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There have been a lot of competitions that are related to Operations Research. I always find it hard to find good teammates for these competitions specially because in grad school everybody is busy with their own research interests and few people are interested in these fun competitions (And usually the prize is not that tempting for many). I am wondering if there is any online place to find and team up with people? can we use OR-Exchange for it?
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I think that is a really good idea. I'm not sure how successful your search for team-mates will be, though. OR-Exchange doesn't seem to have a huge readership. It can't hurt to announce the competition on OR-Exchange and see if anyone is interested. Having a central place to hear about competitions would be good anyway, even if finding team-mates doesn't work out. I don't see why it couldn't work. Many open source projects are collaborated over distances. A centralized point and a leader to drive progress will be key to success.
(May 02 '10 at 12:56)
larrydag 1 ♦
Oh, I agree that having a distributed team could work. I was just mentioning the obvious fact that the readership of OR-Exchange is not the hugest population to start with, and the percentage of those who would be interested in collaborating on a competition reduces the pool even further...
(May 02 '10 at 13:23)
DC Woods ♦
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I can't speak directly to the team competition problem (having never entered one), but I can say that research collaborations for other purposes (such as cranking out journal articles) are formed in myriad ways. Recruiting a team on OR-Exchange strikes me as a perfectly valid use of the forum. You also meet, or at least find out about, people with related interests by attending academic conferences, reviewing papers (when it's single-blind), and the academic version of "six degrees of separation". Plus you meet people by asking/answering questions here or on other forums. (I once answered a question on sci.op-research that led to a joint publication with someone who, to this day, I've never met.) Since competitions have time limits, the happenstance approach to finding collaborators is pretty much out. So advertising here, on sci.op-research, and on other forums makes sense. It would also make sense to ask not just for volunteers but also for suggestions ("Do you know anyone who might be interested in ...?"). You might also look at places like Academia.edu, where you can search by interest. (I just searched there for "data mining" as a test, and found 76 people listed.) |
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Keep in mind that when you add team members you not only get more resources, you also get a whole lot of extra complications, especially with a distributed team...
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Ah the Mythical Man-Month. Now how does one explain this to my boss's boss.
(May 03 '10 at 08:12)
adamo
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1 woman can make a baby in 9 months, so 9 women can make a baby in 1 month. |
An online teammate exchange? Wow! Suppose that the set of people expressing willingness to participate in a competition is known, what about team formation between mostly strangers? Should a "team leader" make proposals to certain people based on a CV, or should it facilitate leaderless team formation?
Given peoples expressed preferences and abilities, you could formulate the team-member-assignment problem and find the best set of teams using OR. Might be more interesting than the competition itself!
Is a team actually necessary?
Well you can define a team as having n > 0 members :)
BTW, here is a competition that I found out about minutes ago: http://informs-ras.org/Problem.htm
That looks like an interesting competition. I'm busy until June, but I think I might give it a go after that. Although, I'm probably going to use a proprietary product and they say you have to submit the program, so I'm not sure... I've sent them a question.