OR and Air Security

Operations research has been getting a lot of press recently due to a study about the effectiveness of “no-fly” lists in preventing terrorism. Long-time researcher of airline safety, Arnie Barnett along with Harvey Mudd professor Susan Martonosi found, using OR models of course, that it is best to screen all passengers, rather than try to pre-screen so-called safe passengers. Here are some excerpts from the LA Times:

Operations research is a little-known but valuable tool for such things as scheduling airline flight crews, planning National Football League seasons and even designing waiting lines at Walt Disney World. And in a report released on Monday, it was used to assess the effectiveness of the nation’s security screening of airline passengers.

Using a mathematical model, Susan E. Martonosi, an assistant professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, and Arnold Barnett, a professor of management science at MIT, sought to explore the effectiveness of the “no-fly” lists in preventing terrorism. The conclusions they reached were less remarkable perhaps than the way they evaluated the program.

They found that improving the screening required of all passengers at security checkpoints would do more to enhance security than further refinements to the pre-screening of passengers by no-fly lists.

Here is a presentation on the topic.  Check out your December issue of Interfaces for the full paper, along with a number of other papers on homeland security.

Some sightings from INFORMS Pittsburgh

OK, a “real” blogger would have put together a dozen posts from the Pittsburgh INFORMS Meeting. But I guess I am not, since I am just plain exhausted from the meeting and can’t put together any extended words. Suffice it to say, I thought it was terrific. Some glitches naturally (sorry to those who were in Greentree with insufficient transportation: wish I had a mulligan on that!), but overall I was thrilled about the things we had control over: the plenaries, the receptions, the convention center setup, the scheduling. We had 3780 participants, an all-time record for OR conferences. Thanks to all who made that happen!
A few sightings on the web: the “Practical Communist” has some postings and some absolutely amazing pictures.

Procure IQ has a number of posts on the conference, including a summary of President Mark Daskin’s plenary.

I can’t read David’s Space, but he clearly was at the conference (before heading to Chicago) and also has some great pictures.

OR in Numb3rs

Numb3rs tonight had a plotline involving causing blackouts by selectively destroying substations. At one point, the head nerd looks at a pad of paper and says “These are Dantzig-Wolfe Decompositions; network interdiction strategies. That’s pretty high-end stuff.” A closeup of the pad reveals notes that look a lot like the things lots of us in OR do (albeit I use Dantzig-Wolfe for things like sports schedules). The episode is entitled “Blackout” and the scene occurs about half-way through (1:25 into part 3 of the innertube version). Thanks Gary Lorden for the shout-out to OR! And thanks Brian Borchers for emailing me about this.

Navigating an INFORMS Meeting

Well, the INFORMS Pittsburgh Meeting is about to begin. The weather looks like it will be fine (no hurricanes like in Miami a few years back!). It is cool tonight (Saturday) but should get a bit warmer for most of the meeting.

At the Doctoral Colloquium tonight, INFORMS President Mark Daskin made some good points about navigating an INFORMS Meeting. One point that may not be obvious to first-time attendees is that you are very welcome to leave a session in between talks (it is a bit ruder to leave in the middle of a talk, but that is certainly not uncommon). So if you like presentation 1 of a session, and presentations 2 and 3 of a session three doors down, feel free to leave after the first presentation (typically as presenter 2 fiddles with the technology) and change rooms. It is something everyone knows after a few conferences, but even first-time attendees should do this. A second point is that many people attend tutorials of areas they specialize in. The best use of tutorials is to learn something of an area that is not known to you. I admit I check out tutorials in my area (to make sure they refer to me in appropriately reverential tones), but I am really wasting my time: I should either be attending something new or partaking in social capital activities (like having a drink at the bar with friends old and new). My own talk at the colloquium was on social capital and OR, similar to my EURO talk.
For those attending, enjoy the conference! For those not attending, shame on you, and plan for Seattle next year!

Update November 5

Mark has kindly provided his full

Mark’s Two-Page Guide to Navigating the

INFORMS Meeting

With a focus on first-time attendees

Continue reading “Navigating an INFORMS Meeting”

Happy Birthday to the Blog!

I started this blog on October 26, 2005. Now, after a year (and a couple of days; Ask my family: this is pretty normal for me!), it’s a good time to take stock. I’ve had 92 posts (93 counting this one) in that year, which seems like a reasonable number. The most common tags I have applied are “Applications”, “INFORMS”, and “OR in the Press” (often on the same posting), which matches up with my view that a primary use of the blog is to bring people’s attention to the usefulness of OR.

I’ve had about 8000 visitors to the blog, which seems pretty good. Not up with the big boys (sites like BoingBoing) with millions of visitors, but ahead of lots of sites. The visitors have provided some commentary activity (69 comments, about half from me). I only have eight other blogs linking to me (ranking the blog 316,042 at Technorati) so I need to get the blogrolling thing going better.

It is amazing the amount of spam comments that are generated. My system has protection against such comments (Akismet) and it has caught 2,205 (!) spam comments. Without such a system, it is clearly impossible to run a blog with open comments.
Thanks for reading!

Bloggers and OR

I try to keep up with people in OR who are blogging, but even with sites like technorati, I fear I am missing some. So if you are an OR blogger, don’t hesitate to let me know directly!

On that note, Scholarships around the US is offering a $5,000 scholarship for the best student blog. One requirement:

Your blog must contain unique and interesting information about you and/or things you are passionate about.

Well of course if you are blogging about OR, you are by definition writing about interesting things and you will naturally be passionate! I don’t know anything about this group, but they seem on the up-and-up (the site is certainly 95% useful and 5% ads, rather than the reverse).

Stockholm Prize in Criminology

Carnegie Mellon faculty member and operations researcher Al Blumstein has won this year’s Stockholm Prize in Ciminology, along with Terrie E. Moffitt. According to the prize announcement:

Blumstein’s analyses of the variations in the frequency of offending in careers of active criminals in US jurisdictions have also had a global influence on justice policies and practices, as well as on the rapid increase in the influence of developmental and life-course criminology.

The prize will be awarded in June 2007 (and is worth 1 million Swedish Kroner). Al has been President of all three of ORSA, TIMS, and INFORMS.

Saul Gass at INFORMS

Saul Gass is one of the great people in OR. In celebration of his 80th birthday, friends and colleagues gathered in Maryland in February for a Festschrift. The book of this celebration is coming out from Springer (Amazon link given, since I can’t find it on Springer: buy it at the conference since often they give a conference discount). Saul will be signing the book from 3-4:30 PM Monday November 6 at the INFORMS Meeting. I bet he would sign some of his other books (like The Annotated Timeline with Arjan Assad, his classic Linear Programming: Methods and Applications reprinted by Dover, or if you are particularly well-heeled, his Encyclopedia of Operations Research with the late Carl Harris) if you asked nicely.

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!