What a bad luck

This year, my Informs presentation is arranged at Wednesday again. I was looking forward to presenting my transshipment stuff in front of more people than the last year.

Two years in a row to present at Wednesday. What a bad luck! Considering that it is in Seattle, a lot of people living in the east coast would need to take flight in the morning so that they can get home before midnight. So if they don't want to cancel or miss two classes, they won't be able to make any Wednesday session.

Informs need to consider to shift their session starting Sat. instead of Sun. so that there is more people can attend all the sessions. Or they need to think out a way to enlarge the number of parallel sessions. Sun. to Wed. is not a good idea.

What should I do in the next Informs meeting?

• Since I already get to know some friends from this conference, I hope I can meet each one individually and have deep conversation. Also because, I will have more time to do research from the fourth year, I hope to seek more opportunities to work on the different subjects with different people with their own expertise
• Prepare some deeper work to present. That's the only way to impress people, so that they are willing to work with you if possible.
• Get to know job market
• Create the chance to talk with those faculties
• Last but the most important, live at a hotel nearby the convention center. I run into trafic every day and get too less sleep every day during conference. And I haven't recovered yet.

internal force(nei gong) or external technic(zhao shu)?

I went to an Informs conference from Nov. 4 to Nov. 8. Everything goes well. Meeting and making friends is the most important thing for me since our department only has very few people sharing the same interests with me. I need to extend my network. Second thing is to present my work. It is ok since nobody left during my talk and I got two questions and handled well in my opinion.

But there is one fundamental question occuring several times during the conference. On one hand, we need to have good papers before we graduate. It means that I need to work hard on generating papers, which implies that I need to read a lot of literature. As Long told me that we need to accumulate several tricks which are used by different authors again and again in their papers but no one collect and publish those as a reference book. This is absolutely right. Even those great mathematicians has only a few tricks. On the other hand, I like to take as much courses as I can since I believe only when you have complete skill set, you can consider problems from different angles which gives you more insight. Also you can do something crossing the different fields.

In Chinese Wuxia novel, there are two kind of persons. One is working on internal force(nei gong) . It takes a long time to master. The other person is working on external technic(zhao shu). It is fast to learn but easy to hit the bottleneck. In the short run, the people working on zhao shu can easily beat the previous type of people since the stuff they learn is more practical. But in the long run, the previous people can outperform the people only having zhao shu since it has more power.

In this conference, when people start to talk about those 'famous' people's name, I feel a little bit embarrassing since I cannot recognize a lot of those 'big' names. I start to think whether I spend too much time in taking course other than reading related literature. For example, the next semester, I plan to take two courses and audit another two courses again. But I stick to finish those courses since I won't get any time to do so after I graduate. And only when you have enough nei gong, you can pick up those tricks quickly. I am not worried about my ability to come up ideas. Actually, during this Informs, I generate several new ideas. For now, I need to focus on developing those nei gong and try to work on only one or two ideas. After next semester, I would devote most of time into research but not now.

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.