Bjarni Kristjansson

Biographical Profile

President and Owner, Maximal Software, Inc., Arlington, Virginia; Maximal Software, Ltd., London, UK; Maximal Hugbunadur Ehf., Reykjavik, Iceland

Education 

B.S. Degree, Computer Science 1990, University of Iceland

Professional Experience

Founder and President since 1987 of Maximal Software, a company operating in three different countries, which specializes in the development of software for optimization modeling; The principal software developer for Maximal Software’s two main products: the MPL Modeling System, a model development tool that seamlessly integrates algebraic modeling language with optimization solvers and relational databases; and the OptiMax Component Library, which allows optimization models to be easily embedded into real-world end-user applications.  Maintains also the open-source project CoinMP (LP/MIP solver library), hosted with COIN-OR. Recent research areas include integration of optimization modeling with various new programming languages and systems, such as Python and Matlab.

INFORMS / ORSA / TIMS Activities

Member: INFORMS/ORSA/TIMS (1988-present), Member: ICS, CPMS, Optimization Society, WINFORMS CSTS Secretary / Treasurer (1997-2000). Attended every INFORMS/ ORSA/TIMS General/Annual/Practice conference since 1988. INFORMS Practice Conferences 2003-2008 (Advisory Council); INFORMS International Conference Puerto Rico 2007 (Program Committee, Practice Co-Chair); INFORMS Computing Society (ICS) Conference Charleston 2009 (General Co-Chair); INFORMS CORS International Conference Toronto 2009 (Practice Co-Chair); INFORMS-ALIO Interna-tional Conference 2010 (Practice Program Co-Chair); INFORMS Annual Conference, Austin, Texas 2010 (CPMS Practice Cluster Chair); INFORMS Current Vice President of Information Technology, 2011-2012.

Other Professional Activities

Member: CORS–Canadian OR Society, OR Society–UK OR Society, ICORS –Icelandic OR Society, DORS–Danish OR Society, GOR–German OR Society, ROADEF–French OR Society, AIRO–Italian OR Society ICORS–Icelandic OR Society: Treasurer 1988-1992; COIN-OR Strategic Leadership Board (SLB) 2004-2006; EURO XXI Conference 2006, Reykjavik, Iceland–Organizing Committee; EURO–European Association of Operational Research Societies: Vice President 3 (Practice) 2008-2009; EURO Conferences: Prague 2007, Bonn 2009, and Lisbon 2010–Stream Organizer (Software/Practice); IFORS Conference 2011, Melbourne, Australia–Program Committee.

Position Statement

I was greatly honored to be elected for my first term 2011-2012 as the Vice President of Information Technology for INFORMS.  The IT Committee for INFORMS has already done a lot of planning and laid the groundwork for several new IT initiatives and projects, which are now ready to go into implementation.  Based on this work, IT was selected, along with Analytics, as a new Strategic Priority for INFORMS by the Board, and a new IT Director was hired by INFORMS. If elected for the second term, there are two main areas where we in the IT Committee will be concentrating our efforts:

First, we will work to provide continuing support for ongoing development of existing IT systems. INFORMS has implemented several IT systems that are critical to the society: INFORMS Online, which is based on the content management system eZ-Publish; Association Anywhere, which hosts our association management and membership database; Publications Online, our web-based journal publishing system with HighWire; and eMeetings, the Conference Management System, which deals with abstract submission for our conferences. While these systems generally perform quite well individually, there is clearly a need for ongoing development and more integration among the systems to enhance the user experience.

Second, we will continue work on moving INFORMS into the 21st century, by setting up the IT infrastructure to bring Web 2.0 technologies to our members.  This includes greater reliance upon social networks and blogs, tightly integrated with sharing of documents, presentations, videos, and pictures. Our goal should be to create live active online communities for O.R. people everywhere.