or-community Questions - OR-Exchange

Where did OR people go ?

2010-07-14T08:31:31Z

OK, not really a question. In many years the google group sci.op-research was a great resource, most of the OR community followed the forum (or so it seemed). Lots of optimizations experts were there, even the commercial development teams from cplex, dash etc. were active, making it a perfect place to ask questions. But now it is flooded by s*p*a*m and very inactive. I think this forum is a very good alternative, but still we lack activity and have few users, only a handful of people is really posting. I think it is a shame, can't we do "something" to attract users, making this the number one OR forum ? I follow OR a lot of places, but the quality is just so low.

Operations Research on a Mac?

2010-07-05T19:17:16Z

Hello,

I know and use some OR applications on Windows but my home computer is a Mac (with Mac OS X), so when I'd like to work at home I always have to boot Win to run those apps. So my question is, what are my possibilities?

In fact, I tried to google this problem with no success so far. To me it seems like this need of mine can't be satisfied, or at least not with a full-GUI app, which I require, at least in part since I am not a programmer and I prefer a GUI over command line. Not like I found any app at all, so every recommendations would be welcome.

Thanks in advance!

How fast/expensive is your number crunching machine?

2010-06-30T08:51:54Z

I have a desktop computer that is getting old. It has a 2-core AMD cpu (64 bits) with 2 Giga bytes of RAM. I frequently hit this RAM cap in my codes (mostly python and R but sometimes Java). Additionally I run SVN, an Apache webserver and MySQL databases on this machine and a number of my collaborators also use this machine remotely (mostly with SSH but sometimes with Remote Desktop). This machine also does constant text mining and web crawling. Most of the times I see it consumes all the RAM and takes some virtual memory and swap drive as well.

I am starting a campaign to convince my advisor to get me a new desktop machine. I am wondering what other people in the community use. Perhaps my computer is sufficiently powerful and I am using it inefficiently.

Thanks

OR-Exchange metadata

2010-06-23T20:15:27Z

Is it possible to get at the data under OR-Exchange?

I was idly wondering which times of the day were busiest here on OR-Exchange, and I realised that there are lots of interesting questions you could ask, eg:

Busiest times of the day, days of the week, periods in history
Most popular tags
Patterns of posting by users
Clustering users based on their activity
Optimal posting characteristics to get a good response
Text mining of posts and responses
Patterns of edits

These are the types of questions that seem made for OR and analytics to ask and answer! What I'm thinking of is some sort of web interface where this data could be extracted, and even some pre-built reports on top of it. Who knows, if we come up with some interesting stuff we may be able to replicate it for the other Stack Overflow type sites.

I don't see any privacy implications since the information is all on the site anyway if you click through all the posts - it's just not very accessible.

I'm not sure how we would go about this, but presumably if the data can be extracted for export to another site, then an automated extract could occur also...?

What do people think? Am I the only one who would find this data interesting?

Favorite website for Operations Research related resources?

2010-05-06T18:32:58Z

I have my favorites. I would like to see your favorite websites to get Operations Research resources, ideas, research, formulas, methods, software or tips. Try to answer only one website with a short description of that site. Its okay if you answer multiple times. The goal is to have specific websites voted up so that the most voted rise to the top. Please leave out "news" related sites (sorry Michael).

OR Anonymous Job Rumors Website?

2010-04-23T17:59:40Z

Political science and economics have

http://www.poliscijobrumors.com/ http://www.econjobrumors.com/

anonymous message boards populated by gossiping grad students. Do we have something like this? Not that I would waste my time on it...

What is the difference between operations research and management science?

2010-04-23T02:13:15Z

Sorry if it's a very basic question but i would like to understand the full answer for the experts. Thanks a lot.

Jorge/

What new journal should INFORMS create?

2010-04-22T17:00:05Z

Reading my copy of OR/MS Today, I saw this column by INFORMS president Susan Albin.

She says that INFORMS wants to start a new journal, and is looking for proposals. That's kind of interesting. I found this a little odd:

There is no doubt in my mind that excellent ideas abound in the INFORMS community. In response to a survey last spring by Patricia Shaffer and Mary Magrogan, many interesting and innovative ideas were submitted. Now is the time to move from the idea stage to the proposal stage.

What are these innovative ideas? After some Googling, I couldn't find the survey results online. Us OR people are lacking a good place to discuss things online, so I guess I'll post this here.

What journal do you think INFORMS should start? This can be an opportunity to broaden the field, adding new life to OR. I'd love to hear your suggestions.

I'll go first and give my 2 cents. I think they should start the journal:

Predictive Analytics
A journal of Predictive Modeling, Machine Learning and Operations Research

Fundamentally, OR is about building analytical models, and using them to make useful predictions. However, the rapidly growing field of Machine Learning (ML) is also trying to do that. Also, at the base of many ML approaches, there is an optimization model to solve. It would be interesting to explore that interface of OR and ML. There also don't seem to be many places that publish application oriented papers on Predictive Analytics. Most ML papers are much more algorithmic in nature, or are published in specialized journals of the application area.

Please add you own suggestions for a title.

-Craig Schmidt

What file format for problem definition is suitable for OR-Exchange?

2010-04-16T12:03:49Z

What would be a text format to state a mathematical programming problem that could be published here on OR-Exchange?

Especially for linear programming, I like lpsolve .lp format. It is far more readable than, for instance, the MPS format (see here for a comparison).

What other formats are out there, both human readable and widely supported?

(I would like to tag this question as "documentation" and/or "format" but I have not the right to tag currently).

How can we improve OR related articles on Wikipedia

2009-11-27T13:13:20Z

Some of the OR related articles on Wikipedia are inaccurate (see this for example) and Wikipedia does not have articles on interesting OR topics (for example there is no article on the ordering policies or join replenishment ideas)

OR articles on Wikipedia obviously need some attention.

My question is how can we join forces to improve these articles?

I have made a project page on Wikipedia there is a "To do list" on that page in which you can insert the articles that need attention and request new articles. If you would like to help in edits you can also add your user name to the list of contributors and we will ask for your inputs as we work on articles.

Even if you do not like to edit Wikipedia articles please consider helping with populating the to do list and I will try to work on those articles as much as possible

What other methods can we use in order to improve Wikipedia in our field?

Update: The project now has its own user box. If you want to show your passion about Operations Research you can place this tag {{User OR}} on your Wikipedia profile page

Do OR people publish in conferences?

2010-02-01T09:17:29Z

I have a paper that seems like good fit for CP-AI-OR but the people whose work I am primarily building upon have all published in places like Management Science, EJOR, C&OR etc.

Do OR people read conference proceedings or is it all about journals in this area?