Optimizer, Assistant Professor of Business Analytics at Bucknell University
I am now going back from Quebec City to Montreal and I will be in Phoenix by noon tomorrow. There are other people from the CP conference with the same destiny, and for that reason my first contribution to the conference blog is about the CP sessions: CP is getting hotter at INFORMS 2012!
For more posts, keep checking the INFORMS 2012 website.
I am right now in a bus from Montreal to Quebec City. CP 2012 will officially start on Monday, but a gathering of those who arrived earlier was suggested for tomorrow in the late afternoon. The same happened last year at CPAIOR, and that was one of the reasons why I decide to come as soon as possible: to avoid missing the first gathering again.
I will be presenting a talk and a poster about the application that I approached during my MSc, which is described in a full paper in the conference proceedings. This work helped me being accepted in the CP Doctoral Program, which will promote some events directed to the graduate students attending to the conference and has assigned a mentor to each one. The CP DP organizers were very kind to help a number of us with registration costs and hosting. On top of that, I was told last week that my position paper about characterizing adaptive search methods (a sequel of my extended abstract from CPAIOR 2011) entitled me 2 minutes to give my 2 cents in a panel about the future of CP, which is being organized by Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck. In short, I am really looking forward this meeting!
In the following, I will go to Phoenix for the INFORMS Annual Meeting. I will give two talks there, one of which at the sessions about OR applications in the energy sector of emerging markets, which I am organizing, and the other at the sessions about CP, organized by Professor van Hoeve. I will also contribute to the blog of the conference, which will have as authors many of the usual OR bloggers. As soon as the blog is officially released, I will post the link here. I have interacted with a number of those guys online but I saw very few of them in person so far. Therefore, my expectations for Phoenix are also very high!
After reading Michael Trick’s blog post on ways of scoring countries according to the medal list, I wondered how to come up with a similar list in the OR world. After all, we have OR-Exchange, an online community where users are scored for their questions and answers as well as recognized with badges for certain achievements (gold, silver and bronze badges: quite similar to the Olympic Games). The results that I found provide an interesting picture of the community. In fact, I was glad that Brazil was better ranked in this list than in the one of the 2012 Summer Games!
I decided to summarize the results of all participants with a score of at least 200 (at first, I wanted to consider at least 100, but there were too many people without a declared country in the range 100-200, so I kept a smaller but reliable sample). I counted each badge as a medal, and I also considered two extra sets of medals to valorize the score of the participants.
The first set is equivalent to the marathon: who are the most diligent contributors? Gold for Paul Rubin, silver for DC Woods, and bronze for Bo Jensen. The second set accounted for team work: which countries had the higher combined score? Gold for the USA (Rubin alone guaranteed that), silver for Germany (mostly due to Florian Bahr and Marco Lüebbecke), and bronze for Denmark (Bo Jensen again).
After counting those, the final ranking was the following:
| # | Country | Participants w/ score > 200 | Total score | Gold | Silver | Bronze |
| 1 | USA | 18 | 25315 | 2 | 29 | 150 |
| 2 | Denmark | 2 | 3854 | 1 | 3 | 17 |
| 3 | Sweden | 1 | 211 | 1 | 1 | 5 |
| 4 | India | 6 | 3237 | 0 | 7 | 54 |
| 5 | Germany | 5 | 4340 | 0 | 7 | 32 |
| 6 | Australia | 1 | 3787 | 0 | 5 | 26 |
| 7 | Brazil | 2 | 2599 | 0 | 3 | 17 |
| 8 | Greece | 2 | 1078 | 0 | 3 | 13 |
| 9 | Ukraine | 1 | 253 | 0 | 3 | 6 |
| 10 | Iran | 1 | 1925 | 0 | 2 | 12 |
| 11 | Canada | 1 | 299 | 0 | 2 | 10 |
| 12 | Iceland | 1 | 680 | 0 | 2 | 7 |
| 13 | Belgium | 2 | 2445 | 0 | 1 | 18 |
| 14 | Finland | 1 | 413 | 0 | 1 | 10 |
| 15 | Singapore | 1 | 305 | 0 | 1 | 7 |
| 16 | New Zealand | 1 | 231 | 0 | 1 | 7 |
| 17 | France | 1 | 333 | 0 | 1 | 5 |
| 18 | UK | 1 | 236 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
Kudos to the OR-Exchange maintainers
Finally, even if not considered in the medal list ranking, we must account for something similar to the Pierre de Coubertin medals, which are offered to athletes who represented the truly Olympic spirit. In the context of OR-Exchange, the first thing that comes to my mind is the effort of some individuals and of INFORMS as well to keep OR-Exchange up and running properly. Among the top scores in the website, I know for sure that I can count Michael Trick, Mary Leszczynski, and Herman Strom as medalists for their effort on that. There are probably other “OR athletes” who deserve this medal, so I will consider this list as open-ended and I would appreciate any comment to include other contributors in the list.
I am organizing a session on “Applications in the Energy Sector of Emerging Countries” within the invited cluster “Operations Research and Management Science in Emerging Economies” at the INFORMS Annual Meeting.
If you are interested in presenting your abstract in this section, please contact me.
The abstract submission deadline is May 15, 2012. The title must have at most 100 characters and the abstract at most 500 (about 50 words). The conference will be held on October 14-17, 2012 in Phoenix, AZ. More information can be obtained at the conference website: http://meetings2.informs.org/phoenix2012/
Thiago Serra 