OR/MS Today - October 1999

October 1999

The International Web

By Michael A. Trick

Ten years ago, I spent a postdoctoral year at Bernhard Korte's Institut für Ökonometrie und Operations Research in Bonn, then-West Germany. This was my first time outside the United States or Canada, and I spoke essentially no German. Despite the language difficulties, I had a wonderful year. The Institute was active and had very friendly, accessible visitors and permanent staff. Bonn was just right: it was neither so large as to be overwhelming, nor so small as to be dull. I met a number of Germans who I interact with to this day, including a very attractive young lady who became my wife. The food, the drink, the atmosphere were all magical.

Despite my love for the country and its people, I felt cut off from my "normal" world. Every morning I would walk down to the train station to buy a day-old USA Today and carefully peruse the baseball box scores. I stayed up late one night in January to watch the one American sport that was shown on German TV: the Super Bowl. I had no knowledge of U.S. politics below the presidential level, and news of natural and unnatural disasters in the States went by without my notice. For one year, little existed for me except for Germany and the rest of Europe.

Recently, I returned to Germany for an extended visit to a German company my university has a partnership with. I again spent time in Bonn as well as a number of other German cities. But no longer did I feel isolated from my home life. In every hotel room, I could quickly connect my notebook computer to a phone line, call a country-wide access number, and immediately access the Internet. Sports scores that used to arrive two days late were now updated live. I could even listen to the radio broadcast of my favorite team. Round-the-clock coverage of the latest political outrage meant that I was as well informed on such minutiae as I would be back home. I could access my e-mail and update INFORMS Online as easily from a hotel on a hill outside of Stuttgart as I could in my office in Pittsburgh. In fact, most of my correspondents had no idea I was out of the country, except for the unusual time of the day I chose to reply to e-mails. My feeling of being cut off was gone, while the food, the drink and the atmosphere remained magical.

The Internet is a powerful globalizing force. Geographic remoteness is now less of a barrier when trying to access current knowledge and information. We see this at INFORMS Online when we look at the usage patterns of our system. While 80 percent of our accesses come from the United States and Canada, the remaining 20 percent come from all over the world. From giants like Brazil (2.1 percent of hits), France (1.5 percent) and the United Kingdom (1.3 percent) to countries like Mongolia, Algeria and Dominica (three or fewer hits each), IOL has been accessed by individuals in more than 130 countries. These accesses represent more than 20,000 individuals in the last three months alone, and I would venture to say the majority of those are people who would not know of INFORMS and its activities except through the web.

INFORMS takes its international role very seriously. We have an elected vice president-International and we require one of the elected members at large to reside outside of the United States (by nominating those who live outside the United States rather than by forcibly moving one of them). We hold international meetings, often in conjunction with the meeting of another national organization. For instance, in June 2000, INFORMS will join the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society in organizing an international meeting in Seoul, Korea. We are active in the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS, http://www.ifors.org), a society whose members are the national OR/MS societies from around the world.

But perhaps our strongest contribution to the international OR/MS world is what we provide electronically. No longer does a researcher in New Zealand have to wait on the vagaries of surface mail to get a journal (or the expense of air mail). A researcher overseas can access a journal through INFORMS Publications Online (http://www.informs.org/Pubs) on the same day a researcher in INFORMS' headquarters city of Baltimore can. E-mail communication through our various e-mail lists and membership lists do not care whether the message goes 5,000 miles or 50 feet. Only our conferences seem to require physical presence, and even for those more members are providing papers online, accessible to those not attending the conference, or those attending who wish to prepare in advance.

The spread of the Internet has not been uniform. Statistics are fuzzy but currently more than one-third of the United States has access to the Internet. Even within Europe, there is tremendous range of Internet access, ranging from 40 percent for Sweden and Norway to fewer than 10 percent for Spain and Italy. Brazil perhaps represents countries with more potential than current success with about 2 percent access to the Internet. As access continues to grow in all countries, the opportunities for providing services independent of geographical location will similarly expand.

New at INFORMS Online

The program for the INFORMS Philadelphia Fall 1999 Meeting (http://www.informs.org/Conf/Philadelphia99) is available.

Educators looking for new material for the classroom should look at the Wiley/INFORMS Case Studies series (http://www.informs.org/Pubs/Cases).

Michael Trick is a professor at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University, and editor of INFORMS Online. He can be reached at trick@cmu.edu

Table of Contents

OR/MS Today Home Page

Lionheart Publishing, Inc.
506 Roswell Street, Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060, USA
Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969
E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com
URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com