INFORMS Open Forum

  • 1.  Call for Challenge Problems Requiring AI/OR Collaboration

    Posted 08-08-2023 15:07

    The CCC, in collaboration with INFORMS and ACM SIGAI, will be hosting the final workshop of a three-part series titled, Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Operations Research (OR), in late February or early March 2024, to set a course for fundamental research that needs the partnership of both disciplines. Organized by Yu Ding (Georgia Institute of Technology), Pascal Van Hentenryck (Georgia Institute of Technology), Sven Koenig (University of Southern California), Ramayya Krishnan (Carnegie Mellon University), Radhika Kulkarni (INFORMS), and Phebe Vayanos (University of Southern California), the workshop will focus on drafting a strategic plan for increasing the AI/OR partnership and on outlining real-world opportunities for collaboration, based on discussions from the previous two workshops.

    For this workshop, we are requesting proposals from the AI and OR communities for compelling and inspiring grand challenge problems of a theoretical or applied nature that 

    1. require the collaboration of AI and OR researchers and

    2. will result in basic research on the integration of AI and OR techniques that

    3. align with societal needs and national priorities with potential for real-world impact. 

    We would like proposals to describe a challenge problem that will result in the integration of AI and OR methods and articulate the AI and OR methods needed, dataset availability (if applicable), method innovation, evaluation criteria, path to applications, and the potential to result in impact on societal needs and national priorities. Some questions to consider are:

    1. What are challenges that you believe will be faced to tackle this problem, and what are the mechanisms needed to address them?

    2. How can policies/mechanisms incentivize collaborations between the two communities?

    3. Why do you think the two communities need to collaborate to address this challenge?

    Challenge problems can be submitted using this form. Submissions can be written in paragraph or bullet point style formats. Your submission should convincingly explain why it satisfies points 1, 2, and 3 above and how it addresses questions A, B, and C. Some high level ideas of challenges include leveraging optimization to mitigate bias in large language models, or using robust optimization to enhance privacy of generative AI. The deadline for submission is September 15, 2023.

    Selected submitters will be invited to participate in the third workshop to help shape the discussion around collaboration between AI and OR communities and researchers and to help break barriers in such collaborations.

    At the final workshop, in addition to laying out challenge problems, we will also outline additional strategies that will help both communities to impact national priorities, such as creating a joint summer school where AI and OR experts provide multidisciplinary training in AI and OR to Ph.D. students, and other ideas from the community. The objective for the third workshop is to write a final report that lays out a blueprint for activities that increase the collaboration between the AI and OR communities. 

    To learn more about the AI/OR Workshop series, please visit the first and second workshop event pages, and read the Workshop 1 Report Out and the Workshop 2 Report Out.

    Please remember to submit your ideas here by September 15, 2023.



    ------------------------------
    Phebe Vayanos
    Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair
    Associate Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering and Computer Science
    Co-Director | CAIS Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society | www.cais.usc.edu
    University of Southern California | Viterbi School of Engineering
    University Park Campus | Office OHE 310L
    phebe.vayanos@usc.edu
    https://sites.google.com/usc.edu/phebevayanos/
    ------------------------------


  • 2.  RE: Call for Challenge Problems Requiring AI/OR Collaboration

    Posted 08-09-2023 10:55

    Thanks for posting this announcement, Phebe! I look forward to the third AI/OR workshop which will be inspired by the challenge problems received in response to this call that is being sent out to both the OR and AI communities. 



    ------------------------------
    Radhika Kulkarni
    Vice President, Advanced Analytics R&D (retd.)
    VP, Advanced Analytics R&D (retired), SAS Institute Inc.
    Durham NC
    ------------------------------



  • 3.  RE: Call for Challenge Problems Requiring AI/OR Collaboration

    Posted 08-11-2023 10:59

    Any discussion on AI/OR has to start with Simon – details below.

    This AI/OR challenge is certainly a critical question that INFORMS community needs to respond to.  This said, it is incumbent on the INFORMS community to place this within the historical background of 70+ years of "analytics without borders" tools to support organizational decision making to improve organizational performance and scientific discovery.  It is only the INFORMS organization that has the end-to-end picture – not AI, not data science, not machine learning.

    To start this is not the first cycle of AI/OR partnership. The 1980s was full of this discussion and work in this area. Examples:

    1.      Dr. Peter Norden shepherded the AI/OR discussion in IJAA journal (formerly Interfaces).  Peter was a past president of INFORMs and he started IJAA – always looking for synergies.

    2.      Constraint based logic and other heuristics for planning and scheduling start in the AI community (See work by Mark Fox) and is not standard part of OR tool kits (heuristics in MILP or list structure-based algorithms in local solver).

    3.      Prof. Ed Feigenbaum is his book Expert Companies highlights work that is mixes and matches AI and OR with information systems – he points out the need for community intelligence.

    4.      Any AI/OR discussion has to start with Nobel Laurette Herbert Simon's presentation at INFORMS and later a paper in IJAA titled: "two heads are better than one – The collaboration of AI and OR" as well as his seminal work on organizational decision making, satisficing, and bounded rationality.



    ------------------------------
    Ken Fordyce
    director analytics without borders
    Arkieva
    Wilmington DE
    ------------------------------



  • 4.  RE: Call for Challenge Problems Requiring AI/OR Collaboration

    Posted 08-31-2023 13:05

    Reminder to Submit Challenge Problems Requiring AI/OR Collaboration

    This is a reminder to please submit your Challenge Problems which require collaboration between the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Operations Research (OR) disciplines by September 15th. You can submit your ideas using this form. Selected submitters will be invited to participate at the 3rd AI/OR workshop to help shape the discussion of potential collaboration between these communities and overcome hurdles preventing collaborations.



    ------------------------------
    Radhika Kulkarni
    Vice President, Advanced Analytics R&D (retd.)
    VP, Advanced Analytics R&D (retired), SAS Institute Inc.
    Durham NC
    ------------------------------