Abhijit Pol coauthored this book as a researcher in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is now a Senior Software Engineer in the Strategic Data Solutions at Yahoo, Inc. His research focus is in the area of databases, with special interests in approximate query processing, physical database design, and data streams. Abhijit has taught the course Developing Web-Enabled Decision Support Systems (DSS) several times in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida. He has presented several tutorials at workshops and conferences on the need and importance of teaching DSS material, and he has also taught at two instructor-training workshops on DSS development. Abhijit has presented research papers at several prestigious database conferences and performed research at the Microsoft Research Lab.
Ravindra K. Ahuja
Professor, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
368 Weil Hall, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA
Ravindra Ahuja is a professor at the University of Florida, Gainesville, in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He specializes in mathematical modeling, state-of-the-art network optimization techniques, and solving large-scale scheduling problems arising in logistics and transportation. He founded the company Innovative Scheduling, Inc. to bring cutting-edge operations research and information technology techniques to the field of transportation and scheduling. He has developed innovative models and algorithms for several scheduling problems that were previously considered intractable; these models are now being packaged into interactive web-enabled decision support systems. He is winner of the 1993 Lanchester Prize for the best contribution of the year in Operations Research, the 2003 Pierskalla Award for the best paper on Operations Research in Health Applications, and the 2006 Daniel H. Wagner Award for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. He is a coauthor of the widely used text and reference book “Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications.” He is also a coauthor of the companion book, “Developing Spreadsheet-Based Decision Support Systems,” which describes how to build decision support systems using Excel and VBA for Excel.
