Let's start with a brief introduction. My name is Hari Jagannathan Balasubramanian (we'll return to the length of the name) and I am a post-doctoral research associate at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota. I joined Mayo in September 2006, after finishing my doctoral degree in Industrial Engineering from Arizona State University. I work now on various research and education initiatives pertaining to operations research in healthcare delivery. Some of my past and current work also deals with scheduling theory and algorithms. This often puzzles some of my colleagues and friends since they are quite aware that I do little to schedule or plan my own tasks.
Out of Kilter will consist of notes and some personal perspectives on operations research (OR), interpreted broadly and applied to just about anything. As a quick preview, I plan to do a post on a difficult land allocation problem that arose in 1947 as a result of the traumatic partitioning of the Indian subcontinent; the nature of sexual relationships in southern Africa and their role in maximizing HIV transmissions; something as trivial (and hopefully fun) as how I pack my laundry into the washer because of a thumb-rule I learned while studying an OR problem; how auto-rickshaw drivers in the increasingly congested city of Bangalore might be thinking of maximizing their revenues; and something as contemporary and vogue (in the OR community at least) as using models for improving access to primary care and disease modeling. My intention is not to be very technical; rather I’ll try to illustrate, whenever possible, aspects involving people and their decision-making.
Why, you might ask, the name Out of Kilter? No particular reason, except that it lends a touch of drama. Some of you may know that out-of-kilter refers to an algorithm developed by Ford and Fulkerson for certain fundamental network flow problems (see this article for an introduction). But let us not delve too much further, because if we do my ignorance – or rather my lack of recollection of networks and graph theory – will be swiftly revealed.
I also maintain another blog with a title just as strange - Thirty letters in my name. I write about history, travel, and literature in that blog - all topics I am very, very passionate about. Hopefully aspects from there will influence what goes on here and vice-versa, even though the two blogs might at first glance seem incompatible.
Shall we begin, then?
Out of Kilter will consist of notes and some personal perspectives on operations research (OR), interpreted broadly and applied to just about anything. As a quick preview, I plan to do a post on a difficult land allocation problem that arose in 1947 as a result of the traumatic partitioning of the Indian subcontinent; the nature of sexual relationships in southern Africa and their role in maximizing HIV transmissions; something as trivial (and hopefully fun) as how I pack my laundry into the washer because of a thumb-rule I learned while studying an OR problem; how auto-rickshaw drivers in the increasingly congested city of Bangalore might be thinking of maximizing their revenues; and something as contemporary and vogue (in the OR community at least) as using models for improving access to primary care and disease modeling. My intention is not to be very technical; rather I’ll try to illustrate, whenever possible, aspects involving people and their decision-making.
Why, you might ask, the name Out of Kilter? No particular reason, except that it lends a touch of drama. Some of you may know that out-of-kilter refers to an algorithm developed by Ford and Fulkerson for certain fundamental network flow problems (see this article for an introduction). But let us not delve too much further, because if we do my ignorance – or rather my lack of recollection of networks and graph theory – will be swiftly revealed.
I also maintain another blog with a title just as strange - Thirty letters in my name. I write about history, travel, and literature in that blog - all topics I am very, very passionate about. Hopefully aspects from there will influence what goes on here and vice-versa, even though the two blogs might at first glance seem incompatible.
Shall we begin, then?
