O.R. IN THE NEWS

Complied by Barry List

The INFORMS archive of podcasts continues to offer provocative conversation with leading O.R. practitioners and thinkers. It includes recent interviews with Columbia University Professor Emanuel Derman on models (financial models, that is) behaving badly and O.R. legend Al Blumstein on when employers can feel safe offering jobs to ex-offenders. Visit www.scienceofbetter.org and www.informs.org to download the latest selections.

Remember to share your news-making research with the INFORMS Communications Department. Contact INFORMS Communications Director Barry List at barry.list@informs.org or 1-800-4INFORMs.

And now, the snippets from the news:

Intermodal: Asset optimization tops 2012 priorities

“Fleet and scheduling optimization were named the highest priorities for 2012 by 44 percent of intermodal industry executives who participated in a pulse survey conducted during the IANA Expo by Princeton Consultants, an IT and management consulting firm that specializes in transportation solutions and services.”

– Princeton Consulting, Jan. 11

Paying a price, long after the crime

“A stunning number of young people are arrested for crimes in America, and those crimes can haunt them for the rest of their lives.”

(Listen to Al Blumstein’s podcast at www.scienceofbetter.org/podcast.)

– New York Times op/ed by former INFORMS President Al Blumstein, Jan. 10

Edelman finalist: TNT Express

“TNT Express has been shortlisted as a finalist at the 2012 Franz Edelman Award for its successful application of operations research in network optimization. The company uses operations research (applied mathematics for decision making) to analyze and enhance its transportation networks, resulting in more efficient routes and lower mileage. This has allowed TNT Express to save costs, improve service to customers and develop managers’ skills.”

– Logistics Week, Jan. 9

Data crunching and the presidential election

“In July, KDNuggets.com, an online newsite focused on data mining and analytics software, ran an unusual listing in its jobs section.

“ ‘We are looking for Predictive Modeling/Data Mining Scientists and Analysts, at both the senior and junior level, to join our department through November 2012 at our Chicago Headquarters,’ read the ad. ‘We are a multi-disciplinary team of statisticians, predictive modelers, data mining experts, mathematicians, software developers, general analysts and organizers – all striving for a single goal: re-electing President Obama.’

“The job listing caught the attention of Alex Lundry, a Republican data-mining expert at TargetPoint Consulting...”

– CNN, Oct. 9, 2011

O.R. speeds up airport security lines

“Listen to Harvey Mudd College’s Academic Minute on WAMC-FM, the Albany, N.Y., affiliate of National Public Radio, in the Academic Minute section of http://www.wamc.org/.

– WAMC Academic Minute, Dec. 21, 2011

Analytics to have another good year

“The new year will bring plenty of splashy stories about iPads and IPOs. There is a more important theme gathering around us: How analytics harvested from massive databases will begin to inform our day-to-day business decisions. Call it Big Data, analytics or decision science. Over time, this will change your world more than the iPad 3.

“Computer systems are now becoming powerful enough, and subtle enough, to help us reduce human biases from our decision-making. And this is a key: They can do it in real-time. Inevitably, that ‘objective observer’ will be a kind of organic, evolving database.”

– Wall Street Journal, Jan. 4

IDC: Analytics to have another strong year

“Research firm IDC is more bullish, estimating that worldwide IT spending will grow 6.9 percent year over year to $1.8 trillion in 2012. A healthy chunk of spending – as much as 20 percent, IDC says – will be driven by a handful of technologies that are reshaping the IT industry: smartphones, media tablets, mobile networks, social networking and big data analytics.”

– CIO, Jan. 3

Optimizing flu vaccines

“Deciding the composition of the yearly flu vaccine in time to produce sufficient quantities is a complex balancing act. Deciding too soon means the vaccine will have negligible impact on an evolving strain of the flu. Deciding too late results in delayed distribution of the drug – an inconvenience for many people, but potentially life-threatening for the elderly and others with chronic illnesses.

“In response to this dilemma, a group of University of Pittsburgh researchers from several disciplines have developed a powerful optimization method that balances the competing needs of composition decision-making and timing. Doctors Oleg Prokopyev and Andrew Schaefer from the school’s engineering faculty and co-authors Osman Ozaltin and Mark Roberts, professors in the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Health Policy and Management have published results of their research in the September-October issue of Operations Research.

Emax Health, Dec. 27, 2011

The Traveling Politician Problem

“Politicians have always been heavy travelers, but recent news out of Iowa takes the notion of hitting the campaign trail to new extremes.

“Rick Santorum has toured all 99 counties and he is back crisscrossing the state.

“Thursday is day seven of Michele Bachmann’s own 99-county tour. She plans to cover the state in 10 days, with time off for Christmas.

“Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich each announced 44-city bus tours leading up to the January caucuses.

“Not to be left out, Mitt Romney announced on Tuesday that he would begin his three-day tour on Dec. 28.

“With all this movement, we thought we might lend a hand and offer a suggestion for saving time and gasoline.”

– William Cook, New York Times blog,
Dec. 21, 2011

Analytics: The widening divide

“In this second joint MIT Sloan Management Review and IBM Institute for Business Value study, we see a growing divide between those companies that, on one side, see the value of business analytics and are transforming themselves to take advantage of these newfound opportunities, and, on the other, that have yet to embrace them. Using insights gathered from more than 4,500 managers and executives, ‘Analytics: The Widening Divide’ identifies three key competencies that enable organizations to build competitive advantage using analytics. Further, the study identifies two distinct paths that organizations travel while gaining analytic sophistication, and provides recommendations to accelerate organizations on their own paths to analytic transformation.”

– Sloan Management Review, Nov. 7, 2011

O.R. part of new Cornell NYC Tech campus

“Cornell University has won the bid to build the big new technology campus on Roosevelt Island that New York City has been looking to create. The plan is to foster a strong technology ecosystem by bringing in lots of talented technical people and have them focus on building innovative businesses on top of the traditional industries in the city...

“Daniel Huttenlocher: ‘Academically, we’re looking at shifting away from traditional university campus disciplines. There’ll be key disciplines involved – computer science, electrical engineering, operations research, applied math – but those disciplines need to be in the context of other disciplines where tech is being applied. . . . hubs that combine tech and other fields. In media, for instance, there are relevant areas of the social sciences, like sociology and psychology.’ ”

– Bizboxusa.com, Dec. 19, 2011

Intel and the Wagner Prize

“The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) recently announced the award of the Daniel H. Wagner Prize to Evan Rash and Karl Kempf of Intel’s Decision Engineering Group.

Rash and Kempf are responsible for decision engineering at Intel and won the prize for their use of analytics and operations research so that the right products are delivered at the right time for customers while efficiently managing resources and costs.

– ZDNet, Dec. 19, 2011

Citizen scientists analyze own health data

“Today, Ms. Terry is part of a growing movement to unlock medical secrets by empowering patients to gather, control and even analyze their own health data. For some people, that means posting detailed personal information, family histories and genetic test results online for all to see. Others may decide to make public only limited information or to grant access exclusively to researchers who agree to share the results of their studies.

“Members of this loose collective of amateurs, who call themselves ‘health hackers’ and ‘citizen scientists,’ also perform their own analyses and use the Internet to create and run experiments and clinical trials.”

– Wall Street Journal, Dec. 3, 2011

Wagner finalist helps aquarium dolphin exhibit

“More than 1,800 visitors can move smoothly through the Georgia Aquarium’s new AT&T Dolphin Tales exhibit, entering and leaving through the same set of doors. Their experience is not by accident though – before the exhibit opened, logistics experts at the Georgia Institute of Technology carefully studied how guests would move and recommended ways to improve their experiences while minimizing congestion.

“We offered Georgia Aquarium leaders accurate predictions on how the new AT&T Dolphin Tales exhibit would impact guest flow within the aquarium and how to optimize the operations logistics, efficiency and show schedules for the new exhibit,” says Eva K. Lee, a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech . . .

“This logistics research project is one of six finalists for the 2011 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice, which is given by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).”

– Newswise, Nov. 14, 2011

Schneider National, INFORMS Prize winner, on how they use O.R. & IT

“ ‘We’re part of an engineering group within the IT part of the company and we subdivide into three of four different teams, some of whom are more mathematician, statistician types … The discipline that captures a lot of what we do is called operations research and it’s kind of related to industrial engineering. There are people who work on very specific engineering problems for customers.’ ”

– Green Bay Gazette, Nov. 14, 2011

Bucknell’s Matt Bailey on O.R. and healthcare

“ ‘Healthcare operations research is about examining processes in, for example, a hospital, and looking at how efficient a system is in placing patients where they need to be when they need to be there. It is about reducing waste and eliminating steps, such as nurses rechecking orders or patients waiting for test results or being stuck in the emergency department because there are not enough available beds. Operations research is not about dictating how clinicians should practice; it is about setting up a system where resources are used as efficiently as possible. Operations improvements have actually been tied to health improvements. If you have a patient waiting six or seven hours to move from the emergency department to a regular bed, that can result in a longer stay for the patient at the hospital, which is tied to adverse health outcomes.’ ”

– Bucknell University, Nov. 10, 2011

Barry List ((barry.list@informs.org) is the director of communications for INFORMS.