OR-Exchange in the top 50

Per Stack Exchange's directory of sites OR-Exchange has moved into the Top 50. This is good news for those in favor of keeping OR-Exchange a resource for the Operations Research community. There have been a lot of good questions asked this week. Although I threw a proverbial OR question about OR solvers some of the good ones include...

What file format for problem definition is suitable for OR-Exchange?

References for conjecture: Any regression can be translated into a math model

Please keep the questions and answers coming for OR-Exchange. For those that don't know about OR-Exchange I had a recent blog post about promoting this website for the Operations Research community.

OR-Exchange Needs Your Help

Michael Trick, maintainer of the OR-Exchange site, is finding himself in a predicament. Apparently the owners of Stack Exchange that make OR-Exchange possible are changing their terms of service and providing an ultimatum to the lower trafficked pages. OR-Exchange will have to shut down if it can not meet the new requirements.

I'm a fan of OR-Exchange. OR-Exchange is a great place to share ideas with the Operations Research community and find answers to questions. OR-Exchange is in the model of digg.com and reddit.com where you can vote up the questions and answers that you find favorable. That means value content will always rise to the top for easy dissemination.

Some people may argue that there is already a lot of information on the internet with Operations Research and that I can't argue against. The value of OR-Exchange is the dynamic collaboration with the Operations Research community. There can be value in posting Q&A topics and getting the community to answer to vote up and comment.

I urge you to give OR-Exchange a try to help promote this project. Otherwise we might lose a great resource.

Math is the New Cool for Employers

While parusing AnalyticBridge, Vincent Granville posted an article from the Wall Street Journal online that New Hiring Formula Values Math Pros. The WSJ article states that more and more companies are looking to statistics, data mining, and machine learning experts. Computer Science is waning compared to analytic experts. From the article...

The most desirable candidates, employers say, can have a variety of experience and educational backgrounds. Companies say specific degrees are less important than a focus on data-mining techniques.

This is definitely a trend I've been seeing. Companies want to see value delivered from their employees instead of just data management. I'm encouraged for the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research field and am looking forward to see how it takes off.

Anyone interested in a good RUG?

R User Groups are popping up around the country. In Dallas there is a new R User Group as told by David at the REvolutions blog. If the Larry in the article sounds familiar than you are right! Here is where you can sign up for the RUG in Dallas.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Dallas_RUG/

Also in Chicago they are getting things going with their own R User Group. REvolutions blog chimes in as well in an announcement for the windy city R users.

For those that don't know, R Project is a statistical computing environment very similar to S+ and SAS. It is free and open source and contains hundreds of free libraries and packages for statistical, optimization, predictive analytics, and data mining computing.

If you would like to get more interested in R in your region take a look at the REvolutions blog. REvolutions lists R User Groups all around the world. And if one is not in your area go ahead and get one started. It is a great way to network with professionals in your discipline.

DataMiningTools.com devoted to sharing data mining resources

DataMiningTools.com is an up and coming website devoted to all things data mining. There is a lot of tutorials, videos, reviews, and recommendations for quality tools of the data mining trade. There is even a feature for Open Source tools which definitely gets my attention.

DataMiningTools.com seems to be to data mining what IEOR Tools is to Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. I really like the presentation of the content. The links are tagged really well and are easy to find relevant resources for data mining. In the future I hope to feature some of the tutorials from this website.

One area you may to look at is the R Project tutorials which has my interest as of late.

New IEOR Tools contributor - developer of OpenOpt

I would like to welcome Dmitrey, developer of the open source optimization software suite, OpenOpt and maintainer of OpenOpt.org. Dmitrey will contribute from time to time about OpenOpt and software releases.

When I started the IEOR Tools blog I wanted it to be a forum for discussion, evaluation, and peer review of the tools available to the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research community. I believe that the best opportunity for continued development and research of tools of the trade is in the Open Source community. I hope that this blog can be a conduit for continued development and opportunity.

I'm excited for the contributions that Dmitrey will provide with OpenOpt and other open source developments.

Timetric, startup grearing up for a new statistics presentation platform

Techcrunch is reporting that Timetric has closed seed funding for an innovative way to present statistics online. From the article, the money is going to be used to help get their statistical platform rolled out. Timetric's claim is that it will be able to present statistics in a more "useful" manner. Timetric already is working with online gurus such as Guardian and United Business Media.

It seems to me that this may be competing with the Wolphram Alphra platform. Another way to present public data on the internet. Yet this is also showing an increased trend in the importance of data visualization. I'm encouraged to see there is competitors in the data visualization market. It definitely shows that there is a need for that data management and presenting it in a meaningful way. Sounds a lot like Operations Research to me!

I really like the layout of the website. Any website that focuses on visualization should be sharp and refined. Curious to see how Timetric proves out in the future.