Today, Dr. Shabbir Ahmed spoke at USF at our lecture series on Stochastic Integer Programming methods. It was high-level and broad and unfortunately he didn’t get into many of the “nitty-gritty” details, but it was still fascinating. Clearly integer programming – and SIP more specifically – is going to be an even more important area in OR and optimization in the very near future.
At the end of the talk, in answer to one of the questions, Dr. Ahmed spoke a bit about his advice to current and future students of industrial engineering. He advised young students to learn programming skills and to embrace what is traditionally thought of as “computer science”. They are important skills too often left out of IE curricula but that are highly valuable and relevant to the work of IEs in the field.
It was a heartening statement to hear, given that our INFORMS student chapter has organized a two-day intense introduction to programming “boot camp” we’ll be running next week called the…
Power Up! Code & Data Boot Camp
I’m very happy to see this vision realized and to be a part of the boot camp. I love talking about code – not something that I get to do everyday, at least not without a few hairy eyeballs.
As the first time hosting this, I think we have a great spread of topics and a great lineup of USF IMSE graduate students. Presentations will include
- Matlab
- R
- Minitab
- Excel
- and SAS
with at least one introductory session and one advanced “hands-on” session for each. I already have some ideas about how we host this again next year, but for now I’ve got to focus on getting my three sessions together.
I’ll be talking motivating students to use R, talking about the fundamentals of R for data anayltics, and using R, knitr and pandoc for reproducible research. I’m excited to get people talking about R, but I’m most excited about getting my fellow graduate students into using pandoc and knitr. Because they’re awesome.