Personal cost minimization on air ticket purchase

This week, Time privdes a very interesting website to help customer to make the decision about 'To Buy or not to buy' air ticket.
http://www.farecast.com

Etzioni's site Farecast.com
original name was, of course, Hamlet--provides the lowest fare on a route, a
90-day price history and, using a novel predictive algorithm, a tip to "buy now"
or "wait," along with a figure indicating how confident Farecast is in its
advice. (Flyers buy directly from the airlines.)

It is surprising that this kind of website is not developed by the OR people (especially revenue management people ) but a CS professor Oren Etzioni from University of Washington.

OR people need to establish much more sucessful story to advocate importantce of OR. Like a disucssion raised in the Coin-OR workshop, we need more credentials to demonstrate the impact of OR. If OR can become HOT in job market, the pressure of academic people can also release and they can focus on the question they are more interesting but time consuming.

DIMACS workshop on Coin-OR

This week, I attend DIMACS workshop on Coin-OR. I am not pure optimization people and have not implemented any project based on any package of Coin-OR before. But I am really astonished to see those really really busy people devotes their time to the open source software on the optimization, even if it may be necessary for them to develop code for their own research. This fresh experience brings me to a new world. Besides this, this trip gives me a chance to know other people in our department better.

During the workshop, I get to know a person from Archstone-Smith working on the revenue management. He came here and try to find a package to replace Cplex which their software is based on. But it turns out that he is a little disappointed on it. The reasons are warmly discussed in the last presentations. They may be the common concern about open source software, legal and support issue. It would be nice to see a company making money by supporting Coin-OR. The problem is whether there is such demand? Then it leads to the issue about awareness of OR either in public or among other research areas. As Stephen Nash point, there are big and interesing questions in other science fields such as how universe begins. If everyone include me know the biggest problems in OR area, the future of Coin-OR would be bright. Otherwise, it is just a tool of researchers.

I hope there is one day a book introducing how to model OR by using Coin-OR through a well spread tool such as Excel like VBA for Modelers: Developing Decision Support Systems Using Microsoft® Excel. And the reader reviews is over 20. This is similar to Leo Lopes presents at the last part of his presentation to show how to use web service through VBA.

The presentation file can be found in workshop website.

The world cup champion predicted by UBS

UBS reports shows Italy would win the champoin. Maybe gamesters should not just read the sports news but also business new.

Many influencing factors
Along with "football fever", the team around
UBS Wealth Management Chief Economist Klaus Wellershoff was interested to find
out what variables are important in predicting World Cup success. In doing so,
they discovered that many things that appear to be obvious are, in fact, not
crucial to winning the World Cup. An example of this would be the size of a
country's population, which is often incorrectly correlated to the amount of
potential athletic talent. The FIFA rankings, which list the top national soccer
teams, also prove to be of limited use when it comes to making a prediction: the
FIFA list compiles the sporting success of the individual teams but assigns
equal value to all wins, no matter how strong the opponent.

GLPK under windows

I experience a hard time to use GLPK under windows. 2 months ago, I can run the program under vc6. But yesterday, linkage errors persist to appear. Finally, I get the answer that I didn't specify glpk.lib in the project settings. But last time, I also not set it. Anyway, I get a blog for the GLPK. http://glpk.blogspot.com/. The one and the only one post is about how to set GLPK under VC 6.0 and Borland C++ 5.0.

Careers in the Decision, Risk and Management Sciences

The article from science websiste discusses the career development.

The 10,000-member Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
(INFORMS) has members working for homeland security, transportation, health
care, law enforcement, the military, and telecommunications. These people apply
scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations
for many different kinds of organizations, says Barry List, director of
marketing and public relations at INFORMS. "By using techniques such as
mathematical modeling to analyze complex situations, operations research
provides the power to make more effective decisions and build more productive
systems based on more complete data; consideration of all available options;
careful predictions of outcomes and estimates of risk; and the latest decision
tools and techniques

Usually, people in OR often thinks what people should do. Even under game theory, there is a strict restriction on the people behavior. So it would be fun to study what people would do under specific situation. Based on that, operations research analysists can conduct optimal response to the party they serves. Moreover, the strategy of avoiding the irrational impact from others can be developed.