MISTA Conference: Venue for 2011 announced

MISTA 2009 finished in the time honoured fashion of a social day. On this occasion it was a cruise down the River Liffey, followed by a two hour guided tour around Dublin, ending up at Trinity College Dublin (which, strangley enough is where MISTA 2009 started as it was the first place we visited when looking for a venue for the conference (in the end, we decided against TCD for various reasons)).

But, as the 2009 conference ends, planning for the 2011 conference begins.

So far, the conference has taken place in Nottingham (2003), New York (2005), Paris (2007) and Dublin (2009). At the conference banquet we announced that the 2011 conference will take place in Phoenix, Arizona. The conference will be chaired by John Fowler, Barry McCollm and myself.

Starting to plan two years in advance might seem excessive but we have found the further out you plan, the easier it is.

MISTA Conference: Plenary Talk (David Hine)

The last plenary at MISTA was given by David Hine. He is a sergeant with the Public Order Unit at New Scotland Yard (in particular Football Intelligence). His talk gave the delegates an overview of the issues and problems he faces in organising resources to police football matches in London, the wider UK and also when fans travel overseas (whether visiting other countries or fans coming to the UK).
He said that he wanted to take us into his world and also take us out of our comfort zone and he certainly did that, with some of the shocking videos that he showed. The feedback I received after his talk is captured by comments such as "an excellent presenter", "one of the best conference talks I have ever seen" and "it really brings home the impact that the schedules have on everybody's life."
I invited Dave to give the talk a few months back (after meeting up with him in London) and I would like to offer my personal thanks to him for taking a couple of days out of his busy schedule (and at the start of the football season) to give the talk to the MISTA audience.

MISTA Conference: Plenary Talk (Edmund Burke)

The MISTA conference had two plenary talks today (Raymond Kwan - see earlier blog) and Edmund Burke. Edmund's talk was entitled A Comparison of Two Methods for Reducing Take-Off Delay at London Heathrow Airport and focussed on his work (and Jason Atkin and John Greenwood) that investigates scheduling aircraft at Heathrow in preparation for take off.
The picture shows Edmund Burke (foreground) and Jacek Blazewicz (session chair).

MISTA Conference: Plenary Talk (Moshe Dror)

The MISTA conference is now well underway, after a busy morning. Our first plenary talk was by Prof. Moshe Dror (University of Arizona) and co-authored with George Steiner. His talk was entitled ‘Strong’-‘Weak’ Precedence in Scheduling: Extended Order Implications.
The picture shows Prof. Dror's talk.

MISTA Conference: Almost There

The MISTA conference is almost upon us.

It was an early start this morning (3am) in order to get to Dublin on the 06:35 flight out of East Midlands Airport. We were actually in the hotel by 09:00 and, thankfully, they had rooms ready so it was not too bad.

We spent the day getting things ready, as far as we could. The real work will start tomorrow and it looks like being a long day. I think we'll open the registration desk at 07:30 and we'll return from the Guinness Storehouse at around midnight.

In between that, we have a Plenary Talk by Moshe Dror ("‘Strong’-‘Weak’ Precedence in Scheduling: Extended Order Implications"), followed by 36 papers, split into nine sessions (the full program can be downloaded from here).

For me (and this is a personal viewpoint; not talking as the conference chair) the highlight is the Sports Scheduling session as this is a particular interest of mine, as you'll see from my previous blog postings. The papers in this session are:

• Mathematical Modeling for Maximising Gate Receipt Problem, Abdul-Hamid N.H., Kendall G. and Sagir M.
• A Heuristic for Minimizing Weighted Carry-Over Effects in Round Robin Tournaments, Guedes A.C.B. and Ribeiro C.C.
• Soccer Schedules in Europe: An Overview, Goossens D.R. and Spieksma F.C.R.
• Round-Robin Sports Scheduling from a Graph Colouring Perspective: A Case Study in Rugby Union Scheduling, Lewis R. and Thompson J.

... but there are many other excellent papers also being presented throughout the day and your preferences will depend largely on your research interests.

MISTA Conference: Program

With the MISTA conference just a week away (this time next week we'll be in the Guinness Storehouse for the reception) we have just released the scientific program.

The list of papers is available at

http://www.mistaconference.org/2009/programme/index.html

A PDF (more detailed) version can be downloaded from the same page (see the link at the top of the web page)

MISTA Conference: Proceeedings

I wonder if there is a good (and I mean simple) way to produce conference proceedings?

In a previous post, I was talking about the MISTA conference that I chair and that we were in the process of collecting all the papers and registrations. This is now done and, with the conference just a week away, we are trying to finalise the proceedings.

It could be worse. In 2003 we had hardcopy proceedings so we had to get things sorted out a lot sooner as we had to deliver the proceedings to the printers. At least, with the proceedings on CD, the timescales are not so tight and we are in charge of our own fate. On the downside you effectively have to develop another web site to enable the delegates to access the papers in a variety of ways.

But that is not the main problem (time consuming as it is). The main problem (at least for me) is three-fold

1. Ensuring that all the papers actually make it to the proceedings and that all the authors and titles are spelt correctly in the contents pages.
2. Making sure that the contents pages have the correct page numbers on (for reasons I won't go into now, it's important that we have page numbers).
3. Putting together an accurate author index so that authors can easily find their papers.

I have put together a number of conference proceedings in my time but I have never found a quick, simple and reliable of doing it, other than just taking your time and constantly checking that you have not missed anything.

Any suggestions welcome, for the next time.

Research Assessment in the UK

Like it or not the academic world is slowly (or perhaps not that slowly) moving towards being judged by how highly cited our work is. Actually, it is not a bad measure as if you publish something and nobody ever reads it, or refers to it (i.e. cites it in their own work), then was their any point in publishing that research?

The problem is, of course, that it might takes years (perhaps decades; or even more) for somebody else to recognise the value in a particular piece of research. The other problem is that once scientists know that they are being evaluated in this way, they find ways to maximise their citations (they are typically quite clever people!).

The next research assessment that will be carried out in the UK (called the Research Excellence Framework (REF)) will using citations as a major way to measure the impact of the research that is carried out by individuals, research groups and universities.

If you are interested in the REF take a look at http://www.hefce.ac.uk/Research/ref


At the moment, in the UK, this area is the subject of heated debate in the scientific community and this will be the case for the foreseeable future, especially when you bear in mind that the last research assessment (Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)) has only just been completed (the results were announced in December 2008 - http://www.rae.ac.uk).