Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences (WORMS) Events at INFORMS Minneapolis

Are you excited about the upcoming Annual INFORMS Conference in Minneapolis, October 6-9, 2013?

I certainly am as are my colleagues who will be going and, of course, our students, who will be presenting.

The Annual INFORMS Conference serves as an outstanding scientific and professional conference plus a great social one -- for many of my former doctoral students this is where we hold one of our annual reunions.

And, among our favorite activities and events (for both males and females alike), are the events organized by the Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences (WORMS) Forum.

Below is a flier prepared by Dr. Susan Martonosi to highlight our activities at INFORMS Minneapolis. You can click on the image below to get an expanded view.

Something new this year, is the Speed Networking event on Tuesday afternoon, cosponsored by the Junior Faculty Interest Group and the Minority Issues Forum.

Hope to see many of you at the great WORMS events and others soon n beautiful Minneapolis!

And the Winner of the 2012 WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Award Is

I am on sabbatical now in Sweden and have been attending the Future Urban Transport Conference, which just finished up today in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Several of my doctoral students (present and former) were at the 2012 INFORMS Conference in Phoenix, Arizona and forwarded me the photos below from the WORMS luncheon.

This is one of my favorite fora and the WORMS Award Luncheon is always a favorite event.

Although I could not make it this year, it was great to have part of my network there. In addition, the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, where I am a faculty member, was one of the sponsors of the lunch.

Congratulations to this year's WORMS Award winner, Dr. Vicki Sauter of the University of St. Louis, Missouri!

I have served as the Chair of the award committee in a previous year and am also a recipient of this award, and it means a tremendous amount to me.

The WORMS Luncheon -- Always a Great Event at the Annual INFORMS Conference

As colleges and universities gear up for the new academic year, it is also a time to begin planning for conferencing.

The Annual INFORMS Conference is always a highlight -- bringing together operations researchers and management scientists from around the globe to exchange their latest research, to reconnect, learn from one another, and also to network and to see old friends and to make new ones.

This year the INFORMS Conference will take place in Phoenix, Arizona, October 14-17, 2012.

In addition to the various society business meetings, which I also enjoy, one of the BEST events is the Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences (WORMS) luncheon. The meal is always delicious and at this luncheon the WORMS Award is given. I posted some photos from an earlier WORMS luncheon here.

This year,  tickets will no longer be sold at the lunch so please plan accordingly, since we don't want disappointed colleagues!

We expect room for 200 at the lunch.

Below is the email that was just circulated to the WORMS community which I am reposting for communication purposes.

Dear WORMS Members,

I am writing to invite you to the annual WORMS luncheon that will be held on Tuesday, October 16, from 12:30-1:30 at the Hyatt Hotel in Phoenix, AZ. This will be another great networking and celebration event for women in OR/MS and other supporters of diversity in the profession.

Luncheon tickets are $18 ($8 for students). You can purchase tickets when you register for the INFORMS conference at http://meetings2.informs.org/phoenix2012/register.html, or during on-site registration when you arrive in Phoenix (if tickets last). Different from the earlier years, we will not be able to sell any tickets at the door, and only those who can present tickets will be admitted to the luncheon. Traditionally, WORMS luncheons have been very popular and previous years' luncheons consistently sold out, so please purchase your tickets early!

During the luncheon, we will be presenting the WORMS award for the Advancement of Women in OR/MS. We have been fortunate to secure sponsorships from various institutions, and we will be hosting a table with our sponsors' recruitment materials and job ads, which we believe will be an excellent opportunity for networking and visibility.

We are looking forward to seeing you in Phoenix! Please join us at the WORMS luncheon!

Best Regards,
Ozgun


Ozgun C. Demirag, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Management
Sam and Irene Black School of Business
Penn State Erie
814-898-6717
ozc1@psu.edu

High Performance Analytics,SAS, and Proving Theorems at a Job Interview

I have returned from a fabulous SAMSI workshop in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina on Uncertainty Quantification, which I will be writing about in another post (or two).

While there, I managed to visit SAS, since one of my former doctoral students, Dr. Padma Ramanujam, who received a doctoral dissertation award from what is now the Transportation Science & Logistics Society of INFORMS, works there.

I was treated to a superb lunch and we were joined by Dr. Radhika Kulkarni, who is Vice President of Advanced Analytics R&D at SAS, and who has a PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University.

My hosts were wonderful and the newest SAS building where the executives sit and where we had lunch is simply stunning. Above are photos that were taken there and I even managed to snap one of the back of Dr. Jim Goodnight, the co-founder of SAS, whom I had recently highlighted because of the coverage of him as the "Father of Analytics" in a Forbes article.

I know Dr. Kulkarni from INFORMS activities, and we were both recipients of the WORMS Award.

Dr. Kulkarni pointed me to her blogpost in SAS Voices on The Journey to High-Performance Analytics, in which she highlights some of the exciting work that SAS is involved in. Since Macy's is one of my favorite stores and, especially the one on 34th Street in NYC, I repost her description of one of the SAS projects (that, coincidentally, Padma also worked on):

What does high-performance analytics mean for your business? It has the potential to introduce some game changing options for customers. For instance, Macy’s needs to determine optimal clearance prices for over 273 million product-by-location combinations involving hundreds of millions of potential pricing decisions per week. The SAS Markdown Optimization solution analyzes three terabytes of historical sales data with multiple estimation and pricing algorithms targeted for this particular business problem. Using new SAS high-performance computing technologies, the computation time was reduced from 30 hours down to about 2 hours. This immense reduction in time gives the customer an opportunity to run more scenarios in the same window of time, providing the ability to look at alternate pricing strategies, thus allowing Macy’s to provide the right prices to the right customers at the right time, in the end maximizing profit and clearing inventory.

I might add that Dr. Radhika Kulkarni has joined the INFORMS Speakers Program, which is great, along with such luminaries as Dr. Brenda Dietrich of IBM (who, coincidentally, also has a PhD in Operations Research from Cornell), Dr. Mike Trick of CMU, Dr. Les Servi of MITRE (a fellow Brown alum, who then got his PhD from Harvard), and Dr. Anne Robinson, a Stanford PhD, of Cisco. INFORMS is in the process of updating the Speakers Program pages, so stay tuned.

Now, for the punchline -- and in the title of this blogpost -- those of you who are on the job market and are thinking of industry. You have passed the core and comprehensive exams, and your doctoral dissertation proposal defense, and are finishing up the writing of your dissertations.

The job interview requests are starting to come in.

Who would have thought that a job interview might entail, and, in industry, no less, that you prove theorems?!

Well, Dr. Padma Ramanujam, after getting her PhD from UMass Amherst, with a concentration in Management Science, receiving a national dissertation award, and even co-authoring a book with me and another student of mine, Dr. Kanwalroop "Kathy" Dhanda, on Environmental Networks, and having several years of work experience at I2 Technologies, made it through the SAS interview process. She told me, during my visit to SAS, that one of her interviewers had asked her to prove theorems, which she did and she got the job offer!

The SAS "campus" is gorgeous so, if you have a chance to visit, you will not be disappointed.

SAS and Evidence-based Decision-Making and Analytics in the New York Times

Today's NY Times has a feature article on the software powerhouse, SAS, which is based in Cary, North Carolina. The article traces its history and founding by Mr. Goodnight and three colleagues from North Carolina State University in 1976 and highlights how, even today, SAS allocates 22% of the company's substantial revenue to research and development. The article has links to SAS's gorgeous campus, which includes a pool, a daycare and preschool for employees' children, on-site medical care, and more! Of the 100 largest companies in the world, 92 use SAS software.

However, SAS is now being threatened by such major corporations as IBM, which is investing billions of dollars in what is being called business intelligence software, for predictive modeling and analytics, which enhances evidence-based decision-making. With the tremendous increase in data availability through the Internet and sensors, companies are now increasingly understanding the huge untapped potential of operations research tools and statistical models and methods.

The environment at SAS has fostered creativity but the competition is growing and SAS will be having to readjust to significant outside competitive pressures. The article discusses how SAS's leadership is planning on handling these new challenges.

One of my former doctoral students, Dr. Padma Ramanujam, whose dissertation that I chaired, entitled, Transportation Network Policy Modeling for Congestion and Pollution Control: A Variational Inequality Approach, which received the 1999 dissertation prize of the (then-called) Transportation Science Section of INFORMS, is an employee of SAS. Dr. Ramanujam is also a Center Associate of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I am the Founding Director of. Dr. Ramanujam, after receiving her PhD with a concentration in Management Science from the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst, joined I2 Technologies in Richardson, Texas, and then moved on to SAS.

SAS has had a very supportive environment for females and I would like to single out the work of Dr. Radhika Kulkarni of SAS, who received the 2006 WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Award of INFORMS. A year later, she chaired the same award committee when I was the recipient of the 2007 WORMS Award. We had a chance to reflect on the careers of females in technical industries and to also reflect on the nurturance of female doctorates. Some photos from the award ceremonies and festivities can be found here.

In conversations with Dr. Kulkarni of SAS, so many wonderful memories came flooding back, including those surrounding the writing of the Environmental Networks book with two of my female PhD students, Padma Ramanujam and Kanwalroop "Kathy" Dhanda. How many technical books are there out there authored by three (or more females) I wonder?!

Looking at the photo of the pool on the New York Times website that accompanied the article on SAS, I was reminded of the corporate positions that I held after receiving my two undergrad degrees from Brown University (and while pursuing my Master's degree from Brown). The positions were in high tech, defense consulting and I was based on Aquidneck Island (Newport and Middletown) in Rhode Island. The intensity of the software research and development work was balanced by runs and marathon training with views of the Atlantic Ocean.

Congrats to companies that realize that simply sitting at a computer is not where the best ideas come from!

A "Typical" Day

As an academic knows, but much of the public does not realize, despite a regular teaching schedule, no two days for a professor are ever alike. This aspect of being an academic makes one's professional life challenging, always interesting, but also not for everyone. There is no such thing as a "typical" or "routine" day.

For example, yesterday, which was a Monday, turned out as follows. In the morning, I discussed, with a producer in New York City, a program that I will be involved in at the 2009 World Science Festival, which will be taking place in mid-June. Last year's festival was the first and it was a huge success. It took place in late spring in NYC and this year's festival will also be in NYC. The festival was modeled after one in Genoa, Italy, and attracted 100,000 participants last year!

Office hours followed with students dropping in as much to chat as to discuss work. Then it was time to teach. I am teaching a doctoral course, Management Science II, and the class lasted for two and a half hours. I love teaching the material and the session felt like ten minutes long to me. Then it was time for a scheduled phone conversation with an executive of a multinational firm, who is an Isenberg School of Management alum. Topics under discussion concerned possible internships for our students, and possible projects in supply chain optimization. Coincidentally, one of the topics of my preceding lecture had been trade-offs between different modes of transportation and the effects on product prices. It is always gratifying that we can be both rigorous and relevant while teaching in the Isenberg School of Management!

After the conversation, more students came pouring in, and it is always those spontaneous conversations that are the most fun. A student on crutches wandered in and we ended up talking, after discussing employment prospects in operations management, and in transportation and logistics, about soccer and the World Cup. He had actually been a professional soccer player in Portugal (and he was now on crutches because of soccer).

Teaching was done for the day and the homeworks graded so it was time to complete the service duties. I have the honor of serving as the Chair of the 2009 WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Award of INFORMS. In the capacity as Chair, I get to select the members of the committee. Yesterday, all the committee members were confirmed and we have a terrific committee in place! They include faculty at business schools and engineering schools as well as a parctitioner. The award will be announced at the INFORMS National Meeting in San Diego next October and the closing date for nominations is July 1, 2009.


As for research, there was good news on this front, too. Two of our papers, which we revised recently, have now been officially accepted for publication. One is on electric power supply chains with application to New England. The other paper is on the horizontal integration of multiproduct supply chains and associated synergies. These papers were co-authored with associates and students that I work with through the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst. The former paper will be published in the journal, Naval Research Logistics, and the latter paper, in the International Transactions in Operational Research.