President's Desk
Goals, Opportunities and Issues in O.R.
INFORMS President
Cynthia Barnhart
president@mail.informs.org
As INFORMS president-elect, many of my conversations with INFORMS members centered on identifying opportunities and issues in operations research. These discussions unveiled priorities for our community and helped me to refine my agenda for my year as INFORMS president. My plan, broadly stated, is to achieve two key goals, namely, 1) to boost the impact of O.R. through the provision of educational materials and experiences for O.R. students; and 2) increase the awareness of the potential for operations researchers to address problems of importance to society, and to engage operations researchers in the task of addressing these important societal problems.
In this column, I briefly sketch activities associated with these goals — activities started during my year as president-elect and planned for continuation during the coming year.
O.R. Education
In 2007, members of the INFORMS Roundtable and I conducted informal surveys of government and industry personnel responsible for hiring and managing graduates of operations research graduate programs. The results indicated that our O.R. graduate students leave school with a solid technical training, but they suffer some pervasive weaknesses. First, many of our graduates are relatively weak at communicating technical ideas to non-experts in O.R. Second, many are not very good at translating non-mathematical problem statements into O.R. models that both are tractable and capture the problem realistically. Third, many of our students lack experience with real-world data and all the associated issues.
To help the O.R. community address these issues, I am working with two committees — an ad-hoc president's committee that I chair, with members including Martin Durbin, James Cochran, John Fowler, Warren Lieberman, Donna Llewellyn, Randy Kiefer, Mary Magrogan and Larry Seiford; and an INFORMS Roundtable Ad-Hoc Committee on O.R. Education of which I am a member, together with Stephen Balut, Paul Griffin, Donna Llewellyn, Larry Seiford and Charles Beall, who serves as the chair.
These committees, in their coordinated activities, are first working to define the types of educational materials and experiences that will address the weaknesses identified in our O.R. programs. Second, they are exploring methods, especially Web-based methods, to provide these educational materials and experiences to a broad set of students. The vision is one of providing Web-based educational materials and modules that can be adopted by O.R. educators around the globe and incorporated into O.R. curricula to strengthen O.R. students' data, modeling and communication skills. The premise is that in developing these skills in our students, we can increase the impact of O.R.
In our efforts to date, we have developed a set of ideas and action items, the details of which I will provide in a future column. If you have any suggestions, or any knowledge of existing resources that might be helpful in this effort, please let us know.
Doing Good with Good O.R.
Kids today, when surveyed, say they are uninterested in technical fields like engineering and O.R. because they don't align with their goal to "make a difference" in the world. One of my goals, then, is to show that O.R. is a great platform from which to "do good." Our two-pronged approach to this task involves first, trying something new at the INFORMS annual meeting and second, using our INFORMS 2008 meeting experiment to launch an initiative in which we engage students in using O.R. to "do good."
Specifically, the president's ad-hoc initiatives committee (described above) is working together with a new "Doing Good with Good O.R." committee (thanks to Margaret Brandeau for the title) with members including Mike Ball, Margaret Brandeau, Jon Caulkins, Terry Cryan, Karla Hoffman, Rina Schneur, Jim Sweeney, John Weyant and myself as chair. With the goal of showing how operations research can (and does) provide important insights that can be used to inform and shape public policy on important societal topics, we are working with the INFORMS 2008 Organizing Committee to introduce something new in the Washington 2008 National INFORMS Conference.
The idea is to create a series of special sessions on topics of importance to society ranging from public health and drug policy; to environment and climate change; to mobility and congestion. Currently, we are working to finalize the topics and select participants for the sessions, with each session planned to include key stakeholders from government and industry, together with academic experts. Our goal is to create a discussion that is of interest to our INFORMS community, and, more broadly, to the general public.
We plan to follow-up on this effort with a program designed to engage O.R. students in activities geared towards "doing good with good O.R." We will provide details of our INFORMS 2008 meeting experiment and, more broadly, the "doing good with good O.R." campaign in a forthcoming column.
As always, our chances for success with these initiatives will be greatly enhanced if we can engage more volunteers to assist. If you are interested in helping out or would like to provide comments and/ or suggestions, please contact us at president@mail.informs.org. I look forward to hearing from you.
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