NCAA Tournament

In the hyper-competitive world of operations research blogging, needing to teach a class can put you hopelessly behind.  The Blog-OR-sphere is abuzz with pointers to the CNN article on computer models for predicting success in the upcoming NCAA tournament featuring Joel Sokol (see the video here).  See the blog entry at Punk Rock Operations Research as well as previous entries by me and Laura on LRMC (Logistic Regression/Markov Chain) and Laura’s article on the work of Sheldon Jacobson and Doug King.  We previously saw Sheldon in articles on predicting the US Presidential election.

Getting back to the CNN article, it is a good illustration on how hard it is to write about models:

At their cores, the computer models all operate like question machines, said Jeff Sagarin, who has been doing computer ratings for USA Today since 1985.

Different people come up with different brackets because they’re asking different questions.

Sagarin’s equations ask three questions: “Who did you play, where did you play and what was the result of each specific game?” The computer keeps repeating those questions in an “infinite loop” until it comes up with a solid answer, he said.

Sagarin has arranged the formula as such partly because he thinks home-court advantage is a big deal in college basketball.

Other models ask different questions or give the questions different weights. Sokol, of Georgia Tech, for example, cares more about the win-margin than where the game was played.

Well… kinda.  It is not that Joel has a philosophical belief in win-margin versus home court.  It is simply that his models include win-margin and the resulting predictions are more accurate because they do so.  Joel didn’t go in and say “Win margin is more important than home court”:  it is the accuracy of the resulting predictions that gives that result.  Some of his models don’t include win margin at all!

I also loved the quote:

Dan Shanoff, who blogs on sports at danshanoff.com, said gut feeling is more important than statistics, but taking a look at the numbers can never hurt.

Followup question:  “So how do you know that gut feeling is more important than statistics, Dan?”.  Reponse (presumably): “Well, it is really my gut feeling, you know, since I really haven’t looked at the numbers”. [Followup added:  Dan isn’t sure he really said what he was quoted as saying.]

Be sure to check out Laura and me, and any other OR people twittering the tournament with tag #ncaa-or, starting noon Thursday.

Tweeting the Tournament

Following up on a post from Punk Rock Operations Research, let’s use a hashtag for OR people twittering about the tournament.  I think “#ncaa-or” should work nicely.  Follow that tag at http://search.twitter.com or directly here.  And start your tweets with #ncaa-or if you want to be part of the group. Thanks to twitterers hakmem and nanoturkiye for instructions on how to set this up!

Are you ready for some College Basketball?

Joel Sokol, Paul Kvam, and George Nemhauser have a ranking called LRMC (Logistic Regression/Markov Chain) for college basketball.  This weekend is when the NCAA selects teams for its championship.  You can check out the current rankings to see whether your favorite team deserves to be in the tournament.  And, once the bracket is published, LMRC provides a guideline for predicting who will win each game.  In the past, LRMC has done very well, but I am still going to go with Pittsburgh over UNC, despite the rankings.