O.R. IN THE NEWS

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 Georgia Tech’s Pinar Keskinocak and Julie Swann about humanitarian apps in O.R., University of Toronto’s Alberto Galasso and Boston University’s Timothy Simcoe on the surprising boon gained from overconfident CEO’s, Doug Samuelson on O.R. in the emergency room, Harvard’s Ryan Buell and Michael I. Norton on the pros and cons of waiting online and Michael Rappa on the analytics program at North Carolina State University. 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, selected news clips from the mainstream media:

Beating Science’s Gender Frontier

“At Sasol, a group of women in the science arena, led by Marlize Meyer played a key role in securing a place in the finals for the Franz Edelman award, which led to Sasol winning the INFORMS prize.”

- Gadget, Sept. 5

Schneider National, INFORMS Prize Winner, Keeps Trucking Along

“Bernard Johnson is a trucker and a math problem. From his home in Columbia, S.C., the 49-year-old drives for Schneider National, one of the country’s largest freight haulers. Johnson pulls trailers filled with everything from TVs to toilet paper on as many as 25 trips a month for stretches of up to 500 miles. The Green Bay, Wis., company has to design the most efficient routes for Johnson and 13,000 other drivers. With diesel at $4 a gallon, this is not an equation it can afford to get wrong.

“ ‘It’s like a big jigsaw puzzle,’ says Ted Gifford, an operations research scientist at Schneider.”

- Forbes, Aug. 24

The Traveling Umpire Problem

“The traveling salesman problem is a favorite math conundrum: If a salesman has to visit a bunch of cities, how do you get him to all of them once via the shortest possible route? But the traveling salesman’s predicament pales in comparison to figuring out the best ways to get four-man crews of umpires to every major league baseball game. A research team attacked the problem for the last few years. Their solution appears in Interfaces. It’s a journal of operations research.”

[Michael Trick, Hakan Yildiz and Tallys Yunes, “Scheduling Major League Baseball Umpires and the Traveling Umpire Problem”]

- Scientific American podcast, 60-second science, Aug. 18

Business Schools Plan Leap into Data

“Faced with an increasing stream of data from the Web and other electronic sources, many companies are seeking managers who can make sense of the numbers through the growing practice of data analytics, also known as business intelligence. Finding qualified candidates has proven difficult, but business schools hope to fill the talent gap.
This fall several schools, including Fordham University’s Graduate School of Business and Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, are unveiling analytics electives, certificates and degree programs; other courses and programs were launched in the previous school year.

“International Business Machines Corp., which has invested more than $14 billion buying analytics industry companies such as Coremetrics and Netezza Corp. since 2005, has teamed up with more than 200 schools, including Fordham, to develop analytics curriculum and training.”

- Wall Street Journal, Aug. 4

Redesign U.S. Liver Donor Network?

“A redesign of the nation’s donor-liver distribution network developed by University of Pittsburgh researchers could result in several hundred more people each year receiving the transplants they need. The team reports in the INFORMS journal Management Science that donor livers currently are doled out to 11 national regions that evolved with little regard for geography and demographics, an arrangement that prevents many livers from getting to prospective recipients in time. The Pitt researchers instead trimmed the network down to six regions that better account for urban and rural population differences, geographic distance and the anticipated supply of and demand for donor livers. They calculated that their rearrangement could result in up to 14 percent more transplants each year, a sizable increase considering that more than 6,000 transplants were performed in 2009 alone.”

- Civil Engineering News, Aug. 11

Billion Dollar Rounding Error

“High-speed computers may be taking over stock market trading, but, to the extent that any human traders are left, they may want to check themselves against the findings of a new analysis of trading behavior from 2001 to 2006. When the decimal value of a stock price was one penny below a round number (e.g., .00, .05, .10, .15), there was a surge of buying; when the price was one penny above a round number, there was a surge of selling. This behavior was especially acute around whole numbers. Moreover, traders who bought right below, or sold right above, round numbers incurred losses estimated at around $1 billion per year.”

[Forthcoming in Bhattacharya, U. et al., “Penny Wise, Dollar Foolish: Buy-Sell Imbalances On and Around Round Numbers,” Management Science.]

- Boston Globe, Aug. 7

The Art of Aligning Companies from Head to Toe

“Broadly speaking, optimization today fits into a box known as business process management. In a nutshell, the goal is to make complex judgments and accurate decisions leading to the most optimal ways to run a business, from the mail clerk to the CEO.

“It spans multiple technical fields and travels under names such as operations research, artificial intelligence and advanced analytics, says Steve Sashihara, author of ‘The Optimization Edge: Reinventing Decision Making to Maximize All Your Company’s Assets.’

“Sashihara, president and CEO of Princeton Consultants, a consulting firm specializing in business optimization, says the approach employs mathematics and algorithms packaged with specialized software to sort and organize data. They use it to make recommendations faster and better than humans can.”

- Brian Deagon, Investors Business Daily, July 22

Don’t Just Analyze Our Business, Optimize It

“Major corporations have spent so much on technology over the years that they tend to think their systems are a lot more sophisticated than they really are, argues Steve Sashihara, the CEO of Princeton Consultants, Inc. and the author of ‘The Optimization Edge: Reinventing Decision Making to Maximize All Your Company’s Assets.’ ” (McGraw-Hill, February 2011).

- David F. Carr, Forbes, July 21

Scheduling Baseball Umpires

“Growing up in soccer-crazed Turkey, Hakan Yildiz knew so little about baseball, even the word “umpire” had no meaning to him.

Today, Yildiz, an assistant business professor at Michigan State University, is part of a team of researchers whose complex method for scheduling Major League Baseball umpires has proven so successful the league has used it five of the past six seasons.

“The method – by Yildiz, Michael Trick from Carnegie Mellon University and Tallys Yunes from the University of Miami – will be highlighted in a forthcoming special issue of the research journal Interfaces focusing on sports analytics.”

- Michigan State University, July 20

Consumers Willing to Pay More for Online Privacy

“A new study [published in the INFORMS journal Information Systems Research] shows that people are willing to pay a higher price for the same goods online if the site does a better job of protecting their privacy.”

- Marketplace, July 14