[Coin-voting-members] COIN-OR SLB and TLC election ballot

[Robert Fourer]

Dear COIN-OR Foundation Member,

As a full member, you have a vote in the election for the Foundation's
leadership.

Members of the Strategic Leadership Board (the business board of the COIN-OR
Foundation) and Technical Leadership Council (the technical advisory group to
the board) are up for election.

Please fill out the ballot below and return it to the email address 
"election at coin-or.org". Ballots must be received by 11:59 PM Eastern Daylight
Time (UTC-4), Sunday, October 11, 2009.

For questions about the election process, contact election at 
coin-or.org.

Thank you very much for your participation and your support of COIN-OR.

----------------------------------

COIN-OR Ballot

In each category below, you may vote for as many candidates as you like.  Those
receiving the most votes will be elected (subject to any applicable rules on the
composition of each board).  Candidate bios appear at the end of this message.


Strategic Leadership Board

Two (2) to be elected.  Type an X in the brackets '[ ]' to vote for a candidate.
You may vote for as many candidates as you like.

[  ]  Kevin Furman

[  ]  Lou Hafer

[  ]  Other: __________________________


Technical Leadership Council

Two (2) to be elected.  Type an X in the brackets '[ ]' to vote for a candidate.
You may vote for as many candidates as you like.

[  ]  William Hart

[  ]  Leo Lopes

[  ]  Other: ___________________________


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Candidate bios
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Kevin Furman:

Kevin Furman is the Optimization and Logistics Program Leader in the Corporate
Strategic Research department of ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Co.  His
recent research efforts include marine transportation optimization, process
planning and scheduling, and mixed integer nonlinear programming.  Kevin is an
active member of several professional societies including INFORMS and AIChE.  He
has recently been an active as a member of the COIN-OR Logo Working Committee
and with the COIN-OR banner preparations for the INFORMS 2006 Annual Meeting.
Kevin hopes to help promote the use and contribution to COIN-OR within industry
through his service with the Strategic Leadership Board.  He is also interested
in assisting in COIN-OR playing a role in setting new format standards for
optimization, and perhaps operations research in general.   Kevin also plans to
play a role in the proposed COIN-OR documentation project.

Lou Hafer:

Lou Hafer is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon
Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. He is the author of the dylp
linear programming code and the OsiDylp OSI interface; Project Manager for the
DyLP project and co-PM for OSI; and an active contributor to cbc and related
COIN projects. He is a founding member of the Strategic Leadership Board. He has
a long-standing interest in open source software and wrote the bonsaiG integer
programming code before joining COIN-OR.

William Hart:

Bio: William Hart is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in the Discrete
Algorithms and Mathematics Department, which is in the Computation, Computers,
Information and Mathematics Center.  His research interests focus on
optimization techniques, including: parallel branch-and-bound, heuristic global
optimization, derivative-free local search, and optimization software
frameworks.  He has applied optimization techniques to many real-world
applications, including computational biology, engineering design, logistics
planning, and sensor placement in municipal water systems.

COIN-OR: Optimization software is a key element of my professional work.  I am a
key contributor to a variety of widely-used software development efforts that
have been motivated by these applications, including the DAKOTA toolkit for
design and analysis, Acro (A Common Repository for Optimization) and the
AutoDock docking software.  For the past few years, I have been organizing
efforts at Sandia to promote the integration of open-source software projects
into Sandia's business areas.  A particular focus has been COIN-OR, which we
have used with the PICO IP solver for several years.  More recently, I have been
looking to more directly integrate Sandia into open-source projects; the Coopr
Python tool will soon become integrated with COIN-OR, and I am directly
collaborating with the CxxTest software testing tool.  I am interested in become
more involved with COIN-OR leadership to further cement these interactions, and
to provide feedback to Sandia management about the opportunities and pitfalls of
external collaborations like these.

Leo Lopes:

Leo Lopes is an Assistant Professor at The University of Arizona. His research
interests are in computational optimization, specifically in dealing with
unreliable, heterogeneous, or massive data sets and dealing with incomplete or
inaccurate models. As a result of these interests, he has pioneered new
XML-based standards for Linear and Integer programs, created automatic
reformulation systems for Stochastic Programs, and produced modeling languages
based on AMPL and UML for Stochastic Optimization. His current work is on
incomplete biological models and scripting- and UML-based modeling languages.
Leo is currently a member of the TLC. His contributions to Coin have been mostly
in the area of packaging under Linux and interfacing with Coin from other
environments.