PLENARY SESSIONS

On Saturday, April 24, 2004, we will begin our celebration of the ORC's 50th Anniversary with a special event. The day will consist of a sequence of plenary sessions representing each of the five decades, during which the ORC has operated, starting with the 1950's. These talks are going to be friendly, reflective and fun!!

LOCATION: The event will be held on MIT campus in Edgerton Hall (34-101), 50 Vassar Street, Cambridge.

TIME: 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM.
Morning and afternoon refreshments and lunch will be provided.

1950's

John D.C. Little
Institute Professor
MIT Sloan School of Management
"The ORC before there was an ORC -- through 2054"
When did the OR Center REALLY start? What was going on B.C. (Before the Center)?  We discuss the history of OR and the ORC through 2054.


Ronald Howard
Stanford University
"Early Memories 1956-1964"
Operations research established as a program at MIT.  Faculty proselytize OR around the world. OR Group at Arthur D. Little, Inc. pioneers application to business. Gurus Morse and Kimball reign.  Probability, Markov processes, and dynamic programming burgeon.  Newly graduating PhD students feted by the next in line. And more.

1960's

Alvin W. Drake
MIT (EECS) (Retired)
"Recalling the 60's at the ORC"
The Beatles, Viet Nam, Flower Children, and Free Love were big things in the 60's. Staying in school to escape the draft was also big. There was an explosive growth in OR theory and applications. We'll recall some OR developments and people of the period, looking for help from session participants.

Ralph Keeney
Duke University
"24-215, 6.27, and X in the 1960s"
The Operations Research Center was a terrific place to be in the late 1960s, mainly due to the wonderful faculty and student colleagues-still good friends today. I'll use vignettes to describe what we students did in and out of school, what was fun, what was worthwhile, and what is still important today.

1970's

Bruce Golden
University of Maryland
"Visualization in Operations Research"
In this talk, I focus on the impact of visualization on problem solving in OR. Three applications will be described: vehicle routing, ranking of outstanding sports records, and a visually based decision support system for college selection.

Margaret Brandeau
Stanford University
"From Venn Diagrams to Bioterrorism: An OR Journey"
What do Venn diagrams, subway control systems, ambulance dispatching systems, hospital patient mix, facility location planning, printed circuit board manufacturing, colorectal cancer screening, HIV prevention, and bioterrorism all have in common?  Come find out how operations research is relevant to all of these topics!

1980's

Edward Kaplan
Yale University
"Getting Started"
The operations research mindset views the world as an endless sea of decision problems awaiting recognition and formulation as such.
Where do "good" problems come from? How can individual researchers tell if a particular issue is worth pursuing? Without claiming any global discoveries, I will revisit the front end of some personal adventures in policy modeling to try and figure out how they began.

Janice Hammond
Harvard Business School
"ORC values: Learning how to learn"
Our time at the OR center imbued us all with a set of "values" that
underlie the choices we've made and influenced who we are today. During those formative years, we learned how to learn, how to teach, and how to live in a diverse community. This talk will focus on how culture of the OR Center contributed to our learning.

1990's

Mitchell H. Burman
Analytics Operations Engineering Inc.
"OR: Salvaging Lost Opportunities in Industry (or How to REALLY Sell OR to Industry Management!)"
Running a successful OR consulting firm has provided first-hand experience on how valuable Operations Research can be in industry -- along with the stark reality of how OR is greatly misunderstood in the business world. By the very nature of the way we present ourselves and our capabilities, we have become our own worst enemy. This talk will focus on proven methods of getting OR accepted and implemented in mainstream industry.

Jonathan Caulkins
Carnegie Mellon University
"OR and the Drug War: Tales from the Trenches"
Throughout the late 1980s Americans listed drugs as the #1 problem facing the nation. ORC faculty preached that OR could solve all the important problems in the world. I believed them and enlisted as chief OR analyst in the drug war. Were they right? Come find out.