[Coin-voting-members] 2015 Election Ballot, COIN-OR Directors

[Lou Hafer]

Please fill out the ballot below and return it to the email address
"election at coin-or.org". Ballots must be received by 24:00 (midnight)
Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5), Sunday, November 1st, 2015.

Members attending the Philadelphia INFORMS Conference may vote in person
at the start of the COIN-OR Members and User's Meeting, to be held 
Monday, November 2nd, 2015, at 12:30 pm, Marriott - Franklin 9, Level 4.

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COIN-OR Ballot

In each category below, you may vote for as many candidates as you like.
The candidates receiving the most votes will be elected. Candidate bios
appear at the end of this message. Candidates who volunteered to run 
after September 28th, 2015 (the nominal deadline for nomination) are 
indicated on the ballot as write-in candidates. The candidates are 
listed in alphabetical order. All candidates are recommended by the 
current Directors.


Strategic Leadership Board
--------------------------

Three (3) to be elected.  Type an X in the brackets '[ ]' to vote for a
candidate, or type in a name for a write-in vote. You may vote for as 
many candidates as you like.

[  ]  Kevin Furman

[  ]  Write-in: ___Horand Gassmann_____

[  ]  Write-in: ___William Hart________

[  ]  Write-in: ___Giacomo Nannicini___

[  ]  Write-in: _______________________

[  ]  Write-in: _______________________

[  ]  Write-in: _______________________



Technical Leadership Council
----------------------------

One (1) to be elected.  Type an X in the brackets '[ ]' to vote for a 
candidate. You may vote for as many candidates as you like.

[  ]  Haroldo Gambini Santos

[  ]  Write-in: _________________

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Candidate Statements
--------------------



Kevin Furman
------------

Kevin Furman is currently a Power Projects Developer in ExxonMobil Gas 
and Power Marketing Co.  He was most recently the Planning Manager for 
Corporate Strategic Research within ExxonMobil Research and Engineering 
Co. and previously held various optimization research oriented roles 
within ExxonMobil including the Supply Chain Optimization Team Leader in 
the Computational Sciences division at ExxonMobil Upstream Research Co. 
as well as the Optimization and Logistics Program Leader in the 
Corporate Strategic Research department of ExxonMobil Research and 
Engineering Co.

Kevin is an inventor on many patents and patents pending across multiple 
computational and modeling technologies of relevance to the oil and gas 
industry.  His research efforts and expertise include the topical areas 
of maritime transportation optimization, planning and scheduling 
applications in the oil and gas industry, electricity and power systems 
modeling, and mixed integer nonlinear programming, for which he has 
authored several publications and presented at conferences on many 
occasions.  Kevin is an active member within several professional 
societies including INFORMS and AIChE.  He has served on the COIN-OR 
Strategic Leadership Board since 2007.  Kevin hopes to help promote the 
use of and contributions to COIN-OR within industry through his 
continued service with the Strategic Leadership Board.  He is also 
interested in assisting in COIN-OR playing a role in setting new 
standards and benchmarks for computational optimization, and operations 
research in general.



Haroldo Gambini Santos
----------------------

Haroldo Gambini Santos is a professor and researcher at the Computing 
Department of Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto. His research includes 
the improvement of integer programming solution techniques and its
application to challenging, real world problems.  His contributions to 
the COIN-OR community include the MIPStart feature for the CBC package, 
automated tests and improved multi-platform installers for the COIN-All 
project. He received his D.Sc. degree in Computer Science from 
Universidade Federal Fluminense of Niteroi.



Horand Gassman
--------------

Horand Gassmann is a Professor at the Rowe School of Business at 
Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada). He  has a long-standing interest 
in the development of formats for data interchange and was a 
co-developer of the SMPS format for stochastic linear programs. Since 
2006 he has been active in the development of the OS project and is 
currently a co-manager of this COIN-OR project (along with Kipp Martin 
and Jun Ma).


William Hart
------------

William Hart is the manager of the Discrete Math and Optimization 
Department at Sandia National Laboratories.  He leads a team of 
researchers in computer science and operations research that perform 
research in stochastic programming, parallel optimization, mathematical 
modeling, theoretical computer science and graph algorithms.  Bill's 
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.

Optimization software is a key element of Bill's professional work. He 
is a key contributor to a variety of widely-used software development 
efforts (DAKOTA, Acro, AutoDock, Pyomo), and he has organized efforts at 
Sandia to promote the integration of open-source software projects into 
Sandia's business areas. He has promoted the integration of Pyomo 
(a.k.a. Coopr) into COIN-OR, and he has previously participated in both 
the COIN-OR TLC and SLB.  Serving on the SLB is synergistic with Bill's 
current responsibilities as a manager at Sandia, where he is involved 
with managing and promoting efforts like COIN-OR for national security 
applications. COIN-OR web services is a particular area of interest for 
Bill; moving beyond NEOS to promote web-based OR analytic services is a 
strategic growth area for COIN-OR that Bill is interested in developing.



Giacomo Nannicini
-----------------

Giacomo Nannicini is an assistant professor at the Singapore University 
of Technology and Design.  From January 2016 he will be at IBM Yorktown 
Heights as a Research Staff Member, on leave from SUTD. Giacomo's 
background is in computer science and his main interest is computational 
optimization and its applications.  He has worked in the areas of 
network optimization, mixed integer linear and nonlinear programming, 
derivative free optimization, and dynamic programming, applying them to 
his work in route planning, sustainable architecture, energy systems, 
and supply chain management in industry and academia.

His involvement with COIN-OR and open source optimization dates from 
2009 and includes code contributions to Cgl, Couenne, and SCIP. He is 
the author and project manager of RBFOpt.