The Or Times Vol 2 Issue 2 Spring 2008

Faculty Corner……………..

Message from the outgoing president

Enabling Bionanoscale Design through Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Haptics Bionanotechnology is a key emerging scientific and technological area of nanotechnology that aims to identify biological molecules and to utilize them to create bionanoscale products with unimaginable applications in every aspect of life. The ability to manipulate and assemble biological molecules can lead to the advancement of science and engineering in areas as diverse as biosensors, discovery of new pharmaceutical drugs and diagnostics, and drug delivery. For example, it can be used to invalidate cancer viral material, design chips for gene sequencing and engineering, and create nanodevices with new capabilities for diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Research has recently begun towards the identification of biological molecules so that they can act as motors, mechanical joints and sensors. As the fabrication techniques to create bionanoscale products are still under research and development, evaluating potential designs for bionanoscale products requires new design approaches and virtual haptic interfaces that consider the different physical phenomena encountered at the nanoscale level. The modeling of molecular interactions is a very challenging task as most molecules have flexible bodies that can adopt many different conformations (or shapes). Moreover, interactive forces created between molecules play a major role in determining whether the molecules can successfully assemble together to form a bionanoscale product. Tools that provide real-time force feedback of virtual objects such as haptic devices can greatly increase our understanding of key molecular forces by providing the “feeling” of these forces to facilitate the testing and assembly of possible bionanoscale designs. Our laboratory, BioNanoCAD Lab, addresses the current limitations in bionanoscale design by investigating and creating computational geometric-based algorithms for effectively modeling flexible molecules and their interactions using haptic devices. Haptic devices are electromechanical devices that exert forces on users giving them the illusion of touching something in the virtual world. These devices enable people to manipulate, visualize and interact with simulated environments of complex engineering systems and have been widely used in various applications such as virtual prototyping, shape sculpting, and surgical simulation and training. In bionanoscale design, haptic devices can enable researchers to manipulate and assemble molecules that will serve as building blocks for the bionanoscale product. (See Haptics on page 2)

USF-INFORMS’ Reflections about the year gone by… It is that time of the year when the USF Chapter of INFORMS members elect a new committee to take office for the coming 2008-2009 academic year. It is worthwhile at this point in time to reflect upon the activities of the Chapter, to not only portray the accomplishments of the chapter but also to acknowledge and encourage the continued involvement and support of all USF-INFORMS members. The following are some of the activities that the Chapter successfully accomplished  The Chapter hosted renowned professors from Universities across the country for research presentations,  launched a successful research newsletter “The OR Times,” currently in its 5th issue,  compiled academic job placement news on the INFORMS student chapter website,  compiled and displayed posters of departmental research  participated in Stampede of Service (SOS), a community volunteering effort organized by USF  organized several fund raisers and multiple social events to enhance the camaraderie in IMSE department,  represented IMSE department in the INFORMS Southwest Regional Conference at Texas A&M University,  coordinated simulation demonstrations for Engineering EXPO On a personal note, I would like to thank each and every one of the committee members for their strong commitment, dedication, and undying enthusiasm. Through this chapter we have all been able to build strong friendships and memories that will last a lifetime. I encourage all the new students to take advantage of such a vibrant student chapter by becoming members and urge the “not-so-new” students to keep up their continued involvement. We would like to specially thank Dr. José ZayasCastro, our Chapter’s faculty advisor for being incredibly supportive of all our activities. We owe him a debt of gratitude. We thank all the faculty and staff of IMSE for their continued participation in all our activities and constant support and encouragement. Sincerely, Vishnu Nanduri President, USF-INFORMS Chapter (2007-2208) Volume 2, Issue 2 Spring 2008

rian Humanita .. c Poli ies

n ssue:OR nitment i s i h t i po I ns i d e tient Ap Pa Issues,

A Newsletter from Student Chapter of INFORMS @ IMSE, USF

News Feature

What is the Role of O.R. in Humanitarian Issues?

It has been more than two years since a conversation I had with my former advisor regarding possible research topics. Like several first year graduate students, I had my own idea about what I wanted to do and I decided to talk it over with him. In hindsight, I admit it was pretty naïve to think that I could convince him to let me work on the topic I was suggesting. After all, students have to take advantage of the experience, knowledge and contacts their advisors have accumulated over the years. Furthermore, the idea I had was pretty vague—I was concerned with the way several rich countries and worldwide organizations had poured large quantities of money in Africa for poverty eradication without major results. After realizing that I had been absolutely unsuccessful persuading my advisor I tried to convince myself that the idea, a brainchild of the United Nations’ poverty relief efforts mattered to economists and politicians, and had nothing to do with operation research. Fortunately, during the last weeks I have realized how wrong I was. First, it was an e-mail forwarded by one of my colleagues; Diana Prieto about a signed petition organized by some people from Georgia Tech with the objective of creating the INFORMS Humanitarian Applications Section. Then it was the February Edition of the ORMS Today magazine titled “Doing Good with Good OR.”, that had articles covering community-based opportunities in OR, OR applied to disaster relief and human rights. Actually, here in our Department Diana Prieto and Andres Uribe; both PhD. Students, led by Dr. Das and Dr.

Savachkin have been working on pandemic relief efforts for several months now. Lastly, and what ultimately motivated me to write this column was a one-hour tutorial section dedicated to Humanitarian and Public Applications of OR/MS during the last Southwest INFORMS Conference held in College Station, TX on April 18-19 2008. Ideally we would not like to have to work on these issues. Nobody likes to see natural disasters, wars, or political crises happening around the world. However, one has to pay attention to the news in the media for a few minutes every day to see that more people are being displaced from their houses because of wars, more kids are still dying from malaria and other preventable and curable diseases in Africa, and nature around the globe is beginning to suffer the effects of global warming. Sadly, everything seems to indicate that this will not stop anytime soon. Coming back to my unsuccessful idea, nowadays I feel more than ever that it has a place within the O.R. field of action. Yet it needs to be narrowed down and I will probably have to wait until after my graduation to work on it. I am positive that you, my colleagues, and the faculty also have your own ideas regarding humanitarian issues, a subject whose challenges I believe should be accorded our attention. NOTE: In the coming months the Center for Humanitarian Logistics from Georgia Tech will organize a conference that will cover this topic in great details.

The engineering toolbox There is an old Mexican proverb that says “the hammer thinks everything looks like a nail”. As highly specialized professionals we can face the same trouble. The more we study a tool or technique, the more we want to apply it to every single problem. Sometimes it helps us to find newer approaches to traditional problems thus creating new research topics. However, we at times tend to solve easy problems the harder way. As Industrial Engineers, we have a very rich background of engineering and managerial tools. During our undergraduate years we learn the basics of an array of quantitative and qualitative techniques. This wide array of techniques narrows down as we advance academically. One researcher told me once that the more you study, the more you know about fewer things. Consequently, you have interesting conversations with fewer and fewer individuals, to an extent of having to travel to conferences to explain about what you do for a living. I think a good researcher should balance an extraordinary and deep

knowledge of his own discipline, an understanding of other fields of study and an understanding of the general culture. Nowadays research is becoming not only interdisciplinary, but intercultural. When did you attend a conference not related with your research? Which was the last nontechnical book you read? How much do you know about the culture of your coworkers, classmates or professors? Did you participate regularly in community activities? Perhaps it is time to start enriching our toolbox with something more than a hammer.

By Patricio Rocha PhD. Student, Industrial Engineering

By Alfredo Santana-Reynoso PhD. Student, Industrial Engineering Haptics (Continued from Page 1)

In this way, researchers can gain deeper understanding of key forces at the nanoscale while also directing the simulation based on their expertise through the haptic device. Therefore, the development of a bionanoscale computeraided design system with haptics will provide a fast and interactive design tool to virtually test bionanoscale designs prior to fabrication for the rapid realization of bionanotechnology into actual usable products for the society. By Susana Lai-Yuen, Ph.D. Asst. Professor, Industrial Engineering

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Research corner Patients’ Appointment Policies. Do you like to wait? The Healthcare industry faces the challenge of improving the patient’s satisfaction while keeping low operational costs. Near to 20% of the patients that use Medicare receive inpatient care and more than 60% are serviced in outpatient facilities. This situation resulted in an increase in healthcare expenditures, from $89 billion in 1993 to $135 billion in 2002. Outpatient clinics, which in 2002 received over 83.3 million patient visits, have to abide by operational scheduling policies and practices determined by the clinic managers. To design an effective outpatient scheduling system, one must consider several system variables that lead to system variability. However, most of the appointment systems only consider doctor’s availability when planning the schedule, ignoring other factors that affect patient satisfaction and the clinics’ operational performance. The availability of resources, (e.g., number of doctors, nurses, and rooms) affect the number of patients that can be accepted and the kinds of procedures they can receive. Other sources of variability are the inaccurate or incomplete information flow, uniqueness of the patient’s medical condition, incorrect estimation of processing time, presence of walk-in patients, and patient no-shows. These and other factors must be addressed to design and implement a successful appointment scheduling policy. Another main variable that is often ignored is the patient’s satisfaction. A certain survey of outpatients listed affordability, waiting time and coordination of care as their measures of service quality. Patients’ dissatisfaction leads to patient disenrollment which hurts the reputation. Research conducted by Picker Institute shows that, the likelihood of cancellation and no-show increases with the increase of waiting times. However, the definition of a unique quality measure for the system is complicated, given the amount of variables that affect it and the different perceptions that patients and managers have about quality service. Also, system managers need to define what the focus of their operations is; to optimize system performance and/or optimize patient satisfaction or to find a balance between both.

Solution to Puzzles Six. Four possible choices of seatingcase1: 2 choose odd and 1 even numbered seat; case2: 1 chooses odd and 2 even; case3: all choose odd; case4: all choose even. Taking first two cases: the person has to replace the even (case1) or odd(case2) seated guy’s bottle to maximize the count which is 6. For the last two cases, any one of the bottles could be replaced, while the even(case3)/ odd(case4) numbered bottles are never used, hence keeping the count at 7. Hence the least possible value is 6.

By Alcides Santander PhD. Student Industrial Engineering

“The last ball is white. The number of white balls in the urn is an odd number at the beginning of the process. On each step, two balls are tentatively removed from the urn. But it is never the case that this results in exactly one white ball being permanently removed; if a black and white are removed, the white is returned. If two whites are removed, both are taken. In other words, if the number of white balls was odd before a move, it is still odd after the move. Hence, since we started with an odd number of white balls, we must end with an odd number of white balls. Since we only have one ball left, that must be white.”

INFORMS Members at the Southwest Regional Conference at Texas A&M: April 18-19, 2008

N = 7491 3

Puzzles

(Contributed by Chaitra Gopalappa, PhD Student, IMSE)

Solution on Page 2

1. Three people meet everyday at a round table that has 12 seats, where each seat has a bottle of water. On the first day each one of them randomly picks a seat. Every day after that, the person sits 2 seats to the right or left of the seat he was at on the previous day. When a person occupies a seat the water at that seat, if available, is consumed. Everyday after the meeting a fourth person replaces just one bottle, and while doing so tries to maximize the number of bottles at the table. What is the minimum number of bottles that always remain at the table? 2. An urn contains 75 white balls and 150 black balls. Next to the urn is a large pile of black balls. Again and again, someone removes a pair of balls from the urn. If either ball is black, then the black ball is placed on the pile, and the ther ball is returned to the urn. If both balls are white, then they are discarded, and a black ball is taken from the pile to the urn. On every turn, there is one less ball in the urn. What color is the last ball in the urn? [Ref: A K Dewdney, The Tinkertoy Computer and Other Machinations, Freeman, 1993.]

Have you looked at your most

Food or Fuel???

by Vishnu Nanduri, Ph.D. Candidate, IMSE

Volume 2, Issue 2 Spring 2008

recent grocery bill closely? Chances are that you may have spent well over 10% more than what you might have done a year ago, to buy the same amount of food. This is not a problem in the US alone, in fact, it is being more severely experienced in developing countries. The World Bank President, Dr. Robert Zoellick, notes that “…food prices have jumped sharply in recent months, driven by an increase in the use of land to grow crops for transport fuels, plus increased demand and poor weather in some countries.” There are two major schools of thought regarding the raging debate about what is causing the food prices to go up. Case 1: Food prices have gone up due to usage of land intended for food products for biofuel production by major food exporters, leading to a shortage of food grains and hence the inflation. Case 2: Food prices have gone up due to severe increase in demand in booming economies specially that of China and India, who are placing a significant strain on food supplies. Statistics indicate that the US is the largest consumer of bio-fuels and, arguably one of the biggest culprits in this debate. On the other hand, the hope of the world community is that researchers in the US will in the near future invent highly efficient methods to harness the unlimited potential of wind and solar energy and thus mitigate any further need for “food-based” fuels in the years to come. The Daily Telegraph, a leading newspaper in the UK, notes that severe demand on food grains is mainly being caused by increase in size and wealth of middle-class families in India and China. Though the middle-class populations of these gigantic countries put together is a staggering 600 million, which is close to the population of entire US and Western Europe combined, I find it hard to completely agree that this is ‘The Cause.’ The same report mentions the effect of rising demand of bio-fuels in developed countries only as an afterthought. It is interesting to note here that the European Union and Brazil are the world’s biggest ethanol exporters. Is it a case of passing the buck? I will let you be the judge of that. Large populations in countries like India and China are indeed causing a lot of burden on the world food production, but is it wise to point fingers toward the so-called “hungrier” economies to shield singling out of biofuel production? On the other hand, it is also not fair to hold responsible the farmers in these ethanol exporting countries. It is only natural for farm land owners to invest in crops that give them more bang for the buck. As I was discussing this issue with my Kenyan colleague (Ms. Wilkistar Otieno), she was quick to point out a real example from her own country. During the British rule, Kenyan farmers were encouraged to, and found it lucrative, to grow tea and coffee. Soon after, a famine followed due to severe shortage of food grains like maize. Similar situation is possibly brewing in major food exporting countries like Brazil, where farmers, looking at short term gains, are turning toward investing in corn to aid ethanol production. This is causing a severe food grain shortage across the world thus driving the food prices higher and higher. I would like to note here that this article is simply an attempt to point out the new direction in which the world is currently headed. By no means, have I considered the theory of economic forces (where the markets are expected to eventually settle at equilibrium), statistically verified if this trend of skyrocketing food prices is going to continue, or if other factors are affecting the food prices. As the population grows, the need for food grows, and that is inevitable in the 21st century. What is avoidable is the use of food crops for producing biofuel, since it is not a sustainable practice. The continuous-renewable-free supply of solar and wind energy drives me to believe that the long term solution is to invest in developing extremely efficient mechanisms to harness these unlimited resources that Mother Nature has bestowed upon us.

Incoming INFORMS Officers for the 2008-2009 Academic year President: Patricio Rocha Vice President: Andres Uribe Treasurers: Diana Prieto & Dayna Lee-Martinez Secretary: Laila Cure Logistics: Alcides Santander Webmaster: Qing Wei Li

OR Times Editors: Wilkistar Otieno & Vishnu Nanduri Publicity & Social Events: Fetullah, Ozan Ozcan, Athina Brintaki, Rita Pena, Gang Liu, Yang Tan

Outgoing Committee Members of the 2007-2008 Academic year Vishnuteja Nanduri (President) Patricio Rocha (Vice President) Wilkistar Otieno, Ozan Ozcan (Treasurers)

Athina Brintaki (Secretary) Chaitra Gopalappa, Dayna Martinez (Logistics) Diana Prieto, Laila Cure, (Publicity)

Andres Uribe, (Webmaster) Alcides Santander, (Social activities) Wilkistar Otieno, Laila Cure (Editors)

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