Geeks do good; warm and fuzzy; math into cash

The INFORMS archive of podcasts continues to offer provocative conversation with leading O.R. practitioners and thinkers. It includes recent interviews about fighting cancer with Georgia Tech’s Eva K. Lee (see page 20) and new forecasting methods with Warren Lieberman, the INFORMS vice president for IT. Visit www.scienceofbetter.org and www.informs.org to download the latest selections.

Discoveries and Breakthroughs Inside Science (DBIS), the joint program developed with funding from the National Science Foundation, continues to offer INFORMS members the chance to bring their research to the television and computer screen. Share your important research! The newest INFORMS contribution was a Yale Management School project that made physicians’ offices more efficient. Visit the INFORMS Newsroom at www.informs.org and follow the easy steps to explaining your work to DBIS editors.

Remember to share your news making research with the INFORMS Communications Department. Contact INFORMS Communications Director Barry List at [email protected] or 1-800-4INFORMs.

And now, the news:

Geeks Make a Difference

“I’m on my way home from the INFORMS Practice Conference in Orlando. A subtitle for it might be ‘Geeks who make a difference.’ ...

“It’s a great conference if you want evidence that analytics matter to performance. There are literally dozens of examples of the use of O.R. in business and government. Every year at the conference a prize is awarded to the most outstanding example of O.R. practice; this year the winner was Indeval, a Mexicobased securities settlement processor. The highlight for me of the awards dinner was sitting next to Tom Cook, who not only pioneered a lot of O.R. work in the airline industry, but also realized the need to market O.R. and led the campaign called ‘The Science of Better.’ ”

– Tom Davenport blog, IIA, April 20

Mexico’s Indeval Wins INFORMS Edelman Award

“The application of operations research and analytics to speedily processing complex securities transactions allowed Mexico’s Indeval to win the 2010 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences at a banquet sponsored by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) in Orlando last night.”

– Baltimore Business Journal, April 20

Career Profile: Humanitarian Logistics

“Until recently, humanitarian aid organizations have relied largely on ‘pure intuition’ when deciding on the best course of action, says Begoña Vitoriano Villanueva, an associate professor in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain. She is aiming to change that. Working with colleagues, the 42-year-old Vitoriano is designing computer tools to support humanitarian aid organizations in their disaster interventions. The project, which she started four years ago, combines her work as a university researcher and teacher with her concern about social inequalities between the developed and the developing worlds.”

– Science Magazine, April 16

Grand Design to Combat Malaria

Philip Eckhoff and Karima Nigmatulina don’t need to be working in this drab concrete building tucked away in an office park in Bellevue, Wash., a place where cloudy days outnumber sunny ones and where the only perks are the once-a-week pizza lunch and free snacks from Costco. In fact, they could probably be working anywhere. Nigmatulina is 25 years old and already has a Ph.D. from MIT in operations research. Eckhoff, 27, has a Ph.D. in math from Princeton and was a Hertz Foundation fellow, an honor bestowed on the nation’s top graduate students in science and engineering. So why aren’t they making big bucks on Wall Street or down in Silicon Valley, trying to get rich at some startup?

“The answer sounds corny, but it isn’t: they’re here because they want to do something important.”

– Newsweek, April 9

7 Steps to Advanced Analytics

“In 1911, Fredrick Winslow Taylor published ‘The Principles of Scientific Management,’ which spawned the academic field of Operations Research/Management Science (OR/MS). This is an awkward term, to be sure, so today’s practitioners increasingly refer to the field using the simpler term “analytics.”

– Intelligent Enterprise, April 5

Turning Math into Cash

Five years ago, [former INFORMS President] Brenda Dietrich started to investigate how IBM’s 40,000 salespeople could learn to rely a little more on math than on their gut instincts. In particular, Dietrich, who heads the company’s 200-person worldwide team of math researchers, was asked to see if math could help managers do a better job of setting sales quotas. She assigned three mathematicians at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., to work on new techniques for predicting how much business the company could get from a given customer.

“The mathematicians collected several years’worth of data about every sale IBM made around the world ...

“The two-year project had a tremendous payoff for IBM. The corporate controller concluded that it generated $1 billion in additional sales through 2008, the year after the team finished its work, says Dietrich, a 50-year-old Ph.D.with a sneaking suspicion that the world would work better if it were run by mathematicians.”

– Technology Review, March/April 2010

Student Modeling Winners from Montana

“Governor Brian Schweitzer met Monday with Carroll College students Brittany Harris and Chase Peaslee, who were two of a three-student team that won top ranking in the 12th annual Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling (ICM). The team was named the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) winner.”

– Helena Independent Record, April 13

Small Canadian Firm is Edelman Co-Finalist

“The excitement is building at a local software company as they count down the days when a winner will be picked in a worldwide competition.

“Remsoft Inc.’s software, Remsoft Analytics, is among six finalists for the Franz Edelman award, the Olympics of competition in operations research.

“The winner will be announced by the prestigious Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) on April 19 in Orlando, Fla.

“They may not end up with the gold but their software program is already a winner said company co-CEO Andrea Feunekes. “ ‘Very few Canadians have even been a finalist. So for a small company in a small province, it’s really quite a big thing,’ said Feunekes.”

– New Brunswick Business Journal, March 18

In Business O.R. is easy; the Warm, Fuzzy Stuff is Hard

“My thinking was: I’m a natural leader, so I’m going to study what’s hard and mathematical like finance and operations research, not the touchy-feely stuff that would be easy.

“When I finally got a management position, I found out how hard it is to lead and manage people. The warm, fuzzy stuff is hard. The quantitative stuff is easy – you either don’t do much of this as a manager or you have people working for you to do it.”

– Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of Alltop, in interview with New York Times, March 19