Sloan-Kettering wins 2007 Edelman Award

The Franz Edelman award is the most prestigious award for the practice of operations research, and each year’s competition is hotly contested. Nominees need to spend significant time preparing their presentations and almost all of them end up involving CEOs or other top executives in the firm.

This year, the winner of the Edelman Award is Sloan-Kettering for work entitled “Operations Research Answers to Cancer Therapeutics.” From the announcement

Yesterday was the first time that the association awarded the Edelman prize for a medical treatment. The Sloan-Kettering win demonstrates how operations research and mathematics are increasingly bringing improvements to health care, not only in the areas of policy, finance, and public health but in diagnosis and treatment, as well.

Dr. Marco Zaider, Attending Physicist in Medical Physics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center received the award together with Professor Eva K. Lee, Director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.

The 2007 Franz Edelman Award winner was announced at a special awards banquet during The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) Conference on O.R. Practice in Vancouver. http://meetings.informs.org/Practice07/ The finalists included Coca-Cola Enterprises, Hewlett-Packard, DaimlerChrysler, and the U.S. Coast Guard.

Dr. Lee and Dr. Zaider devised sophisticated optimization modeling and computational techniques to implement an intra-operative 3D treatment planning system for brachytherapy (the placement of radioactive “seeds” inside a tumor) that offers a safer and more reliable treatment.

The real-time intra-operative planning system eliminates pre-operation simulation and post-implant imaging analysis. Based on the range of costs of these procedures, Prof. Lee estimated conservatively that their elimination nationwide could save $450 million a year for prostate cancer care alone.

I am hoping for some press coverage for this (the winning work is very important, as are the contributions of the other finalists), but not much so far (just a couple pickups from health-oriented web sites). Reporters: great opportunity here!

Papers associated with the Edelman finalists will appear in the January-February issue of Interfaces.

Conference Listing Software

One of the things I did with INFORMS Online was put in a system for conference listings.  The system began with some commercial software but I ended up modifying it so much that it is almost unrecognizable.  The system has been very successful (a few hundred OR/MS conferences get added every year, and the upkeep is relatively low).  But the system is buggy (people “losing” their conferences is the most common problem) and I cannot keep reminding myself on how it works in order to debug it.  Further, there are some things we would like (RSS feeds and ical compatibility) that this cannot do.

So I would like a new system.  There is an add on for word-press blogs (like this one) that allows event entry, but it is pretty darn clunky.  I am now experimenting with it on this page (see the right hand column), but I am not crazy about it.  Has anyone seen systems like the one at INFORMS that they like and (even better) have experience with?

Grand Challenges in Engineering

The National Academy of Engineering is soliciting thoughts on “Grand Challenges for Engineering“, setting an agenda for the next 100 years. Of course, such a goal is impossibly ambitious: imagine trying to do such a think in 1907, and come even close to what the last 100 years have achieved (or failed at). But in OR we understand the value of long-term planning with rolling horizons. If we don’t think about where we might want to go, we can’t even take the first step.

What is the role of OR in these Grand Challenges? As a field, we seem to be successful in the details, but less successful in the big picture. Even trying to define “who we are” causes more smoke than light. But we should think big: without the skills and knowledge of those in OR, any problem sufficiently broad and important to justify the title “Grand Challenge” is doomed to failure.

INFORMS President Brenda Dietrich, in her recent OR/MS Today article, talks about getting outside our comfort zone, and her comments really hit home. I am comfortable doing my research, and teaching students. I have gone a bit outside my comfort zone by moving to New Zealand for a year, but am I really stretching myself?

Thinking about Grand Challenges is a good way to get outside your comfort zone. Art Geoffrion and others have put together a wiki for OR people to think about Grand Challenges in Engineering and the role OR has to play. I think it is a great idea to spend some time thinking about the “big picture” and how engineering and OR fits into it. And definitely check out the “Grand Challenges in OR” site!