{"id":1557,"date":"2011-11-09T22:22:15","date_gmt":"2011-11-10T02:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=1557"},"modified":"2011-11-09T22:22:15","modified_gmt":"2011-11-10T02:22:15","slug":"coin-or-cup-2011-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/11\/09\/coin-or-cup-2011-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"COIN-OR Cup, 2011 edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

COIN-OR<\/a> is a project to spur open-source activities in operations research.\u00a0 I am a big supporter of this activity, to the extent that I was part of its Strategic Leadership Board for a term until I did them an even bigger favor by stepping aside for people who could be even better at this than I (not that such people were exactly rare:\u00a0 my time on SLB corresponded to a somewhat over-committed time for me).<\/p>\n

Every year COIN-OR gives out an award called the COIN-OR INFORMS Cup.\u00a0 This year’s winner has just been announced, and I think the committee has made an inspired choice:<\/p>\n

The submission “OpenSolver: Open Source Optimisation for Excel using COIN-OR”, by Andrew Mason and Iain Dunning, has been selected as the winner of the 2011 edition of the COIN-OR INFORMS Cup. OpenSolver is an “Open Source linear and integer optimizer for Microsoft Excel. OpenSolver is an Excel VBA add-in that extends Excel\u2019s built-in Solver with a more powerful Linear Programming solver.” (from http:\/\/opensolver.org<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This year’s award recognizes that lots and lots of people want to use top-notch optimization code, but would like to stay in the world of Excel.\u00a0 The authors of this work (who I am very proud to say come from the University of Auckland (at least in Andrew’s case), where I was a visitor in 2007) have done a great job in integrated the optimization codes from COIN-OR into an easy-to-use interface in Excel.\u00a0 It is a fantastic piece of work (that I blogged about previously<\/a>) and one that I believe does a tremendous amount of good for the world of operations research.\u00a0 If you can model in Excel’s Solver<\/a>, then you can plug in OpenSolver and start using the COIN-OR solvers with no limits on problem size.\u00a0 I am also delighted to see that that they have moved to CPL licensing, rather than GPL, which was my only whine in my original post.<\/p>\n

Congratulations Andrew and Iain.\u00a0 If you would like to celebrate this award, there is a reception to attend, thanks to IBM:<\/p>\n

All entrants and their supporters are welcome to join in the celebration and regale (rile) the prize winners.<\/p>\n

Date: Sunday, November 13
\nTime: 8pm-10pm<\/p>\n

Location: The Fox and Hound
\n330 North Tryon St.
\nCharlotte, NC 28202
\n(Directions: http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/75zhm7k<\/a>)<\/p>\n

The celebration is sponsored by IBM.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Good work by the committee:<\/p>\n

The COIN-OR INFORMS Cup committee:<\/p>\n

Pietro Belotti
\nMatthew Galati
\nR. Kipp Martin
\nStefan Vigerske<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kiwis and open source rule!<\/p>\n

This entry also occurs in the INFORMS Conference blog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

COIN-OR is a project to spur open-source activities in operations research.\u00a0 I am a big supporter of this activity, to the extent that I was part of its Strategic Leadership Board for a term until I did them an even bigger favor by stepping aside for people who could be even better at this than … Continue reading “COIN-OR Cup, 2011 edition”<\/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":[13,28,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences","category-informs","category-open-source"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1557","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=1557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1557\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}