The Or Times Vol 1 Issue 2 Fall 2007

Faculty Corner…………….. Cyberinfrastructure for the 21st Century Science and Engineering Discovery In 1984, when I was 11, my father bought me my first scientific calculator IK-82 for an equivalent of about 10% of his monthly Engineer's salary. The next day, I began my cyber-enabled exploration of science during a math test, which consisted of trigonometric function calculations of tricky angles, like 42036’15’’! I was done after 15 minutes while the rest of the class sweated much longer using old Bradis' tables for their calculations. Flash forward 23 years. Many OR researchers are still using “Bradis' tables” - their desktops, to do “not-so-real-life'' engineering innovations. But a paradigm shift has happened recently, bringing unprecedented computing capabilities via fancily named tera and petascale cyberinfrastructure (CI). The purpose of this article is to give the reader general awareness of CI and its opportunities. What is CI? CI consists of computing systems, data repositories, visualization environments, and people, all linked together by software and powerful networks, to enable research breakthroughs which are otherwise impossible. Being an infrastructure, CI intends to provide basic support, and the idea is that scientists eventually will be able to use it without thought – just as you do when you plug an appliance into an electrical outlet without having to comprehend the intricacies of electricity generation and conduction. But it will take us years to be able to use CI without substantial knowledge of its intricacies. Facilities: Since NSF coined the term in 2003, it has been actively pushing CI and a special Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) was created for this purpose. Currently, NSF supervises the TeraGrid project -- a cybernet with more than 250 teraflops of computing horsepower and more than 30 petabytes (quadrillions of bytes) of online and archival data storage, with rapid access and retrieval over high-performance networks. As it is now, the TeraGrid is the world's largest and most comprehensive distributed CI for open scientific exploration. TeraGrid is coordinated through the University of Chicago, with partner providers at Indiana University, Oak Ridge National Lab, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Pittsburgh, Purdue, San Diego Supercomputing Center, Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Chicago/ Argonne National Lab, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. (See Cyber on page 2)

The Committee Column LaTeX: An Indispensable Tool in an Engineer’s Kit Frustrated with the way the American Mathematical Society modified the look of his publications, in 1977, Donald Knuth, Professor Emeritus from Dept. of Computer Science at Stanford University began to develop a program called “Tex” (pronounced ‘tech’), to ensure that complex mathematical equations and text would look exactly the way he wanted them to appear in print [1]. A comprehensive version of TeX was made available by 1982. TeX is versatile and suitable for typesetting various types of documents such as journal articles, books, presentations, and letters. LaTeX (pronounced “lay-tech”) is a set of macros designed by Dr. Leslie Lamport, currently with Microsoft Corporation Inc., using TeX as the typesetting engine. LaTeX is now one of the most preferred forms of typesetting for many mathematically intensive books and journal publications. Advantages of LaTeX: • Professional quality output that does not vary with different operating systems. • Easy generation of complex multiline mathematical equations, bibliography, footnotes, headers, and footers • Several freely available “add-on-the-fly” packages for accomplishing every task a “regular text editor” can do, and much, much more… Disadvantages of LaTeX: • Takes plenty of practice to get familiar with commands (even though with the current freely available LaTeX editors, this has become easier) • It’s a programming language, so be ready to “debug” your code, if your output does not look the way you wanted it to. In my opinion however, the merits far outweigh the demerits. Several LateX editors like TeXnicCenter, Led, and TeXmaker are freely available. Help is just a click (in some cases a library) away from the installation of LaTeX editors to producing final output files in portable document format (pdf). Good Luck and Happy LaTeXing… By Vishnu Nanduri [1] T. Oetiker et al., ‘The Not so Short Introduction to LaTeX 2ε’, June 30th, 2007, http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf

Volume 1, Issue 2 Fall 2007

issue: s i h t e d e Insi hing mor

time aste of than a w ets k :Somet ower mar ic games ulated p Electron search on dereg Re

A Monthly Newsletter from Student Chapter of INFORMS @ IMSE, USF

News Feature Electronic games: something more than just a waste of time!! For all of us who have developed simulation models, it is clear that one of the hardest parts is to incorporate human

First of all I need to make clear the following: I am not an “electronic games freak” and this column does not intend to advocate the consumption of them. However, some researches have found a very interesting use for them that goes beyond just spending a whole Sunday afternoon in front of the TV or computer pressing buttons (like some of my roommates love to do). Dr. Nina Fefferman, an epidemiologist at Princeton University is using the Corrupted Blood outbreak in World of Warcraft to help her study and predict behavior of real world pandemics. First time I read about it, it sounded kind of far-fetched, but on a second thought it kind of made sense, after all games are simulation models (from a very academic perspective).

behavior to our model and more so, to assign numerical values associated with these types of behavior. It is in this regard, that Dr. Fefferman sees a great research opportunity. Furthermore, the game provides a way to experiment and try different scenarios of infection, given that it would be unethical to release an infectious disease in real life and see what happens.

Most of current pandemic models are built from the mitigation point of view, conversely the game provides a framework to study the infection spread from the human behavior perspective. It is evident that a game does not resemble 100% what takes place in real life (people can behave in a riskier way than in a game). However, what simuSome months ago, the “corrupted blood” disease spread lation model actually does it? rapidly within the online game World of Warcraft, killing Therefore, next time you see someone totally absentoff thousands of players in an uncontrolled plague. The minded playing a game, do not rush to conclusions. It infection raged, wreaking social chaos, despite quarantine could be one of your colleagues studying some scenarios measures. The researches identified a diversity of refor a simulation model. sponses to the threat of infection such as: some players fled from infected cities, others rushed to the help of other play- More info about Dr. Fefferman can be found at: ers (risking infection themselves), and others deliberately http://www.tufts.edu/med/phfm/faculty/fefferman-nina.htm spread the disease. http://www.math.princeton.edu/~feferman/

By Patricio Rocha

advances in computational thinking encompassing relevant concepts, methods, models, algorithms, and tools. CollecWhat is in it for us? In summer 2007, NSF put up a $22M tively, CDI multidisciplinary research outcomes are exsolicitation for Accelerating Discovery In Science and En- pected to produce revolutionary shifts in our understanding of a wide range of science and engineering phenomena and gineering through Petascale Simulations And Analysis (PetaApps) proposals. The solicitation sought proposals to socio-technical innovations. In addition, NSF will be sponsoring yearly Cyberinfrastructure Experiences for Gradudevelop the future simulation, optimization and analysis ates (CIEG) 10-week summer programs at national supertools that can use emerging petascale computing to adcomputing centers (San-Diego, in 2006) for doctoral engivance the frontiers of scientific and engineering research. neering students to gain experience with CI tools. Examples of research problems included nature's interacFlash backward 60 years to 1947. So much for a tions scaling from sub-particles to galactic, from subcellular to biosphere, complex biological systems, and dynamics Shockley-Bardeen-Brattain's invention. Alex Savachkin of chaotic and complex social systems. In response to this Assistant Prof. Industrial Engineering request, Drs. Das and Savachkin submitted a collaborative USF-Purdue-Rutgers proposal to address the challenge of mitigating cross-regional pandemic outbreaks via a petascale hierarchical simulation-based optimization framework. IMSE doctoral students D. Prieto and A. Uribe are an active part of this project. Cyber (Continued from Page 1)

(Solution to Puzzle) N=7491 bags!! By considering a certain number of coins from all bags at each weighing, we can use a combination of the 3 weighing to identify the bag with faulty coins. To do so the ratio of the number of coins taken from each bag at each of the weighing must be unique. For e.g.: if you take 3,6,9 coins from bag 1 for the 3 trials you cannot take 1,2,3 from another bag. Since we have 10 coins in each bag the total number of possible combinations is [20*20*20common ratios] = 7491 (20 because it can be placed on either the left or right pans). The difference in weight at each trial will be proportional to one of the combinations, and the bag from which this combination was taken is the one with faulty coins.

Future: Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) is NSF’s 2007-2012 $250M initiative to further propel

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Research corner Equilibrium Bidding Strategies in Deregulated Electric Power Markets The deregulation of the electric power market has brought about sweeping changes to a traditionally monopolistic industry. The industries are moving from vertically-integrated-government-controlled monopolies to horizontally-integrated-free market based corporations. Governments and industries are beginning to realize that restructuring the power market to provide open and flexible trading that encourages vigorous and fair competition in power supply is beneficial in the long run. Hence the world is moving towards more accessible, flexible and free markets, where trading of electricity can take place akin to other commodity markets. The presence of multiple participants vying for the same revenue resources enables the growth of a healthy competition. This consequently increases the quality and value of the services being offered. What is commonly referred to as the deregulated power market is actually a collection of various markets such as energy market and transmission market, differing only in the commodity being traded, the time frame and geographical location. The move towards a deregulated electric power industry has raised the awareness of the critical impact of transmission congestion on power networks. Limitations in the transmission grid constrain long-distance movement of power, which results in higher prices in certain locations of the network. This phenomenon is termed as transmission congestion, and the difference in the Locational Marginal Prices (LMPs) between any two busses is called congestion cost (transmission charge). Electricity markets use various transmission right mechanisms such as Financial Transmission Rights (FTR), to hedge the market participants from the volatility of the transmission charges. The auction is the central mechanism of the power markets. In FTR market, market participants submit cost information and points of injection and delivery in the form of bids, to the independent system operator (ISO). The ISO being the neutral party arbiter runs an FTR auction to allocate the FTRs. The bids are allocated such that they maximize the revenue from FTR sales while satisfying the simultaneous feasibility condition. As a result, the bidding behaviors of the participants become significant. Bidders make their decisions based on anticipated system operating conditions while holding FTRs. Similarly, in energy market ISO receives bids of cost information from the generators and allocates the electric production among the generators to minimize the total cost to the consumers. Our research concerns developing comprehensive matrix game models for scenarios where bidders compete with each other to maximize their profit over the FTR and energy markets. Equilibrium bidding strategies for the markets are found by using a value iteration based reinforcement learning algorithm, also developed through our research team. A two-tier matrix game theoretic approach of modeling FTR and energy allocation among competing generators and other market participants is novel and has not been attempted before. Also the value learning based algorithm to solve for market equilibrium allows examination of much larger network scenarios than those in the literature. This work is partially supported by a grant to Dr. Tapas K. Das from the National Science Foundation #ECS 0400268. By Cihan Babayigit

International Multicultural Luncheon Fundraiser on September 7th 2007

N = 7491 INFORMS officers at the “International Lunch”

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Professors and students enjoy a multicultural cuisine

Puzzles and Jokes

Puzzle: (Contributed by Chaitra Gopalappa)

There are N bags which contain 10 coins each. One of these N bags has all faulty coins. The weight of the faulty coins is different from the weight of the genuine coins (lighter or heavier, not known). You do not know the weight of either of the coins. You have a beam-balance (one pan each on either end of the beam on which you can place an arbitrary number of coins you want to measure). The balance does not give you the weight but gives you the difference in the weight between the right and the left. What is the maximum number of bags you can have, i.e., value of N, if you want to find the bag containing faulty coins using just three weighing trials? Solution on Page 2

Jokes: (Contributed by Chaitra Gopalappa) "Normal people believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet." ---- Scott Adams, ‘The Dilbert Principle’. •

Volume 1, Issue 2

.. Job s g tin s o P ing m o Upc ts... n eve

• • • •

What is the difference between Mechanical Engineers and Civil Engineers? Mechanical Engineers build weapons. Civil Engineers build targets. --Anon.

Engineers aren't boring people; they just get excited over boring things. --Anon.

Asst/Associate Prof positions in the Dept. of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering: U. of Toronto Tenured/tenure track faculty position Eng. Education: Purdue University Postdoctoral fellowship and graduate research experience funds: NSF Quality Improvement Analyst: Mayo Clinic Faculty positions: Texas A&M University

(for details about the jobs above visit http://informs.eng.usf.edu/jobs.htm)

INFORMS Combined Colloquium in Seattle, WA (Nov 3, 2007) IMSE Students making presentations in the 2007 INFORMS Annual Meeting at Seattle (November 4th– November 7th)

Vishnu Nanduri: Sunday Nov 04, 08:00 - 09:30, A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Finding Nash Equilibrium of Multiplayer Matrix Games

Chaitra Gopalappa: Tuesday Nov 06, 08:00 - 09:30, Hybridization Noise Removal from cDNA Microarrays Cihan Babyigit: Tuesday Nov 06, 16:30 - 18:00, A Matrix Game Approach for FTR Allocation in Electric Power Networks

Fall 2007

Abhik Bhattacharya: Sunday Nov 04, 16:30 - 18:00, Improving Operational Quality of Care in Healthcare Inpatient Processes Alcides Santander: Monday Nov 05, 08:00 - 09:30, Interpreting Laboratory Test Results as a Dynamic Model

Arka Bhattacharya: Wednesday Nov 07, 10:00 - 11:30, Comparison of Procurement Options in the Healthcare Industry and Determining the Degree of Innovation

Wilkistar Otieno: Monday Nov 05, 12:30-13:30, Failure Characterization, and Intensity Function Estimates of Nanosystems

Swati Verma: Wednesday Nov 07, 10:00 - 11:30, Defining Service Quality in an Outpatient Clinic with Complex Constituency

Hui Wang: Tuesday Nov 06, 08:00 - 09:30, Error CancellationModeling and Its Application to Machining Process Control

For details visit http://meetings.informs.org/Seattle07/

Vishnuteja Nanduri President

Diana Prieto Laila Cure Publicity

Patricio Rocha Vice President Wilkistar Otieno Ozan Ozcan Treasurers Athina Brintaki Secretary Chaitra Gopalappa Dayna Martinez Logistics

Andres Uribe Webmaster

IMSE 4202 E. Fowler Ave. ENB 118 Tampa FL, 33620 Tel: (813) 974-5591 Fax: (813) 974-5953 [email protected] 4

Alcides Santander Shaoqiang Chen Social activities Wilkistar Otieno Laila Cure Editors