F E E D B a C K WINFORMS INSTITUTIONAL Newsletter of WINFORMS MEMBERS the Washington Institute for Operations Research

F E E D B A C K WINFORMS INSTITUTIONAL Newsletter of WINFORMS MEMBERS The Washington Institute for Operations Research

BOOZ-ALLEN & HAMILTON, and the Management Sciences Volume 24 Number 4 (August - December, 2002) INC. Web: http://winforms.chapter.informs.org CACI - MILITARY email : [email protected] SIMULATION AND ANALYSIS DIVISION

CALIBRE SYSTEMS INC. nd 2 Joint Symposium Scheduled COMPUTER SYSTEMS CENTER INC. (CSCI) ANNUAL EVENT TO TAKE THE CNA CORPORATION PLACE IN APRIL

FEDERAL AVIATION As many of you may recall, the 2002 Joint ADMINISTRATION Symposium co-sponsored with Washington

GEORGE MASON Academy of Sciences (WAS) and the DC UNIVERSITY Chapter of the World Futures Society was a huge success! This prompted the THE GEORGE WINFORMS officers and directors to again WASHINGTON pursue co-sponsorship of a symposium in UNIVERSITY Don Bates 2003. AT&T GOVERNMENT 2003 Symposium Chair SOLUTIONS Last Fall, the board unanimously approved Mr. Don Bates as symposium chair INSTITUTE FOR DEFENSE and Don has successfully gotten the effort off the ground. ANALYSES

LOGISTICS MANAGEMENT This year, the symposium will again be hosted at the AAAS Building in INSTITUTE Washington D.C. on Tuesday and Wednesday, April 22 & 23, 2003. Three tracks have been tentatively scheduled and the theme will be “Analysis in Our MAXIMAL SOFTWARE, INC Changing Times.” Mark your calendars! We still need lots of volunteers, so

MCR, INC. don't be shy with your rolodex's!

THE MITRE CORPORATION st INFORMS at the 31 USA NORTHRUP GRUMMAN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY Mathematical Olympiad Contributed by Frank Trippi PRESEARCH INC

TRW INTERNATIONAL Winners of the Mathematical Association of America Thirty-First USA Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO) were feted by the sixteen sponsors, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA including INFORMS, of the American Mathematics Competitions, on June 2002. The Award Ceremonies were held at the National Academy of Sciences, VECTOR RESEARCH , INC in Washington, DC

FEEDBACK Page 1 August - December 2002 It should be noted, the winners outscored more than 238,000 students, nationwide, in grades 7—12, on a series of challenging exams. Of the top 326 USAMO participants, the top twelve were named USAMO winners. Two of them are young women - Inna Zakharevich (Henry M. Gunn H.S., Palo Alto, CA) and Alison B. Miller (Home Educators Enrichment Group, Niskayuna, NY). One of them - Inna Zakharevich - tied four men (Daniel Kane, West H.S., Madison, WI; Ricky Liu, Newton South H.S., Newton Centre, MA; Tiankai Liu, Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH; and P0—Ru Loh, James Madison H.S., Madison, WI), for first place and perfect scores!

The other winners were Steve Byrnes (Roxbury Latin School, West Roxbury, MA) ; Michael Hamburg (Saint Joseph H.S., South Bend, IN) ; Neil Herriot (Palo Alto H.S., Palo Alto, CA) ; Anders H. Kaseorg (Charlotte Home Education Assn., Charlotte,NC); Gregory Price (Thomas Jefferson H.S. of Science & Technology, Alexandria, VA); and Tong-ke Xue (Hamilton H.S., Chandler, AZ)

A formal reception/dinner honoring Mike Trick (front row, left) and Mark Doherty (INFORMS) (front row, right) not only the winners and their and the USAMO Winners, at the Albert Einstein Memorial families, but also members of sponsoring organizations, followed in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U. S. Department of State. President Bush’s congratulations to all winners was delivered by Dr. John H. Marburger, III, Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Office of the President.

After a rigorous summer training program at the University of Nebraska, six of the twelve traveled as the United States team to compete in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), held July 19-30 in Glasgow, Scotland. The IMO attracted 300 of the most talented mathematics students from more than 80 countries.

Monthly Meeting Summaries, August – December 2002

AUGUST 2002 Mr. Douglas Hubbard spoke at the August meeting. His talk was titled “The IT Measurement Inversion: Why Measurement Priorities are Upside-Down” and the abstract was as follows: The business cases created for IT investments are often filled with highly uncertain numbers. Managers try to measure some of these variables to get better estimates. But mathematical methods that exist for computing the economic value of these measurements show that measurement priorities are typically backward. Find out how the information value calculation works, what was discovered with this calculation, and how to better prioritize your IT measurements in the future.

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OCTOBER 2002 Mr. Vince Roske spoke at the October evening meeting. The presentation was "Analysis Support to Operations Planning for Small Scale Contingencies." Abstract: Analysis support to SSC planning has for too long been concentrated on developing analysis tools that claim to be "useful" to the military planner. Too often this amounts to analysts inventing the problem and solution from their own perspective. The result is the waste of millions of dollars in analysis tool developments that never get productively used. This talk addresses the challenges of developing useful tools for SSC planning, give examples of development initiatives that have failed, and contrasts those to examples of recent initiatives that show promise. The meeting was well attended (standing room only) and Mr. Roske imparted numerous bits of wisdom. One area discussed extensively was agent based modeling and the exploration of emergent behavior.

NOVEMBER 2002

In November , Mary Batcher and her team from the Ernst & Young, Quantitative Economic and Statistics (QUEST) Group of Washington DC presented at the monthly meeting. The team presented three real case studies that applied value added quantitative modeling to complex business and policy problems, improving decision quality for their clients. Each presentation will last about 20 minutes.

In the area of telecommunications, Ms Susan Garille Higgins spoke on "Determining Economically Optimal Service Standards using Linear Programming." A local phone company that wants to sell long distance needs to provide equally good service to its own customers as it does to its competitors' customers (long distance companies). If it fails to do this, then it must pay a fine. How much should it pay? This talk presented a way of looking at this problem that can be solved using an LP.

In the area of fair lending, Ms Cathryn Marsh spoke on "Statistical Analysis to Reduce Compliance Cost and Litigation Risk." This talk covered applications of statistical analyses and regression techniques to the area of fair lending, which helps banks and mortgage companies self-monitor their compliance with fair lending laws and their own standards in the underwriting and pricing of mortgage, consumer, and other loans.

In the area of auditing, Mr Ryan Petska spoke on "Efficient Sampling Techniques Applied to Auditing Applications." Theory tells us that in audit situations, Probability Proportionate to Size (PPS) sampling can be advantageous over Stratified Random Sampling, (SRS) when the error rate is rare. Yet from tax to healthcare, federal and state regulators as well as Big Four firms often use stratified approaches in many audit settings even in the face of low error rates. This talk explores PPS versus stratified sampling for various distributions of errors found in common modern audit settings. Standard estimators, such as MPU, ratio, and regression, estimators are considered from stratified samples and compared to PPS samples of equal sizes.

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PAC Bytes Contributed by Frank Trippi

The INFORMS / Public Awareness Committee (PAC) participates in outreach activities that increase general awareware of our profession. In August 2002, PAC was invited by Gerald Gambino (Math coordinator, Fairfax Public Schools System) to participate in the school systems annual Secondary Mathematics Inservice Dau Langley High School (VA). PAC presenters were WINFORMS members Don Gross and Frank Trippi and Hazel Orth. Hazel is the Teacher Leader, Teacher Instructional Modules (TIMs) Working Group, and a senior math teacher at Langley.

Two identical sessions entitled “Operations Research, TIMs, and You” provided a brief summary of what Operations Research is , information about INFORMS, and a survey of the completed 10 TIMs; Hazel Orth (front left), Gerald Gambino (back left) then, zeroed in on specifically incorporating the math and Don Gross work with teacher participants at the programming principles of TIMs 6 - “Service Woes at Inservice Day. Speedy Delivery - Finding the Shortest Route”, into a Math “ Traveling Salesman Problem .”

The teachers enjoyed the interactive approach very much and were particularly pleased because Hazel had been emphasizing using TIMs in her classes.

SIGSTAT Topics for Winter/Spring 2003 Contributed by Charlie Hallahan

SIGSTAT is the Special Interest Group in Statistics for the CPCUG , the Capital PC User Group, and WINFORMS , the Washington Institute for Operations Research Service and Management Science. The group meets on a regular basis to discuss statistics applications and exchange information relevant to the groups’ membership.

All meetings are in Room S3031, 1800 M St, NW from 12:30 to 1:30. Enter the South Tower & take the elevator to the 3 rd floor to check in at the guard’s desk.

First-time attendees should contact Charlie Hallahan, 202-694-5051, [email protected] , and leave their name. Directions to the building & many links of statistical interest can be found at the SIGSTAT website, http://www.cpcug.org/user/sigstat/ .

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SIGSTAT topics and schedule:

February 12, 2003: PROCs MI & MIANALYZE in SAS/STAT (http://www.sas.com)

February 26, 2003 "Live Graphs"

March 12, 2003: R Graphics (http://www.r-project.org)

April 9, 2003: SAS 9.0 ( http://www.sas.com )

May 14, 2003: SAS/IML Workshop 2.0 ( http://www.sas.com )

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA ACCELERATED MASTER'S DEGREE IN SYSTEMS AND INFORMATION

Responding to the needs of industry and individuals alike, this 11-month program enables professionals to earn a Master's Degree without career interruption. Classes will be meeting every other weekend from May 2003-April 2004 in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia.

Given the early interest level in this opportunity, the Program is now accepting on-line preliminary applications. Please log onto our web site at:

www.sys.virginia.edu/weekend/

The Program will also be conducting the following Information Sessions in our area:

January 14th, 6:00-7:30 PM...... Ritz Carlton Hotel...... Tyson's Corner, VA

January 28th, 6:00-7:30 PM....Richmond/Downtown Marriott...... Richmond, VA

February 22nd, Accelerated Program Open House at The University of Virginia

To attend any of these sessions, please visit our web site or email: [email protected]

WE LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING FROM YOU!

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WINFORMS Officers President Sean Vessey US Army Cost&Econ Analysis Ctr [email protected] (703) 601-4138 Vice-President Russell Vane III Veridian [email protected] (703) 516-6376 Secretary Cortez "Steve" Stephens MCCDC USMC. [email protected] (703) 784-6029 Treasurer Jeffrey Paulus AT&T, Government Solutions [email protected] (703) 696-9360 Trustee (02-04) Dan Nussbaum Booz, Allen, Hamilton, Inc. [email protected] (703) 902-4957 Trustee (02-04) Robert “Bob” Sheldon L-3 Com Analytics Corp [email protected] (703) 645-8437 Trustee (01-03) Bjarni Kristjansson Maximal Software, Inc [email protected] (703) 522-7900 Trustee (01-03) Perk Pedrick CNA [email protected] (703) 824-2747 Past President Don Bates Office of the Secretary of Defense [email protected] (703) 696-9490

WINFORMS Committees Evening Program Stephen Mack [email protected] (703) 413-5570 Institutional Members James Huttinger Booz, Allen, Hamilton, Inc. [email protected] (703) 845-2107 Membership Wallace Keene The Public Manager Journal [email protected] (301) 340-9096 Publications Harvey Graf The MITRE Corporation [email protected] (703) 696-9490 Statistics SIG Charlie Hallahan US Dept of Agriculture [email protected] (202) 694-5051 Symposium Chair Don Bates Office of the Secretary of Defense [email protected] (703) 696-9490 Washington Academy of Science (WAS) Liaison Dr. John G. Honig Institute for Defense Analyses [email protected] (301) 845-2045 Webmaster Ron Schwarz The MITRE Corporation [email protected] (703) 883-7612

Important 2003 Calendar Dates Please take a moment to mark these dates on your calendars. Some are tentative, so keep in contact for updates:

♦ Wednesday, January 22, 2003 – Evening Meeting at BAH in Tyson’s at 6:30 p.m. (Dr. Joe Bolmarcich) ♦ April 22-23, 2003 – WINFORMS Annual Joint Symposium “Analysis in Our Changing Times” in Washington, D.C. ♦ May 4-6, 2003 – INFORMS Conference on OR/MS Practice in Phoenix, AZ ♦ October 19-22, 2003 – INFORMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta, GA

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The Washington DC Area chapter of INFORMS WINFORMS -- proudly presents -- Evening Program Featured

Speaker Who Shoots How Many?

Dr. Joe Warfare involves myriad variables that combine with one another with such complexity in effecting the outcome that the process may be called almost chaotic. Centuries of analytical study concerning how warfare outcomes come about have provided little more than some Bolmarcich rough quantification of the qualitative guidance of Clausewitz (1832). Our current approaches, methods, and machinery are unable to predict the outcome of warfare with any Chief Scientist, certainty, much as the final score of a football game seems impossible to predict with any QUANTICS, Inc. certainty. But there is one aspect of warfare that turns out to be quite predictable. It is the pattern of the variation of combat performance among individual combatants — a few Dr. Bolmarcich co-founded combatants end up killing many enemy while many end up killing few. This pattern holds QUANTICS, Inc. in 1977. He has despite differences in areas of warfare, types of combat, length of combat, types of over 30 years of managerial and combatants, and numbers of combatants on each side both participating and killed. The technical experience, primarily in purpose of this talk is to present some of the examples of this pattern that we have mathematical operations research, discovered to date which are complete enough to study statistically. We end with a rather and in the development of stark, probabilistic characterization of the phenomenon, namely, that the chance mechanism mathematical models linking the which best represents the variation in the behavior of human beings in warfare is identical to combat and logistics aspects of the chance mechanism which best represents the variation in the behavior of atoms in the warfare. He received the David Rist physical universe. The way to bet is that all outcome states are equally likely. Prize from the Military Operations Research Society for the key ideas behind these munitions planning Wednesday, January 22, 2003 methods and has produced over 500 reports, papers, and briefings. Dr. Bolmarcich earned a BS from 6:00 p.m. Registration, Buffet, & Networking Drexel University (Mathematics) in 6:30 p.m. Speaker 1965 and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (Applied Mathematics) in 1972. He has served Drexel as an adjunct professor, as the Chairman of the External Advisory Board to the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, and as the Chairman of the Advisory Council to the College of Arts & Sciences.

Note The Location!

Booz-Allen & Hamilton 8283 Greensboro Drive

McLean, Virginia

(in Tyson’s Corner – see website for directions) http://winforms.chapter.informs.org/directions_to_booz-allen.pdf

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Call for Volunteers and Presentations

for the

2nd Joint Symposium

Analysis in our Changing Times

April 22 & 23, 2003

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Building, Washington, DC