Another journal acceptance! Woo-hoo!

I just received the excellent news that the paper that I wrote in collaboration with Wei Lijun, Zhu Wenbin and my boss Andrew Lim has been accepted for publication in the European Journal of Operational Research. Woot!

This paper had by far the smoothest acceptance procedure out of all the journal papers I have ever written. The reviewer comments came back 3 months after submission with a major revision. It took us a couple of weeks to address the issues, and it took another month for the official acceptance to come through. That's four and a half months from the start of writing to a new line on my CV. :D

It's probably no coincidence that this paper is one of the most straightforward. It deals with the rectangle packing problem, which essentially asks how you can pack a bunch of small rectangles into a bigger rectangle as much as possible. Our main contribution is a heuristic, which is a fancy word for "rules of thumb". Basically, it decides where to place a small rectangle using a number of rules, such as "don't put it too high" and "don't put it where it creates a lot of wasted space where no other small rectangle can fit". We then try the small rectangles in many different orders, and pick the best result. Turns out it works pretty well.

The details are slightly more complicated, and we also deal with another related problem called strip packing, but you get the picture; it's not exactly rocket surgery. On the other hand, it is simple enough for the average software engineer to actually program and use, unlike some of the more complicated papers with lots of math and Greek symbols.

Sometimes, simple really is best. :)

For those of you who actually want to read the paper, it's called "A Skyline Heuristic for the 2D Rectangular Packing and Strip Packing Problems". I'll put a link to it in the Selected Publications page on my website as soon as we get the final proof.

Looking for a professor job in Singapore

My current postdoc position at the City University of Hong Kong ends in September, so I plan to send out job applications in the next couple of weeks. I'd like to get a tenure-track research professor position in any of Singapore's four universities. Hong Kong is a great place to spend a couple of years to hone my research skills, but I miss the hot and muggy little island where I grew up. The problem is, I can't shake the feeling that I'm in for some major disappointment.

Here's the thing. I got my Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore. Not MIT, not Berkeley, but NUS. There's no concrete proof, but the overriding feeling is that Singaporean universities don't hire Singaporean professors unless they're superstars (I'm realistic enough to admit that although my CV is decent, I'm no Stephen Hawking).

When I told some of my friends that I was looking for a professor job in Singapore, one of them sent me this link to an article on tankinlian.com, which attributes the possible bias against hiring Singaporean professors to the foreigners in charge of the local universities. Another plausible theory is the fact that "ratio of international faculty" is a measure in ranking universities (e.g., QS Rankings, Times Higher Education Rankings). Sure, this measure is only 5% of the total, but why not bump that value up a little?

Anyway, I'll be sending out my job applications and crossing my fingers. If I don't get a bite this time, I'll probably get out of research academics altogether. At 37, it doesn't make sense for me to take another 2 or 3 years to find a university willing to hire me when I can be earning a decent wage in industry starting immediately.