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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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The H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering welcomes Dr. William Pulleyblank, vice president of the Center for Business Optimization at IBM Business Consulting Services, as guest lecturer for its 2008 Annual Distinguished Lecture.
Dr. Pulleyblank will speak on "Computing, Business, and Operations Research: The Next Challenges."
Lecture Abstract
There have been two consistent drivers over the last sixty years of the evolution of computing: Computer power and price/performance improve by a factor of two every eighteen months; the problems that we wish to solve require this growth in capability and more.
We seem to be reaching inflection points with both of these drivers. High performance systems are turning to massive parallelism to continue the required growth in performance. New challenges are arising in business and industry that require the solution of fundamentally different problems as well as the development of new approaches to old problems. Moreover, the rapid growth of a global economy has given an unprecedented urgency to dealing with these changes.
I will review these subjects and some approaches that are being applied, with varying degrees of success. In particular, I will discuss five technical problems that must be solved to enable us to successfully meet the business challenges that we will face in the future.
Biography of William R. Pulleyblank
William R. Pulleyblank, IBM Vice President, is the leader of the Center for Business Optimization within IBM Business Consulting Services. This group develops and deploys high powered optimization and analytic capabilities to improve the business performance of a broad range of companies.
Prior to this, he was the Director of Exploratory Server Systems and Director of the Deep Computing Institute within IBM Research. These research teams provided broad-based support to IBM
