OR/CS Glossary

The Mathematical Programming Glossary explains terms that are specific to the discipline of mathematical programming. A number of the terms also appear in related disciplines such as economics, computer science,and mathematics. The ICS is pleased to host this valuable public service.

ICS member Harvey Greenberg established the Glossary in 1996 after noticing that many common terms in Mathematical Programming were not listed in standard dictionaries of mathematics. Since it receives on the order of 15,000 web hits per day,the Glossary obviously fills a pressing need. Harvey has been enlarging and finetuning the Glossary ever since, but as of June 2006 handed over these duties to new Editor Allen Holder. Harvey continues to be involved in the capacity of Founding Editor. An Advisory Board assists the Editor and Founding Editor.

COIN-OR

The Computational Infrastructure for Operations Research (COIN-OR) project is an initiative to spur the development of open-source software for the operations research community.

Why open source? The Open Source Initiative explains it well. When people can read, redistribute, and modify the source code, software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. The results of open-source development have been remarkable. Community-based efforts to develop software under open-source licenses have produced high-quality, high-performance code---code on which much of the Internet is run.

Why for OR? Consider the following scenario. You read about an optimization algorithm in the literature and you get an idea on how to improve it. Today, testing your new idea typically requires re-implementing (and re-debugging and re-testing) the original algorithm. Often, clever implementation details aren't published. It can be difficult to replicate reported performance. Now imagine the scenario if the original algorithm was publicly available in a community repository. Weeks of re-implementing would no longer be required. You would simply check out a copy of it for yourself and modify it. Imagine the productivity gains from software reuse!

Leading Edge Tutorials

The informal motto for ICS is "INFORMS' Leading Edge for Computation and Technology". Hence it is the responsibility of ICS to report back from the leading edge: what is new and interesting? what is finding novel and unexpected applications? what new techniques are revitalizing old fields? The Leading Edge Tutorials series is our vehicle for bringing this news to INFORMS in an accessible manner. We plan to offer tutorials on topics of current interest at the major INFORMS conferences on an ongoing basis.

Educational Committee

The ICS Education Committee arises from a suggestion by Harvey Greenberg that developing a model curriculum for programs at the Operations Research and Computer Science interface would be beneficial for the development of the field. This was discussed at the ICS Business Meeting in January 2007, and as a result the Chair struck a Committee consisting of interested volunteers to work towards the development of a model OR/CS curriculum.

Membership Committee

ICS chair Robin Lougee-Heimer recently created the ICS Membership Committee and charged it to: (a) identify means of enhancing the society's value to its members and (b) maintain or grow its membership size. ICS has made significant contributions to the OR/CS interface and the committee's mission is to ensure that it continue to flourish and grow. We welcome suggestions, criticisms, and participation from all members and friends.