More Operations Research professors and students are building and deploying applications than they were two years ago, aligning them more with advanced analytics practitioners, according to our survey at the INFORMS Annual Meeting October 22-25 in Houston. The survey repeated with minor modifications our survey in 2015 at the same event, which found notable gaps between what students learn, what professors teach, and what practitioners need.
We can report the following:
- Gaps between practitioners and academia narrowed related to programming and application development, with more than 50% of students surveyed building applications.
- The O.R. community is very flexible when solving problems; there is no dominant software product or development tool.
- MATLAB is popular as a solver and as a programming language, and as an optimization tool, it is used more in academia than in industry.
- The use of modeling languages is especially varied.