INFORMS News: Roundtable report: mobile computing
– By Pete Buczkowski
“Mobile Computing” was the theme of the Roundtable winter meeting held at Innisbrook Resort near Tampa, Fla., Feb. 19-20.
The meeting began with a social activity on Sunday afternoon. Those among the group who professed to have or wished to acquire culinary aptitude participated in an interactive cooking class with one of the resort chefs. The task at hand was to construct the resort’s famous short rib spring rolls. While the visual aesthetics of the group’s handiwork was somewhat variable, the results were uniformly delicious. Earlier in the day, two foursomes attacked one of the resorts championship golf courses. While there was some initial concern regarding the somewhat lofty green fees, by the end of the round, there was consensus that, when recalibrated on a cost-per-stroke basis, the cost turned out to be surprisingly reasonable.
The formal meeting began Sunday evening with a presentation from John Kenney from the Toyota InfoTechnogology Center. Kenney spoke about current research and innovation being carried out by a consortium of automobile manufacturers that will allow cars to communicate in a peer-to-peer fashion to greatly enhance safety, reduce environmental impact and make driving more enjoyable. The program continued Monday morning with Ted Gifford, Roundtable member from Schneider National, describing his company’s new in-cab computing platform which supports automated driver workflow, safety monitoring and predictive risk analysis, in addition to navigation and communication functions.
The next speaker, Kate Brass, leader of the Ecomagination Initiative at GE Energy, provided insight into how mobile technologies are enabling step-level improvements in the design, construction, performance and on-going maintenance and repair of electric power grids. Following Brass, Tico Ballagas of Nokia Research showcased some fascinating new devices, exhibiting a novel interplay between traditional books and state-of-the-art digital paradigms, to facilitate learning and social interaction between small children and remote family members.
After lunch, Roundtable member and Wayne State Professor Ken Chelst described the pioneering work for which he was honored with the 2011 INFORMS President’s Award. The work includes development and deployment of material to introduce operations research into the mathematics curriculum at the high school level, as well as policy and operational analysis to guide police, fire and emergency leaders through difficult budget and resource challenges. Next, David Becerra, vice president for strategy at Mellmo, addressed the challenges associated with delivering useful business intelligence to the small form factors of mobile devices. Becerra demonstrated a novel tool suite and provided insight into emerging best practices.
Following an afternoon break, Fabrice Hoerner from the technical marketing group at QUALCOMM, shared his perspectives on the “Internet of things,” describing advance mobile technologies and applications that enable enriched, real-time interactions between people and their environment; e.g., homes, cars, public spaces. The day’s final speaker was Anand Ranganathan of the IBM Watson Research Center. Ranganathan provided an interesting loop back to John Kelley’s earlier discussion of the connected vehicle. Ranganathan described a prototype system, newly deployed in Stockholm, Sweden, that generates dynamic, multi-faceted views of transportation information using real-time data from a grid of road-network sensors and vehicle GPS data, thus providing a framework for real-time traffic flow optimization.
Although mobile computing is a fast-moving target with new ideas and possibilities emerging almost daily, the conference was successful in capturing a representative snapshot of the topic and incentive for the participants to continue their own research into opportunities afforded to their respective business challenges.
