Operations Research on Harlan D. Harris

Conference Blogging INFORMS Analytics 2017

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Sun, 09 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on Medium

A particularly good way to get a little more out of professional conferences is to blog about your experiences, I think. It makes you focus your thoughts on things like “what’s the big take-away here,” and “what should I be asking people in the hallways?” Rather than just summarizing what you saw, or making snarky Twitter comments (also worth doing!), a great conference blog post is synthesis — combining insights from multiple presentations and conversations into a coherent new whole that helps clarify ideas.

INFORMS Business Analytics 2014 Blog Posts

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Sat, 02 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year, I attended the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Research, in Boston. I was asked beforehand if I wanted to be a conference blogger, and for some reason I said I would. This meant I was able to publish posts on the conference’s WordPress web site, and was also obliged to do so!

Here are the five posts that I wrote, along with an excerpt from each. Please click through to read the full pieces:

Operations Research, from the point of view of Data Science

more insight, less action — deliverables tend towards predictions and storytelling, versus formal optimization
more openness, less big iron — open source software leads to a low-cost, highly flexible approach
more scruffy, less neat — data science technologies often come from black-box statistical models, vs. domain-based theory
more velocity, smaller projects — a hundred $10K projects beats one $1M project
more science, less engineering — both practitioners and methods have different backgrounds
more hipsters, less suits — stronger connections to the tech industry than to the boardroom
more rockstars, less teams — one person can now (roughly) do everything, in simple cases, for better or worse

What is a “Data Product”?

DJ Patil says “a data product is a product that facilitates an end goal through the use of data.” So, it’s not just an analysis, or a recommendation to executives, or an insight that leads to an improvement to a business process. It’s a visible component of a system. LinkedIn’s People You May Know is viewed by many millions of customers, and it’s based on the complex interactions of the customers themselves.

Survey of Data Science / Analytics / Big Data / Applied Stats / Machine Learning etc. Practitioners

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As I’ve discussed here before, there is a debate raging (ok, maybe not raging) about terms such as “data science”, “analytics”, “data mining”, and “big data”. What do they mean, how do they overlap, and perhaps most importantly, who are the people who work in these fields?

Along with two other DC-area Data Scientists, Marck Vaisman and Sean Murphy, I’ve put together a survey to explore some of these issues. Help us quantitatively understand the space of data-related skills and careers by participating!

making meat shares more efficient with R and Symphony

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Mon, 09 May 2011 01:01:01 +0000

In my previous post, I motivated a web application that would allow small-scale sustainable meat producers to sell directly to consumers using a meat share approach, using constrained optimization techniques to maximize utility for everyone involved. In this post, I’ll walk through some R code that I wrote to demonstrate the technique on a small scale.

Although the problem is set up in R, the actual mathematical optimization is done by Symphony, an open-source mixed-integer solver that’s part of the COIN-OR project. (The problem of optimizing assignments, in this case of cuts of meat to people, is an integer planning problem, because the solution involves assigning either 0 or 1 of each cut to each person. More generally, linear programming and related optimization frameworks allow solving for real-numbered variables.) The RSymphony package allows problems set up in R to be solved by the C/C++ Symphony code with little hassle.

making meat shares more efficient

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Mon, 09 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A personal interest I have is the ethical and sustainable production of food. I’ve been a member of and helped run Community Supported Agriculture groups, and my wife and I currently purchase the majority of our meat from a group of upstate NY pastured-livestock producers who sell their products through CSAs. It’s an ala-carte business model, where I place an order on a website, and the next week I pick up the frozen products cut and packaged as if for retail.

On "Analytics" and related fields

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I recently attended the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research, aka “INFORMS Analytics 2011”, conference in Chicago. This deserves a little bit of an explanation. INFORMS is the professional organization for Operations Research (OR) and Management Science (MS), which are terms describing approaches to improving business efficiency by use of mathematical optimization and simulation tools. OR is perhaps best known for the technique of Linear Programming (read “Programming” as “Planning”), which is a method for optimizing a useful class of mathematical expressions under various constraints extremely efficiently. You can, for example, solve scheduling, assignment, transportation, factory layout, and similar problems with millions of variables in seconds. These techniques came out of large-scale government and especially military logistics and decision-making needs of the mid-20th century, and have now been applied extensively in many industries. Have you seen the UPS “We (heart) Logistics” ad? That’s OR.