TODAY'S KEY EVENTS
Plenaries and Keynotes
10-10:50am, Convention Center, West 301A William R. Pulleyblank, United States Military Academy
3:10-4pm, Convention Center, West 101
The Future of High Performance Computing Alan Gara, Intel Corporation
3:10-4pm, Convention Center, West 301A
Manufacturing - Fading or Phoenix? Wallace J. Hopp, University of Michigan
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ADDENDUM TO SCHEDULE
Please click here to download pdf of the addendum for late changes to the printed program.
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REGISTRATION
Registration will be open from 7am-5pm today.
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CONSIDERING APPLYING FOR THE EDELMAN AWARD?
2103 Edelman Prize Chair, Peter Bell, will be at the INFORMS Booth #58 from 10-11am this morning to answer any questions you might have about the awards process.
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EXHIBITS OPEN TODAY 9AM-5PM
You can get into the running to win an iPad2 just by visiting the exhibits. INFORMS will award one iPad during each afternoon coffee break in the Exhibit Hall on Monday and Tuesday. Just follow these easy steps:
- Stop by one of the exhibit booths to pick up a raffle coupon (different color coupon for each day).
- Fill out the coupon and get it stamped by the exhibitor.
- While you're at the booth, give the exhibitor an opportunity to tell you about his or her company's products!
- Place your completed coupon in the raffle bin by 4:15pm.
- Be present when the winning raffle ticket is drawn at 4:15pm.
- You can submit as many coupons as you like, but each must be from a different exhibitor.
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BLOG OF THE DAY
2012 Teaching Effectiveness Colloquium (TEC)
by Patrick Noonan
On Saturday, before the main conference began, the Hyatt was already becoming a busy place. As the site of this year's Combined Colloquia - Future Academicians, Future Practitioners, and Teaching Effectiveness - the lobby and meeting rooms were the gathering spots for a diverse mix of participants and presenters.
As the Chair for this year's Teaching Effectiveness Colloquium, I got my first look at what happens on those pre-meeting Saturdays, and it was a great experience.
In the Teaching Effectiveness Colloquium, our participants represented a wide range of INFORMS members. Some were just finishing their doctorates, others were wrestling with their first real teaching responsibilities, still others were old hands just taking the opportunity to devote a day to reflecting on teaching and learning. Some were from engineering departments, many from business schools; some represented public institutions (including one service academy), others private ones. Collectively we were optimizers, schedulers, decision and risk analysts, statisticians, modelers, and nearly every other flavor of the INFORMS community. Keep reading.
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MONDAY COMMUNITY BUSINESS, RECEPTION, & NETWORKING MEETINGS: ALL WELCOME
Choose the community that is right for you and attend. Members and non-members welcome. H= Hyatt and C= Convention Center
Public Programs, Service & Needs | H - Regency D |
12:30-1:30pm
| Decision Analysis | C - West 102A |
6-7:15pm
| Technology Management | C - West 106B | 6-7:15pm | Analytics Section | C - North 224B | 6:15-7:15pm | Applied Probability | C - West 106A | 6:15-7:15pm | Computing | C - West 105B | 6:15-7:15pm | eBusiness | C - West 106C | 6:15-7:15pm | Financial Services | C - West 105C | 6:15-7:15pm | Health Applications | C - West 104B | 6:15-7:15pm | Military Applications | C - North 231C | 6:15-7:15pm | Multiple Criteria Decision Making | C - West 105A | 6:15-7:15pm | Quality, Statistics & Reliability | C - West 103A | 6:15-7:15pm | Revenue Management & Pricing | C - North 225B | 6:15-7:15pm | Spreadsheet Productivity Research | C - North 227B | 6:15-7:15pm | Transportation Science & Logistics | C - North 229 | 6:15-7:15pm | Women in OR/MS | C - North 228A | 6:15-7:15pm | Behavioral Operations Management | C - West 102B | 7:15-8:15pm | Military Applications Reception | C - North 231C | 7:15-10:15pm |
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TODAY'S CAN'T-MISS SOCIAL EVENTS
COIN-OR Members & Users Meeting - Bag Lunch
12:30-1:30pm, Convention Center, West 212B
Anyone interested in open-source software tools, open standards, and data and model repositories for any aspect of operations research is encouraged to attend this Computational Infrastructure for O.R. (COIN-OR) meeting. Please bring your own lunch and ideas. For more information, visit
www.coin-or.org.
Junior Faculty Interest Group Luncheon
12:30-1:30pm, Offsite - Kincaid's Classic American Restaurant, 2 South Third Street
$25 ($15 students) Tickets are available at INFORMS Registration Desk. No tickets will be sold at the door. The winners of the 2012 JFIG Paper Competition will be presented with awards. All junior faculty are invited to participate. This event gives junior faculty in engineering and business schools the opportunity to discuss career development and exchange ideas. Sponsored by the University of Arkansas and Wichita State University, Dept. of Industrial Engineering.
SPPSN Lunch
12:30-1:30pm, Hyatt, Regency D
$10, SPPSN Section member ($15 nonmember) A limited number of tickets may be available on-site. Go to the INFORMS registration desk for information on availability. No tickets will be sold at the door. This lunch and business meeting is open to members of the INFORMS Section on Public Programs, Service and Needs and also those who are interested in joining the section. Sponsored by Georgia Tech, School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.
INFORMS Analytics Section Business Meeting & Reception
6:15-7:15pm,Convention Center, North 224B
The Analytics Section invites all attendees to participate in the business meeting and reception. Enjoy light refreshments and listen to the officers discuss recent accomplishments of the section. Help chart the course of the future of the section. Sponsored by SAS.
CPMS Isolated Practitioner Workshop & Reception
6:15-7:15pm, Convention Center, North 225A
CPMS, The Practice Section of INFORMS, sponsors this workshop on topics of interest to isolated practitioners, the "lone rangers" of OR/MS. This 29th workshop will address timely issues that affect isolated practitioners. All are welcome to participate. Wine and cheese will be served.
Student Awards Ceremony & Student Reception
Awards Ceremony: 7:30-8pm Reception: 8-9:30pm
Hyatt, Regency A
All students registered for the meeting are invited to attend the first-ever Student Awards Ceremony. The Chapters/Fora Committee will present the winners of the Student Chapter Annual Awards and the Judith Liebman Awards. Join us to recognize the great contributions of our most dynamic student volunteers. Plan to stay for the Student Reception, which immediately follows the ceremony. The reception that follows the Awards Ceremony is open to all students - join us for an evening of food and drink, fun and networking. Come relax after a busy day of sessions and mingle with fellow students from universities around the world. Sponsored by the Seth Bonder Foundation.
Screening of Travelling Salesman Movie
9pm, Hyatt, Regency A
Introduction by William J. Cook, author of In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation and the Concorde TSP app. Sponsored by the INFORMS Computing Society. |
SUBDIVISON AWARDS FOR MONDAY
Computing Society
INFORMS Computing Society Prize
The ICS Prize is an annual award for best English language paper on the OR/CS interface. The award includes a plaque and a $1,000 cash prize. Winners: A. A. Ahmadi, A. Olshevsky, P.A. Parrilo, and J.N. Tsitsiklis INFORMS Computing Society Student Paper Award
The ICS Student Paper Award is given annually to the best paper on computing and operations research by a student author, as judged by a panel of the ICS. The award includes a plaque and a $500 cash prize. Winner: Huashuai Qu Runner-Up: Martin Takac Presented: 6:15pm, Computing Society Business Meeting, Convention Center, West 105B
Decision Analysis Society
Publication Award
This award is given annually to the best decision analysis article or book published in the second preceding calendar year, as judged by a panel of Society members. The award includes a plaque and a $750 cash prize. Winners: Samuel D. Bond, Kurt A. Carlson, and Ralph L. Keeney
Student Paper Competition Award
This award is given annually to the best decision analysis paper by a student author, as judged by a panel of Society members. Student papers need not be sole-authored or first-authored. This award includes a plaque and a $500 cash prize. Winner: Mehmet Ayvaci
Frank P. Ramsey Medal
The Frank P. Ramsey Medal is the highest award of the DAS. It was created to recognize distinguished contributions to the field of decision analysis. The medal is named in honor of Frank Plumpton Ramsey, a Cambridge University mathematician who was one of the pioneers of decision theory in the 20th century. The Ramsey Medalists are recognized for having made substantial further contributions to that theory and its application to important classes of real decision problems. The medal is accompanied by a $1,000 cash prize. Winner: Robert T. Clemen Presented: 6pm, Decision Analysis Society Business Meeting, Convention Center, West 102A
Health Applications Society
Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Health Services
The Bonder Scholarship was created in 2002 to honor the work and commitment of Seth Bonder. The purpose of the Bonder Scholarship in Health Care is to promote the development and application of process modeling and operations research analyses to healthcare design, delivery, and operations. The tenure of the award is one year. The scholarship provides funding of $5,000 to support the development of highly qualified individuals and promote the interchange of health services research knowledge in conjunction with INFORMS. The Bonder Scholarship consists of a grant of $4,000, which is intended to provide financial support for a promising young researcher. In addition, the award winner will be eligible for up to $1,000 of travel funding to support his or her participation in Health Application Section activities at the annual INFORMS conference. INFORMS will waive registration fees for the awardees. Winner: Amin Khademi
Pierskalla Best Paper Award
The Health Applications Section of INFORMS sponsors an annual competition for the Pierskalla Award, which recognizes research excellence in the field of healthcare management science. The award includes a $500 honorarium for the best paper presented in a Health Applications Section-sponsored session at the annual INFORMS conference. The award is named after Dr. William Pierskalla to recognize his contribution and dedication to improving health services delivery through operations research. Dr. Pierskalla is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Anderson School at UCLA and the Ronald A. Rosenfeld Professor Emeritus, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and he serves as an editor on numerous operations research journals. Winners: Vishal Ahuja and John Birge Presented: 6:15pm, Health Applications Section Business Meeting, Convention Center, West 104B
Military Applications Society
2012 Koopman Prize
This Prize was named after Bernard Koopman, a founding father of military operations research. It is awarded for the outstanding publication in military operations research of the previous year. The award includes a plaque and a $500 cash prize. Winner: Greg Parlier
Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Military Applications
The Bonder Scholarship was created in 2002 to honor the work and commitment of Seth Bonder. The purpose of the Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Military Applications is to promote the development and application of process modeling and operations research analyses to military issues. The scholarship provides funding of $5,000 to support the development of highly qualified individuals and promote the interchange of military OR research knowledge in conjunction with INFORMS. The Bonder Scholarship consists of a grant of $4,000 that is intended to provide financial support for a promising young researcher. In addition, the award winner will be eligible for up to $1,000 of travel funding to support his or her participation in Military Application Section activities at the annual INFORMS conference. INFORMS will waive registration fees for awardees. The tenure of the award is one year. Winner: Mehmet Ertem
J. Steinhardt Prize
The J. Steinhardt Prize is sponsored by the CNA Corporation. The prize is awarded for outstanding contributions to Military Operations Research and is awarded for life work rather than for any paticular contribution. The selection Committee is composed of previous award winners. The award is accompanied by a plaque and a $2,000 honorarium. Awardees: Don Gaver and E.B. Vandiver Presented: Military Applications Society Business Meeting, 6:15pm, Convention Center, North 231C
Revenue Management & Pricing Section
Section Prize
The INFORMS Revenue Management & Pricing Section Prize is awarded for the best contribution to the science of pricing and revenue management published in English. The prize includes a certificate and cash award. Winner: Omar Besbes Presented: 6:15pm, Revenue Management & Pricing Section Business Meeting, Convention Center, North 225B
Technology Management Section
Best Dissertation Award
The Technology Management Section recognizes the best doctoral dissertation in the field of technology and innovation management in terms of furthering the field and making a theoretical and practical contribution. The award includes a plaque and a $500 cash prize. Winner: Zhijian Cui Runner-Up: Vivek Tandon
Distinguished Speaker Award
TMS presents its distinguished speaker award to an outstanding academic leader in the field of technology management. The award is presented every year during the annual fall academic meeting and includes a plaque and a $500 cash prize. Winner: James Utterback Presented: 6pm, Technology Management Section Business Meeting, Convention Center, West 106B
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MONDAY'S INTERACTIVE SESSION
General Interactive Session 12:30-2:30pm, Convention Center, West 301CD Lobby
Authors will be on hand, and prizes will be awarded. Cluster Chairs: Young Jun Son and Jian Liu, University of Arizona; and Burcu Keskin, University of Alabama.
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MONDAY'S TUTORIALS
All sessions held in Convention Center, West 207
8-9:30am
Some Simplifying Conditions for Markov Chain Modeling Marlin Thomas, Air Force Institute of Technology
11am-12:30pm
Clearing Functions, Variable Lead Times and Delay Equations in Production Planning Dieter Armbruster, Arizona State University; and Reha Uzsoy, North Carolina State University
1:30-3pm
Regenerative Medicine Manufacturing - A Systems Engineering Perspective Richard A. Wysk, Paul Cohen, Ola Harrysson, Molly Purser, and Rohan Shirwaiker, North Carolina State University
4:30-6pm
Teaching Dynamic Programming and Duality Insights Using Games, Interdiction, and Robust Optimization J. Cole Smith, University of Florida
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INFORMS JOB PLACEMENT SERVICE OPEN TODAY AT 9AM
9am-5pm, Convention Center, Exhibit Hall
OK, you did the Job Fair on Sunday and met lots of great employers/candidates. Now it's time for on-site interviews to explore opportunities in academia, industry, and government.
In addition, the Job Placement Service offers
- Online access to job listings and applicant files
- Expanded information about jobs and applicants
- Weekly updates of the database
- Improved database search capabilities
- Online data entry for applicants and employers
- Extended availability of the database. www.informs.org/JPS
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At TNT Express, O.R. Is Key to a Greener Future
by Ryan O'Neil
| 2012 Edelman Winner TNT Express accepts their prize check from INFORMS President Terry Harrison | Ask Marco Hendriks of TNT Express about the impact of cost reductions in freight logistics, and he'll tell you they "go hand in hand with sustainability." This may not be the first response you'd expect, but it's just this sort of thinking that earned the international Dutch courier delivery services company the 2012 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
The way Hendriks and Hein Fleuren of Tilburg University told it, using O.R. to simply reduce costs and improve efficiency is old hat. We as practitioners could also reduce the environmental impact of the companies or customers we work for while we're at it.
Though lacking in specifics, the numbers they cited were pretty impressive. TNT Express claims to have saved €207 million during the period from 2008 to 2011, all the while reducing their carbon footprint by dozens of MKg of CO2 emissions---and maintaining the same level of service, or better, for their customers.
The many methods the company developed to improve its supply chain and logistics read like a laundry list of difficult problems tackled. Doing so required a massive corporate effort, resulting in the creation of their Global Optimisation program (GO), a sort of boot camp for operations managers. The program is not attempting to create mathematicians but instead train a global network of "ambassadors" who "understand that it may be necessary to increase costs in one part of the supply chain" to make savings in another.
Details aside, it's great to see these sorts of success stories recognized in our field.
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Technology Solutions for Soldier Support
by Rachel Ramirez
| [Right to Left] Mr. Ken Donovan and Mr. John Dulin answer a conference attendees questions after the session | The Technology Solutions for Soldier Support track presented ongoing research projects in the following companies: Technology Solutions Experts (TSE), Lockheed Martin (LM), and Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC). The first two presentations were focused on the development of mathematical models to help solve challenges for soldiers and their decision makers. The last presentation was a suggestion for how the US Department of Defense (DoD) can increase operational effectiveness by requiring a new metric for technology development.
The first speaker, John Dulin from CTC, presented "A Proposed Analytic Method for Predicting IED Emplacement"; the method proposed is a combination of Markov decision processes (MDPs) and game theory ideas to create an optimal soldier convoy route for mission planning. The problem with predicting improvised explosive device (IED) emplacement has always been understanding the adversaries' behavior, which despite many lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, is still not well understood. Although US soldiers with firsthand experience seem to have a "sixth sense" in detecting changes to their normal patrol environment, no underlying patterns can be unraveled to guide predictive models. Dulin stated that MDPs can model troops moving from place A to place B as transitions from one Markov state to another. Each Markov state has a risk of proceeding on to the next state. In addition, each state has a different "reward function" for the enemy. For example, an adversary may have a different level of "reward" associated with disrupting a convoy early on in its route by the base versus disrupting a convoy in the middle of its route, where it is the maximum distance from help at its departure and destination locations. If research is expanded, potential future applications could include homeland security, prediction of criminal activity, and search and rescue.
Then Dan Rice of TSE presented "Representing the Power and Energy Needs of Today's Soldiers in Modeling and Simulation," which demonstrates the relationship between today's soldiers' electronic equipment power needs and the resulting weight load of needed batteries. There is currently no procedure for soldiers to decide how many batteries they need to carry on missions aside from "carry as much as you can," but because soldiers typically carry about 130 pounds of gear, soldiers may drop necessary lifesaving armor plates to carry more batteries and water. The work TSE is doing is a component of the Army's Infantry Warrior Simulation (IWARS), to study the effect of physical encumbrance of weight on movement and ultimately mission performance. Future work to update the model includes different types of missions, different types of electronic equipment, and the addition of possible wearable power-regeneration options.
Ken Donovan of LM, the third speaker, discussed "The Operational Readiness Level Metric for Technology Development," proposing that the DoD should request an Operational Readiness Level (ORL), in conjunction with its existing Technological Readiness Level (TRL) requirements, to help ensure developing technology stays relevant to the customer/soldier when going to Operational Test and Evaluation (OT&E). "There are many examples of technology investments that fail to provide relevant products," stated Donovan, and he proceeded to explain how a system with a TRL rating of 9 does not correspond to operational maturity in the field. The proposal by LM was primarily internally driven to help reduce risk, but Donovan stated it would primarily benefit the government to ask for these metrics up front to guarantee the technology they requested makes it to OT&E. "The customer gets what they ask for," said Mr. Donovan, and in this presentation, he suggests that they ask for more operationally relevant technology metrics. Adding the ORLs to parallel the TRL maturity process may do just that.
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Ecological Conservation
by Rachel Ramirez
In the Ecosystem Conservation track, four speakers---Hayri Onal, Robert Haight, Bistra Dilkina, and Sandor Toth---presented interesting models for optimizing certain goals.
| Speakers [left to right] Hayri Onal, Robert Haight, Bistra Dilkina, and Sandor Toth | Haight, from the USDA Forest Service, presented "Optimal Surveillance and Eradication of Invasive Species." His work focused on studying the economic trade-offs between surveillance/detection and eradication and using a model to goal seek a minimum total expenditure. His research built on past models by allowing for repeated invasion events over time; stochastic invasion establishment; an unknown quantity for number, size, and location of the invasion; and the ability to scale up detection effort costs with an increasing population size. He was able to give a real-life example of how the model was used to help minimize total costs for California's gypsy moth prevention and eradication budget based on inputs from a regional level.
Toth, a professor at the University of Washington, presented his students' research on modeling frameworks for life history-based conservation planning. The crux of his presentation was using the generalized maximal covering problem proposed by Church et al. in 1996 to decide how to maximize the protected area for populations. Decision factors were whether to protect a site and, if so, how much of habitat k will benefit population j. His case study was to apply the model to Lopez Island, located between Canada and the United States near the state of Washington, where the US Fish and Wildlife Service had identified seven endangered species needing protection. The presentation focused on how five of the seven species were different types of bats that needed two primary things protected: shelter and food/water. After some trade-off studies to maximize the protected number of populations (x) against different levels of investment (y), a sensitivity analysis found that the weighted level of importance for factors was significant. Experts determined that water is 40 times more important than forage, which made a big impact on suggested conservation planning. Sandor now wants to further his model to consider species competition.
Dilkina, a Cornell student and recipient of the ENRE best forestry paper in 2011, gave a presentation on the robust network design for multispecies conservation. She spoke on how habitat fragmentation, or inversely, landscape connectivity, is a key conservation priority to maintain a population by increasing the chances of immigration, gene flow, range shifts, and fire escape. Yet she critiqued that the current approach in conservation biology is more focused on identifying likely linkages to purchase for preexisting habitats rather than a more comprehensive, planned area with habitable corridors. Her examples showed that a focus on minimum-cost corridors and maximized utility path may result in a plan where one single parcel that is lost could disconnect the corridor. Through graph theory she proposed a solution to optimize "robustness," the measure of a number of edge disjoint paths so that the result is a shortest maximally connected network design. She stated that this is related to survivable network design. Her research included a study for Montana's endangered lynx and wolverine conservation programs to find a way to spend the same budget for a robust connectivity for more than one species. She is eager to further understand how to incorporate trade-offs between connectivity requirements for each species and the trade-offs between the path quality for each species.
Onal, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discussed how to design a conservation reserve with optimum functional connectivity. He introduced how this field of study is still relatively new, citing that the reserve design research problem only recently started using optimal site selection models using mixed integer programming two decades ago. His research centered on how set covering and maximal covering models usually result in configurations without desirable spatial characteristics, and he emphasized how spatial coherence is important for the effective functioning of a reserve, especially for ground-based species. He argued for the benefits of adding functional contiguity into a model and showed how a Dykstra algorithm was used to find the most optimal paths in some real-world applications of conservation planning for tortoises on military ranges in Fort Benning, GA. |
Advances in Modeling and Optimal Control of Infectious Disease Spread
by Rachel Ramirez
Three speakers touched on the advancement of modeling the spread of infectious diseases and its impact on analysis-driven policy decisions.
| Speakers [left to right] Margaret Brandeau, Sabina Alistar, and Reza Yaesoubi | Research presented by Margaret Brandeau and Sabina Alistar, both of Stanford, closely followed each other. Brandeau's presentation, "A Model for Optimal Allocation of HIV Prevention and Treatment Funds," spoke to the optimal use of resources to control the spread of epidemics such as HIV when forced to fund different levels of prevention and/or treatment, and Alistar's presentation, "Evaluating the Effectiveness of Interventions During an Influenza Pandemic," seemed to build off that foundation with a four-component model to optimize for four epidemiological objectives: (1) to minimize the number of infected at some time, (2) to minimize the prevalence of disease at the end of time, (3) to minimize new infections, and (4) to maximize the quality-adjusted life years (a quality-of-life goal).
A clear takeaway from all presentations was up-front investments in prevention are much less costly to implement than the cost of treatment; a common example of inexpensive AIDS prevention is to distribute condoms in conjunction with education on how diseases are transmitted. Treatment would cover the medical costs involved with treating a person with a disease. The third speaker, Reza Yaesoubi of the Harvard Medical School, presented how to determine at what point one would decide to switch from one policy to another policy, such as a switch from investing in prevention and investing in treatment.
Yaesoubi's presentation, "A Framework for Real-Time Decision Making During Epidemics," discussed how to use the advances in medical and population surveillance technology to provide real-time data on determining the emergence of epidemics at hospitals and community levels. He gave an example of a school open for the first 15 weeks of the school year and then experiencing a large case of influenza. A decision maker needs to choose whether to keep the school closed or open, and for what duration. Yaesoubi presented the popular traditional way to make decisions, which can become computationally intractable, and then he introduced an alternative real-time, observation-based policy that is simple for a decision maker to understand and implement. His ending slide gave decision makers the markers for deciding when to switch from one strategy to the other. He ended with a real-life application of the model to minimize the total number of tuberculosis cases in Zimbabwe given two strategies (active and passive) and a decision period of one month.
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O.R. Applications in the Defense and ISR Communities
by Ryan O'Neil
Retired Major General Richard J. O'Lear spoke in a manner familiar to anyone who's attended presentations given by members of the military or intelligence communities. He had an easy, informal tone and made his audience comfortable with comments such as, "I'm going to talk about four hours. If you finish listening before I finish talking, go and take a break." He also sprinkled his slides with jokes involving cannibals and injured beavers, though he claimed none were harmed in the making of this morning's plenary.
Today's subject is O'Lear's work on the Task Force on Operations Research for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) organized by the Defense Science Board (DSB). The DSB creates a few of these each year to investigate a variety of topics.
The goal of this particular task force was to determine if O.R. is being used effectively in the intelligence community. In intelligence, the consequences of being wrong are very high. One doesn't want to "have any surprises where a lot of people get killed because we were efficient and not effective."
O'Lear was quick to point out his belief that the task force was allowed to be honest about its findings. We "felt free to be pretty liberal in our comments," he stated. And indeed, the study concluded that, while O.R. is applied across many services and agencies, its use is inconsistent and not standardized. This is likely the case because there is no jointly accepted body for accreditation of OR practices in the military.
For someone who, in his own words, is "not an O.R. expert," O'Lear could certainly talk the talk. He stressed the value of soft skills and engagement with decision makers: "Without a good decision maker in the loop from start to finish, you're not going to get good O.R."
One issue with the talk was that it sometimes bordered on vague. Most attendees at INFORMS are probably already convinced that tracking metrics is a good idea. We would like to hear more about how this relates specifically to intelligence gathering and analysis.
Naturally, he closed with a pitch to get good O.R. practitioners to apply for jobs at the CIA.
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2012 TUTORIALS ONLINE BOOK
All attendees receive free exclusive early access to the INFORMS 2012 TutORials in Operations Research online book concurrently with the meeting. Entitled "New Directions in Informatics, Optimization, Logistics, and Production," the 2012 volume is the perfect complement to the series of talks. For access, visit here and log in using your INFORMS username and password. Nonmember meeting attendees: use the username and password you selected as part of the online registration process. NOTE: your username and password also appears on the receipt in your registration envelope. All INFORMS 2013 members receive access on January 1, 2013. You can order the 2012 book or previous volumes (CDs 2005 - 2009) through the TutORials website or visit the INFORMS Booth #58.
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SOCIAL NETWORKING QUICKLINKS
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2012 ANNUAL MEETING QUICKLINKS
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THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS
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