{"id":1037,"date":"2010-02-08T17:21:17","date_gmt":"2010-02-08T21:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=1037"},"modified":"2010-02-08T17:21:17","modified_gmt":"2010-02-08T21:21:17","slug":"reading-material-while-snowed-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2010\/02\/08\/reading-material-while-snowed-in\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Material While Snowed In"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> We had a record (21 inch) snowfall on Friday night, if you consider the 4th biggest snowfall of all time (since the 1860s) a record.\u00a0 Since then, our city seems to be trying to turn this into our own little Katrina, showing very little planning or execution in getting the city back in working order.\u00a0 City schools are closed and our street has yet to see a plow.\u00a0 Once a car is painfully extracted from its snow cocoon, a curious Pittsburgh rite begins:\u00a0 the placement of the kitchen chair.\u00a0 Since the city is unable to actually remove any snow (it only pushes it around a bit), no on-street parking spaces are cleared except laboriously by hand.\u00a0 Since it would be manifestly unfair for someone else to use the vacated spot, a kitchen chair is the accepted marker for “If you take this spot, I will curse you and your children and let the air out of your tires”.\u00a0 Coincidentally,\u00a0 I have my property tax check waiting to go in the mail.\u00a0 What exactly am I getting for this high charge?<\/p>\n

Anyhow, enough of the rant.\u00a0 Being snowed in (for three days and counting, and furthermore…. OK, …calm) allows me to read my favorite issue of my favorite journal.\u00a0 The January-February 2010 Interfaces<\/em> is now available<\/a>, and we all know what that means:\u00a0 the Edelman Papers!\u00a0 The Edelman<\/a>, of course, is INFORMS big prize for the practice of operations research.\u00a0 Every year, a few dozen nominees get whittled down to a half dozen finalists.\u00a0 These finalists then prepare a fancy presentation, ideally involving a Cxx for suitably impressive xx.\u00a0 They also put together a paper describing their work.\u00a0 This is then published in the January-February of Interfaces.<\/p>\n

I was a judge in the last competition, so I know the work of the finalists very well.\u00a0 But it is inspiring to read the final versions of their papers.\u00a0 I have a course on the applications of operations research that I teach to our MBAs and Edelman papers are generally a highlight of their readings.<\/p>\n

In the 2009 competition, the finalists were:<\/p>\n

CSX Railway Uses OR to Cash In on Optimized Equipment Distribution<\/em>
\nMichael F. Gorman, Dharma Acharya, David Sellers<\/p>\n

HP Transforms Product Portfolio Management with Operations Research<\/em>
\nDirk Beyer, Ann Brecht, Brian Cargille, Russ Chadinha, Kathy Chou, Gavin DeNyse, Qi Feng, Cookie Pad, Julie Ward, Bin Zhang, Shailendra Jain, Chris Fry, Thomas Olavson, Holger Mishal, Jason Amaral, Sesh Raj, Kurt Sunderbruch, Robert Tarjan, Krishna Venkatraman, Joseph Woods, Jing Zhou<\/p>\n

Operations Research Improves Sales Force Productivity at IBM<\/em>
\nRick Lawrence, Claudia Perlich, Saharon Rosset, Ildar Khabibrakhmanov, Shilpa Mahatma, Sholom Weiss, Matt Callahan, Matt Collins, Alexey Ershov, Shiva Kumar<\/p>\n

Marriott International Increases Revenue by Implementing a Group Pricing Optimizer<\/em>
\nSharon Hormby, Julia Morrison, Prashant Dave, Michele Meyers, Tim Tenca<\/p>\n

Norske Skog Improves Global Profitability Using Operations Research<\/em>
\nGraeme Everett, Andy Philpott, Kjetil Vatn, Rune Gjessing<\/p>\n

Zara Uses Operations Research to Reengineer Its Global Distribution Process<\/em>
\nFelipe Caro, J\u00e9r\u00e9mie Gallien, Miguel D\u00edaz, Javier Garc\u00eda, Jos\u00e9 Manuel Corredoira, Marcos Montes, Jos\u00e9 Antonio Ramos, Juan Correa<\/p>\n

Any one of them could have been the winner: I really liked all of the work. HP ended up winning(now that I see the author’s list, they certainly had the numbers on their side!). I get to judge again this year, and am once again looking forward to doing that.<\/p>\n

So, back to the hot chocolate and the fuming about municipal services… hmmmm… I wonder if I can convince our mayor to use a bit more operations research?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We had a record (21 inch) snowfall on Friday night, if you consider the 4th biggest snowfall of all time (since the 1860s) a record.\u00a0 Since then, our city seems to be trying to turn this into our own little Katrina, showing very little planning or execution in getting the city back in working order.\u00a0 … Continue reading “Reading Material While Snowed In”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,32,44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-informs","category-journals","category-prizes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}