Russell Ackoff has been honored as the latest inductee into the IFORS Operational Research Hall of Fame. In a recent article in International Transactions in Operational Research (Vol. 12, No. 1), authors Maurice Kirby and Jonathan Rosenhead track Ackoff's intellectual journey and detail his gradual transition from "O.R. apostle to O.R. apostate."

The authors begin by noting Ackoff's influence on the early development of O.R. in the 1950s and '60s. Teaming up with C. West Churchman, their self-defined mission was to apply philosophy to societal issues, and in 1957 they co-authored the pioneering text, "Introduction to Operations Research."

As the Machine Age faded, however, the Systems Age presented an increasingly complex and volatile society, whose issues Ackoff was finding O.R. models

too narrow to effectively address.

Increasingly, Ackoff focused more on interdisciplinary approaches to decision-making. Moving away from O.R.'s quantitative/computational norm, he called for a new paradigm for O.R. rooted in a more participative, holistic systems approach.

Eventually, he found O.R. completely irrelevant to problems above the purely tactical level. He was quoted in 1987 as saying, "I did not abandon [O.R.], [O.R.] abandoned me." The break led him to identify himself with the systems movement, a constituency where his writings have been enormously influential.

The article is available at: http://ackoffcenter.blogs.com/.

Dimitris Bertsimas, the Boeing Professor of Operations Research at MIT's Sloan School of Management, has joined the D2Hawkeye Board of Directors. Bertsimas has provided guidance for D2Hawkeye's data mining research for the past year.

Bertsimas is the author of leading books in the areas of large-scale optimization and decision-support systems. He is the winner of numerous awards and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Bertsimas was co-founder of Dynamic Ideas, LLC, whose assets were sold to American Express in 2002. The company produced optimization software for asset management companies.

Bertsimas is a world expert in data mining, and understands well the rationale behind D2Hawkeye's predictive models and the medical rules that D2Hawkeye injects into the databases it develops for all of its clients.

D2Hawkeye is a medical data-mining company that provides decision support and builds fully integrated medical and financial databases for its clients and leverages these databases with applications that are relevant to its clients' business.

Send People items to Peter Horner via e-mail at: horner@lionhrtpub.com