Subject: Re: DO'99

From: "Peter L. Hammer" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 09:54:55 +0005

Dear Saleh,

How are you doing?  Are you still coming to DO'99?  I hope nothing is 
wrong.  If you are not coming, would you please let me know right 
away, so I can use the room we had assigned to you.

thanks,

terry

===========================================================================
Peter L. Hammer                                                      Phone:  732-445-4812    
Director, RUTCOR                                                  Fax:     732-445-5472
Rutgers Center for Operations Research                  Email:  [email-masked] 
Rutgers University
640 Bartholomew Road
Piscataway, NJ 08854-8003 

Please NOTE new address and area code.
==========================================================================

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From: Saleh Elmohamed <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1999 12:33:48 -0400

Dear Peter and Endre,

First, I'd like to thank you for the superb job and organization
you have done in hosting DO'99. It certainly was a job well-done
and for that we all appreciate it.

Second, I have few suggestion that I'd like to share. As we all know the
DO community is fairly large and widley distributed ... Also, within the
community we see various groups of practitioners (or experimentalist) 
as well as theoreticians. The former's interests mainly in applying and
analyzing the most suitable tools available to solve real world problems,
and the latter are at the forefront in advancing the state of the art in
this field. Certainly, there are few groups that tend to combine these
two aspects.
I as well as many others believe that there is hardly any interaction
between these two groups. As a matter of fact the experimentalists camp 
is fragmented into various sub-groups each seems to operate in its own
closed world. This lack of interaction is unhealthy to the community in
general, leading to duplications in efforts, etc. Of course in many cases
duplicate applications of similar algorithms to large scale real world
problems can be used as a measure of crediblity and maturity of these
methods. On the other hand, experimentation on toy or made up data
is not really that useful to anyone.

Therefore, how the community goes about dealing with these problems/side
effects?

1. Whether we like or not we live in the age of the web. From papers
to data to algorithms to results all need to be made available through
a single web site rather than having sets of instances of various problems
spread out on tens of web sites throughout the world... Also, in the case
of data it needs to be put in a standard (or something that can be in
general agreeable on) formats.
Standarization can make comparsions of results obtained by various groups
using the same algorithms(s) on the same kind of problems more plausible
and sound... Of course, there are other factors that need to be taken into
account as well.

2. Interactions don't have to be only through mailing lists but also
can be through the web.
There are web tools that people can freely download and install on 
their PCs and use to interact with others who have the same
kind of tools. This kind of interaction/planning/collaboration through not 
only text and drawing/white boards but also through audio and video as
well.

Here is an example of a collaboratory set of tools:
http://www.npac.syr.edu/tango/

3. Again as mentioned in point 1, results (and perhaps data) need to be 
made available through the web not only in a text format but also in a
graph-based and if possible in an animated format. As the saying goes, if 
a 2-D picture worth a thousand words then its worth in a 3-D is
immeasurable.

These are few of the things I thought to share with you. Hope they all
make sense and again, many thanks.

best wishes,
Saleh

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From: "Endre Boros" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1999 08:16:43 -0400

Dear Saleh,
many thanks for your comments and suggestions. I share your views on many of
these issues, and perhaps with more focused topical meetings we can bring
people, in smaller groups, together from the two far-ends of our research
area.

Let's keep in touch, and I hope you'll be able to come over other time, too.

All the best: Endre

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Saleh Elmohamed [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Monday, August 02, 1999 12:34 PM
> To: Peter L. Hammer
> Cc: [email-masked]; Saleh Elmohamed
> Subject: DO'99 -- some comments and suggestions.
>
>
> Dear Peter and Endre,
>