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Mary Fenelon
Architect, CPLEX
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I’m an old timer here at ILOG having worked on CPLEX for over 15 years since the 1.1 version. We just released ILOG CPLEX 10.0 so it really has been a commitment! I was responsible for the initial versions of the CPLEX MIP optimizer and, as a Principal Architect on the team I still spend a lot of time on MIP optimization.
I joined CPLEX because I could see the product was really going to be great and I wanted to be a part of it. After getting my PhD in OR at Stanford, I had gone to work for a mainframe company, Unisys, but the reach of our mathematical programming product was limited to the shrinking number of Unisys customers. In contrast, a product that could run under any operating system (since it was written in C, not a proprietary assembly language) had an unlimited market reach. I have stayed with CPLEX because that potential has been realized. CPLEX makes a tremendous difference in the world, both in applications that make the world run a little more smoothly and efficiently, and in advancing research. I have a habit of checking each issue of the INFORMS journal Operations Research; almost every issue has an article where a researcher has used CPLEX. It’s been tremendously satisfying to see CPLEX become so widely used.
I have also stayed with CPLEX because of the chance to work alongside all of the brilliant people who have worked on CPLEX over the years, starting with Bob Bixby. And of course, the success of CPLEX in solving hard problems has led to people formulating even harder ones - the challenges never end and so my job remains interesting.
And now, with our ODMS initiative, I think ILOG is going to get optimization into places it's never been before. Business people can now understand it much better than they could before. But the more we hook business people on using optimization, the more they will need performance. After all, interesting what-if analysis and scenario comparison will inevitably raise the bar on solving power, explanations and robustness. There are still lots of MIPs that are very hard to solve, and we will keep chipping away at them! There’s lots more to do.
One of the advantages of being on the CPLEX team is getting to work in Incline Village, Nevada on the shores of Lake Tahoe. My husband John also works for ILOG as a QA Manager on CPLEX. We have three children, David, a junior at the University of California, San Diego, majoring in Aerospace Engineering, a daughter, Julia, who will be graduating from Incline High School this June and is planning to major in International Relations in college, and a son, Steven, a seventh grader at Incline Middle School. All three children have learned French in school and David and Julia spent some time in France with ILOG families; Steven is hoping to do so when he is older. Much of my after work time is spent with my children's activities, either shuttling them around or helping out. My latest activity has been helping coach the middle school MathCounts team. I enjoy snowshoeing, hiking, and bicycling – pretty hard to beat Lake Tahoe as a place to live!
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Greger Ottosson
Manager, ODMS Product Management
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If pressed to choose, I would have to say that my technical background is in Computer Science. But it's probably fair to say that I've worked equally across Computer Science and Operations Research for the last 10 years. And within optimization itself, I’ve split my time between Math Programming (MP) and Constraint Programming (CP). I guess I’ve got a sort of split personality. In fact, after my Master's work on CP at Uppsala University in Sweden in 1995, I got so intrigued by the similarities and differences between MP and CP that I ended up writing my Doctoral thesis on the subject. In part finished at Uppsala and in part at Carnegie Mellon—this analysis of the synergies between MP and CP was my real entry point into the optimization community.
After a few years mostly away from optimization—more on that later—I'm back working with both MP and CP, but I've expanded my agenda beyond research: I'm driven now by the goal of making optimization more useful and accessible through good use of IT, and to help bring optimization from a niche technology to a software market category in the larger world of business and IT. There are still a lot of sub-optimal schedules and plans being created in industry with spreadsheets and insufficiently precise SCM applications. We at ILOG believe they could do better with optimization—were it just to be made more accessible. So I’m excited to have the chance to work on the integration and extension of ILOG’s optimization tools and engines. I think we can make it much easier to build great decision support applications using optimization technology and thus make optimization more useful and more widely used.
I mentioned I took some time off from optimization—I did so partly at an enterprise applications platform startup in New York and in part after joining ILOG where I worked with business rules technology as a technical sales engineer. In both cases, I worked a lot with J2EE, XML and related enterprise technology. The world of enterprise IT has come a long way in the last decade and for us in optimization there are many improvements to be gained from leveraging these advances, in particular advances in the areas of web-based usage, scalability and usability. I see this as the next big opportunity for optimization and as a great challenge for me personally to again work at merging distinct areas for mutual benefit.
As I have thoroughly enjoyed the cross-disciplinary part of my career, I have also personally been blessed with cross-cultural experiences. Originally from Sweden, I spent the last 8 years in the US, most of it with my now wife Sarette, who is from South Africa. In late 2005 our daughter, Linnéa, was born. To add to the excitement, we then moved to the south of France in the spring of 2006 where I am now working out of ILOG’s Sophia Antipolis office. We will have to see how my French evolves, but more interesting will be to watch Linnéa adjust to four languages, three cultures and two new parents!
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