Almost two months into 2022 and many of us probably still haven’t begun to tackle those New Year resolutions or maybe you began but have already given up. Motivation to get started on healthier habits can be hard to find and the commitment to stick with them is often just as challenging. So, how do we get on track? Why don’t we talk a little about this beautiful woman! You’re looking at Ernestine Shepherd. She is one of the world’s oldest female bodybuilders. Between the ages of 56 and 85 years old, Ernestine won two bodybuilding titles, ran nine marathons, worked as a personal trainer, professionally modeled, and instructed fitness classes for seniors. She attributes discipline, determination, and hard work as her secrets to success. Next time you need a little inspiration to get moving, think of Ernestine and remember it’s never too late to begin, always focus on progress, not perfection, and never ever give up! Learn more about Ernestine's achievements here: https://ernestineshepherd.net/?page_id=2 CANA LLC is a Veteran-Owned and Woman-Owned Company.

The fall of 2021 ushered in the return of in-person conferences and meetings. These events were the first of their kind since the spring of 2020. Even though proof of vaccination and mask-wearing was required, it was awesome to be back in person, see old friends, and meet new acquaintances. CANA took full advantage of this opportunity to attend both the INFORMS Annual Meeting and the MORS AI Workshop. INFORMS Annual Meeting I never understood how big the Operations Research community was until I attended my first INFORMS Annual Meeting in Houston, Texas, in 2017. INFORMS is the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, and its membership is 10,000 strong. INFORMS provides a network for members to share new methods and approaches, communicate best practices, and communicate and connect with peers. That 2017 meeting took place in the Houston Convention Center and thousands of people from all over the world attended. This year’s annual meeting took place at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California. The in-person attendance was smaller than past annual meetings, with less than 2,000 people attending in person. However, total attendance including virtual attendance was approximately 7,000. One of the highlights of the conference was the Edelman Award competition. The participants are always of an exceptional caliber, and this year’s included Lenovo, OCP, Alibaba, JD.com, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and the UN World Food Program. Viewing the competing presentations was extremely informative. They can be seen here. A particularly notable presentation was The Uncertain Courier. This was in reference to a Georgia Tech professor’s work for GrubHub, and the efforts to build a model to address the multiple uncertainties inherent in food delivery - a very challenging logistical problem. I found the methods discussed interesting in that, one, they may be relevant to handling attrition problems in other scenarios and, two, they included the use of an AI wrapper. The presentation illustrated the trade-off value between achieving the ‘best’ solution and something that works really, really quickly. This presentation, and others, offered food for deep future thought for all the INFORMS participants. Connor McLemore MORS AI Workshop This event was the first MORS in-person event since March 2020. This workshop was a follow-on to the first MORS Artificial Intelligence (AI) Workshop held in February 2019. Originally planned for the fall of 2020, the workshop had been delayed a year due to COVID. The facility was great and allowed for plenty of space between attendees in all of the presentation rooms - although wearing a mask all day does take some getting used to. Day One included tutorials covering the entire AI history, development support, roles, methodologies, and examples. There was also a tutorial on Explainable AI (XAI) that provided an overview of past efforts, and then demonstrated current packages and techniques used in different XAI areas. The Keynote speaker was Lieutenant General Groen, Director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). He highlighted the JAIC's successes and challenges over the past few years and also pointed out current projects like AI and Data Acceleration (ADA). This project is sending data scientists and data engineers out to the Combatant Commanders (CCMD) to help them identify and begin structuring their data. This first phase of ADA is scheduled to be completed in March of 2022. With the data better structured, ADA should allow for faster development of AI tools and solutions in the following phases. A variety of other presentations reviewed everything from use cases to methods. My favorite was a series of briefs on Ethical AI. The Australian Ministry of Defence briefed their framework for Ethical AI that had been developed over the past year. There was also an interesting panel discussion with questions ranging from, “Who is responsible for AI that causes harm?”, to, “What are the legal implications of the use of lethal force in a military operation by an autonomous AI-controlled weapons system?” International presenters and participants were hosted online and made the conference hybrid with both live and online presentations and panels. Attendees represented a broad cross-section of the community and included military, academia, industry, and Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs). All in all, it was a great and informative return to more robust conference participation.

During this past summer, the CANA Foundation, the “give back” arm of CANA Advisors, helped support a live, interactive panel at the 89th Virtual Military Operational Research Society (MORS) Conference. The event, a Women in MORS Special Session on Effective Networking Strategies, was an informative and entertaining success with almost 50 attendees, bringing together a diverse group of women and men leaders and thinkers to share their successes, and even sometimes, failures. The highlights are worth revisiting as we approach the 22nd of September, American Business Women’s Day; a National Day of Recognition that likely falls below the radar on a far too frequent basis. This year, we share the insights and tools used by professionals to interact in meaningful and productive ways in their respective fields. Due to the non-attributional nature of the panel, specific names and positions cannot be provided, but the group was wide-ranging and accomplished, from senior military members and government policy leaders to top technical experts. Their comments have been condensed and organized for clarity. The panel was first asked to detail an interesting or influential professional experience or notable observation. Three maxims were particularly resonant and widely applicable. It’s not who you know, but who knows you. You have to create true, foundational relationships in order for your networks to work. You need a wingman that you can reach out for support. Be conscious of who you network with – think about looking up and out. You will have to network with those outside of your comfort zone. Second, the question was raised: What is the most valuable piece of professional advice you received and who gave it to you? Action, accountability, and balance were common threads woven through the panel’s answers, but each panelist shared a slightly different take. “You can have it all, but you can’t have it all at the same time,” as credited to a well-known female government policy advisor. Work hard and own it! You can do and be anything; don’t let anyone else define who you are. Attitude can be contagious. Keep a positive, optimistic outlook. This will help you and your team accomplish goals. You rarely accomplish anything when you’re trying to accomplish everything. It is important to maintain balance: put things in priority and drop those of low priority. Do what you say: actions follow words. It’s okay to fail. Learn from it and grow. The panel’s spontaneous and personal answers are supported by recent research. An exceptionally long and detailed study of networking among men and women was cited by the Harvard Business Review in 2019 with similar findings. The study - over 15,000 participants over 15 years - also found that successful women prioritize their efforts; they maneuver adeptly in and out of networks; they create balance, and they create a wide-spanning network(2). While all of this is illuminating, there remains the practical question of how do we do these things? Building, maintaining, and using networks is not easy, nor are there obvious instructions. Answering this question in the context of women in business adds another layer of complexity. Fortunately, the panel had answers. Look for people that are sincere and open-minded. Career paths may separate, but those types of people will give you their time and honest feedback. You have to involve yourself in activities and opportunities to build your network – through your organization, and through professional societies. A lot of people network when they need something, but it’s a continual process – you need to build your network so that it exists when you need it, and it has to be genuine. You need to find what is comfortable for your personality. Be okay with who you are. If you excel in a tough job, you’ll build your network based on how you interacted with people. Again, study results bore this out. Successful networkers were found to have confidently looked outside their familiar zones to seek new connections. There is no expectation that it is comfortable, per se, but reaching out is, “...critical to accessing new information, leading innovation, and pursuing advancement, for both women and men.”(2) Building connections requires work, as one panelist noted, ‘there’s no such thing as luck – do what you can to be there in the room. Be prepared, be present.’ A large component of the panel was a discussion of the differences, if they exist, between male and female networks, and the intersections thereof. Given the panel’s traditionally male-centric and/or male-dominated career representation - military, technology, IT, and government - it was little surprise most participants recognized a male/female distinction. But is there a line in the sand, or have the two sides become mixed? The answer is a little of both. The general consensus was that separate male and female networks do exist, but the smart professional tries to adeptly navigate and build connections in both. Ideally, these networks will eventually share members and benefits. There was a recognition among the panel that while things are changing, and ‘it is better than it was,’ women still have ‘…to be well prepared and hold their own.’ One panelist observed a female-centric network can be a powerful tool, referencing another study that validated this conclusion. According to the evidence, “...77 percent of the highest-achieving women had strong ties with an inner circle of two to three other women with whom they communicated frequently.”(1) It is affirming that size and composition are not the sole characteristics of a network that works. Although this may not seem particularly progressive, it is an improvement from connections and affiliations rooted solely in outdated notions of looks, compliance, or stenographer pool aptitude. That being said, there is still a dichotomy in perceptions of what qualities promote success. The networks study touched on this, perhaps in an unintentionally ironic way, in revealing the female networking secret of being “energy-balanced.” The successful women, “...demonstrate[d] both competence and warmth, both intelligence and emotional intelligence, as studies—the researchers’ and others—suggest they must [do] to build trust.” Rob Cross, one of the study’s authors, observed, “[t]he most successful women don’t downplay their knowledge, skills and accomplishments; they show evidence that they can do things…But they also use humor, presence, and small gestures to signal caring and positivity….”(2) Competence and intelligence for all? Yes. But, warmth and small gestures? Yes, if the measures were assessed equally in both men and women. More than likely, this will remain a challenging path to navigate. Recognizing the challenges, the panelists noted collaborative and collegial professional environments must be nurtured. There is responsibility not only to support, and be supported by, one’s networks, but also to participate authentically in the day-to-day. Opportunity lies in the mundane to shape relationships and to take and receive advice. Being prompt, specific, and reciprocal were omnipresent themes of the panelists’ comments. Give specific, targeted comments, and be open to receive feedback. Feedback needs to be timely. Give kudos right after a subordinate gives a great brief, and prompt feedback after a misstep— feedback is best when it is fresh. You need to be approachable so that your people can talk to you. Ask targeted questions. How am I doing? is too broad to get a good response, instead use something like, What did you think about what I said at the offsite? You need to be firm, fair, and friendly, and develop relationships with subordinates who feel comfortable giving you honest feedback. There is a limit to the number of people one person can effectively manage. Knowing that is the best way to maintain sincerity and tailor feedback to specific personalities. Subordinates, superiors, and peers must be able to communicate effectively with one another: to learn, to teach, to exchange information, and to relay both good news and bad. One of the key benefits of this communication chain is to promote one’s own professional competence. During the question-and-answer period, the audience asked the panelists how to become a “go to” person. The answer was simple: tell people! People inside and outside the team or organization need to know you are interested in more - more responsibility, more challenge, and potentially, more advancement. Ask to go along to a briefing, communicate the desire for opportunities, speak up. Professional networks provide more opportunities to act. Your network is not a safety net to protect you from falling – those connections are your guidelines to help you make it to the top. Use it! 1. Hallgren-Rezac, G., Thomson J., and Rezac, D. (2019, March 6). Opinion: Women’s networks are key to leadership success. BCBusiness. https://www.bcbusiness.ca/Opinion-Womens-networks-are-key-to-leadership-success 2. Harvard Business Review. (2019, November-December). The Secrets of Successful Female Networkers. Harvard Business Review. Harvard https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-secrets-of-successful-female-networkers

As we think about the typical work week, we tend to imagine the same 8 am - 5 pm that our parents, grandparents, and those before them pursued. That consisted of getting ready in the morning, eating a quick breakfast as we run out the door, fighting traffic on the way to the office, hopefully grabbing a quick bite for lunch (often at our desk), before rushing into the afternoon sprint, and then fighting the same traffic to get home. Rinse and repeat until Friday. And frankly, after rushing around for 10+ hours, we rarely have the energy to embark on new journeys, let alone leave the house unless it’s absolutely necessary. But what if you woke up to this on Monday instead? And Tuesday, and Wednesday… What if you woke up at your destination and just had to step outside at the end of the day to enjoy new journeys? With the evolution of modern technology, our world is quickly changing and the possibilities are endless. We are a married couple, with two boys and a dog, who are fortunate to both work remotely for CANA Advisors, and we have been able to do just that this past summer. Working remotely has afforded us the opportunity to work from the road and pursue endless experiences. This has opened doors, allowing us to more efficiently manage our time while enjoying a variety of places and adventures with our children and our families. In 2021, we spent 10 days camping to volunteer as leaders with the Boy Scouts of America, 28 days traveling in our RV, and 33 days at a North Carolina beach. It’s important to understand that we weren’t on vacation or paid time off for that entire time. We’ve merely worked from different locations so that, at the end of the day, we were already at our destination and prepared to enjoy time with our family. Our office may look a little different from the traditional office, but the end goals of dedication, teamwork, motivation, and success are the same. This flexibility facilitates a work-life balance unmatched by a conventional work environment. This has enabled us not only to successfully deliver on contract deliverables, but also to take our family hiking, swimming, boating, jet skiing, water skiing, tubing, kayaking, fishing, boogie boarding, crabbing, tenting, biking, and volunteering with the youth in our community. We’ve been able to feel, see, touch, and enjoy experiences more frequently than when we worked in a traditional working environment. CANA Advisors is a 100% virtual company. This is not to be confused with “working virtually,” which typically refers to working from home a few days a week and working in the office a few days a week, where the company has a physical facility. Working for a virtual company means that your current location at any moment is your office, regardless of your current zip code. Our team members at CANA Advisors do not have assigned physical office space. Our teams are scattered across the United States, allowing us to hire the best employees, skill sets, and team members in the country, not just the best in our city. We leverage video teleconferencing and cloud-based services to interact and share on a daily basis. This provides the opportunity to work anytime and anywhere. This isn’t always sunshine and rainbows. It takes dedication and perseverance to ensure that we communicate well with our team members and carry our own weight. Sometimes it means that we stay up until the early morning, while the family sleeps, in order to help the team meet deliverables. It means that we’re back in the RV attending meetings and addressing client requests while the family is sitting at the pool. But it also means that we can soak up the sun by the ocean and catch up on work under the moon, and we wouldn’t trade it because otherwise many of these experiences would not have been possible. Someone once said that we get 18 summers with our kids, so don’t waste any of them. We plan to make the most of every summer we get! 2021 isn’t over yet! We’re excited to see what new adventures await for our family in the future & thankful that we work for a company that enables us to Work To LIVE!

As a Principal Operations Research Analyst with CANA Advisors, I am always excited at the opportunities to participate in professional organizations. One such professional organization is the Military Operations Research Society (MORS), which hosts an annual symposium. This year’s symposium like last year’s was virtual, and just like last year’s, it was robust and engaging notwithstanding its remote execution. I was very pleased to provide two presentations at this year’s 89th MORS Symposium. The first was a summary of the non-profit work on military readiness I continue to do with www.probabilitymanagement.org. Since last year’s symposium, we’ve had our work published in the MOR Journal, a peer-reviewed journal of high academic quality, which describes a more technical continuation of the policy-focused work that won me and my PHALANX Magazine article co-authors—Dr. Sam Savage and Shaun Doheney—last year’s MORS Walker Award. We presented on the recommendations our response article published by the Center for International Maritime Security to an article in War on the Rocks by General Charles Brown, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and General David Berger, the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, calling for a better analytical framework for the joint force to better assess balancing operational costs of existing forces with investment costs to modernize and replace those forces. Additionally, I presented the status of CANA’s work on the Distribution Network Model (DNM), which is designed to determine the most responsive and lowest cost afloat and ashore tailoring a plan for inventory and transportation enablers and inform investment decisions to allow selection of the most effective affordable platforms to support Marine Corps future operating concepts. The model will allow the Marine Corps to explore new logistics operating concepts to include supplying many mobile austere bases distributed over thousands of miles. I was pleased to be joined by Mr. Ric Story, HQMC, LPO-2, who gave his organization’s perspective on the value of DNM. I always look forward to and enjoy the sharing of knowledge that takes place at the MORS Symposium, and I look forward to attending next year's 90th MORS Symposium! To learn more about the Military Operations Research Society, check out this link - https://www.mors.org/

Some people may remember a catchy ad from the 1980s - “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile” - meant to attract a new generation to a modernized car line. Out with the old, in with the new. To borrow the phrase, this is not your father’s A.I.! Artificial Intelligence, or A.I., is no longer relegated to science fiction and film, like Hal, the domineering computer in 2001: Space Odyssey, or Robbie, the life-saving nursemaid robot in Asimov’s I, Robot. A.I. is part of our everyday lives, right now. If you've ever purchased something out of the ordinary with a credit card or bought something at an unusual time or place, you may have had your credit card shut off. In this instance, A.I. identified a pattern characteristic of fraud, something that didn’t fit with your normal behavior, and A.I. made a decision. A.I. is the brain behind the scenes in your social media. It adjusts your feeds, picks possible friends, selects ads, and more, based on what it thinks you want and how you will respond. A.I. helps shape your perceived independent, highly personal decisions. Artificial intelligence uses multiple technologies, including machine learning algorithms, and is being developed for multiple use cases, including automation, autonomy, and as an advanced analytical technique for software solutions. Computer science defines A.I. research as the study of, “intelligent agents, any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals.” A more elaborate definition characterized as A.I. is a system's ability to correctly interpret external data, learn from such data, and use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation. Looking at this overlapping Venn chart created by Nisarg Dave, first focus on the big, blue circle. That's computer science. Inside computer science, there is a circle for artificial intelligence, inside that is a circle for machine learning, and inside that, another circle for deep learning. Outside artificial intelligence, there are databases and then data mining, which crosses multiple boundaries of A.I., machine learning, deep learning, databases, and cloud computing. Data science encompasses all of those areas. And, if you are from a statistics or mathematics background, you will see both of those areas cross all of those same circles for computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning. This graphical representation highlights the interconnectedness of A.I. in so much of modern technology. A.I. became a named discipline in the 1950s, although work had really begun several years prior. A.I. includes a component known as machine learning, which is the study of computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience. It is further defined as techniques that give computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed to do so. These algorithms build mathematical models based on sample data known as training data in order to make predictions or decisions. Machine learning algorithms are used in a wide variety of applications, such as email filtering and computer vision. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that makes the computation of multi-layer neural nets feasible. When we talk about your credit card being shut off, that's an example of neural nets at work. Those determine patterns, matching your pattern of fraud, and then turning off your credit card. Machine learning is typically broken down into three sub-categories: supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. Supervised learning algorithms find patterns in both input and output data from a training set of data, and then predict outputs from non-training data based on the learned set of patterns. In the credit card example, the algorithm can be fed input data related to credit card use behaviors and output labels related to whether the behavior resulted in fraud. In supervised learning, data is set with clearly defined outputs. The user essentially defines the patterns for that algorithm to follow. Unsupervised learning algorithms find patterns based solely on the input data. These can be used when you are not sure what to look for; the machine is identifying the patterns from the data and providing that to the user. Reinforcement learning algorithms use positive or negative rewards to achieve certain goals. Source: https://www.newtechdojo.com/list-machine-learning-algorithms/ If you are an operations research analyst most of the techniques listed in the chart above are quite familiar: decision trees, naive Bayes classification, random forest, linear regression, and logistic regression. Also, for someone with experience in statistics, many of these techniques will be familiar. Even if you have little knowledge on the subject, you are, more than likely, a frequent and dedicated recipient of these techniques and concepts. A.I. is deeply rooted in your daily life and activities, even if not so obvious as robot maids and sentient spacecraft computers. Advancements in the field are made daily, and the unimaginable now may become commonplace. Please join Renee for the next phase of this A.I. journey in the upcoming Part II, A.I. Techniques, Platforms & Requirements.

Interior of IBM Quantum computing system. (Credit: IBM) A video presentation of the blog post is available here: https://youtu.be/B_VgGOicr4U Quantum computers are vastly different from classical digital computers. The first question you might ask is, “what is a quantum computer?”, and the second, “why do we need them?” Joe Moreno, Director of Development at CANA Advisors, answers these questions in his complex, yet accessible (and fascinating) post on quantum computers. The fundamentals of quantum mechanics go back to the end of the 19th century with theoretical physicist Max Planck. In the intervening years, minds such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger contributed to the quantum field. The idea of using quantum particles to store and process information was proposed by physicist Richard Feynman in 1981, and now companies such as IBM operate dozens of actual quantum computing systems. The quantum computing field has not yet scratched the surface of what is possible, but the groundwork has been laid. Let’s take a look by discovering the differences between classical digital computers and quantum computers. Processing Digital computers process data in series. Data is processed, sequentially, through a central processing unit (CPU). Even in a computer with multiple CPUs, they still need to explicitly coordinate operations. Quantum computers process data in parallel. This is how the universe actually works. There is no single central place in the universe that processes the laws of physics. If we think of our body as a computer, our brain would be the processor. Yet our brain doesn’t need to explicitly coordinate many of our body’s activities. For example, if I take a bite out of an apple, swallow it, and then drop dead (resulting in no more brain activity), the apple would continue to digest in my stomach, at least for a little while, because that activity happens in parallel with other bodily functions. Performance Digital computer performance increases by a factor of two for each bit added (2n). A computer that can process eight bits is twice as powerful as a computer that can process seven bits. Quantum computer performance increases exponentially for each bit added (2ⁿ) due to its parallel nature. This means a quantum computer that can process 64 bits can be thought of as 2⁶⁴ (a 20 digit number) in terms of how much information it can store and process. Behavior Digital computers use simulation to solve problems. We write computer programs that store variables and execute algorithms to simulate what we observe in the real world. For example, if we want to simulate the interaction between the coronavirus and a candidate COVID-19 vaccine, we’d take the parameters that describe both, assign them to variables in a computer program, and write algorithms to simulate the interactions. The better our algorithm, the better our results. However, this only works on a small scale because there are too many variables and interactions to consider on the scale of a human. Quantum computers use imitation to solve problems. A good example of this is a lab rat. Before we give a candidate vaccine to a human, we test it on a lab rat. In this scenario, we can think of the lab rat as a computer that is imitating how the human body works. Information Digital computers store information in classical bits. A bit can only be a zero or one. Keep in mind that computer science, much like political science, is a human-created science, so we have defined the conditions and rules. Computer scientists have defined a bit to explicitly be a zero or a one. Quantum computers store information in quantum bits (qubits). A qubit can be a zero or one or somewhere in between zero and one, or negative, or a complex number. To wrap your head around how a qubit can be in many different states, consider using a coin to represent the state. Let’s say heads is one and tails is zero. What state is the coin in when we flip it and it’s spinning through the air? Is it heads? Is it tails? Is it both? Is it neither? A qubit is represented as a ket (vector) which distinguishes them from classical bits. A zero qubit is represented as: A one qubit is represented as: Logic Digital computers perform operations using logic gates governed by Boolean algebra (AND, OR, NOT, XOR, etc.). By performing operations on multiple bits, at the same time, we can produce meaningful information. Quantum computers perform operations using quantum logic gates (X, Y, Z, CNOT, Hadamard, etc.) governed by linear algebra (matrix algebra). These quantum logic gates are somewhat different from digital logic gates. For example, the Hadamard gate is used to quantumly entangle subatomic particles in a quantum computer and then put the particles into a state of superposition to process information. Borrowing from my earlier example of flipping a coin, we can think of superposition, in an overly simplified way, as when the coin is flipping through the air. Storage Digital computers store bits using voltage and charge. This is done inside “chips” (integrated circuits) made up mostly of transistors. A transistor is simply a switch that can be turned on (one) and off (zero) without moving atoms -- transistors only move electrons. Quantum computers store information in qubits using particle spin. Quantum particles have different properties such as mass, charge, and spin. When a particle is in a state of superposition we can think of it as spinning, much like flipping a coin. When we measure (read) the coin’s state after flipping it, it has only one of two outcomes, heads or tails. Similarly, quantum particles end up in only one of two states when we measure them called spin up or spin down. We can think of spin up as when its axis is pointing up (north), which we call zero, and we can think of spin down as when its axis is pointing down (south), which we call one. Architecture Digital computers use a von Neumann model with a CPU, ALU (arithmetic logic unit), and memory to store instructions and data. Physically, bits are stored in transistors at room temperature. Quantum computers store and process data using quantum error correction (this is what makes a quantum computer a quantum computer). Quantum error correction protects the qubits (electrons, photons, nuclei, etc.) from outside interference. The biggest source of interference is heat. Physically, qubits are stored at less than 1 Kelvin (about 0.015 Kelvin) to remove any thermal noise that could disturb them. The requirement to maintain a temperature of less than -457.87 degrees Fahrenheit presents its own set of operational challenges. Output Digital computers are deterministic. The exact same inputs, into the exact same algorithms, always yields the exact same outputs. Quantum computers are probabilistic. Repetition of the same inputs yields probabilistic outputs. This is a realistic model of how the universe works. If we flip a coin 10,000 times, we’d expect the sum of heads and the sum of tails to total 10,000 with about a 50/50 split. However, it’s entirely possible that the coin could land on its side (edge). Quantum computers can better represent real-world probabilities. Reversibility Digital computers’ logic gates are not all reversible. If I show you the outputs from a digital computer, and tell you which operation is performed that yielded those outputs, you may still not have enough information to figure out the inputs. Quantum computers’ logic gates are all reversible. If I show you the outputs from an operation, and tell you the operation that was performed, you could always determine all of the inputs. So much so that if you took these outputs and put them through the same operation, as inputs, your new outputs would match the original inputs in the first step. Current State of Quantum Computing Before 2020, researchers viewed quantum computing as primarily a scientific endeavor with relatively little immediate bearing on the commercial viability of quantum computing. However, that has quickly changed with multiple companies entering the quantum computing market. Amazon currently has a web service where anyone can run quantum computing tasks on a variety of quantum computers. The ability to decode complex cryptographic challenges, process enormous amounts of data quickly, and simulate atomic and subatomic behavior in a controlled environment is likely just the tip of the quantum wave to come. #quantumcomputing #CANAAdvisors #joemoreno

In early December of 2020, several CANA team members participated in the virtual MORS Emerging Techniques Forum (ETF). Norm Reitter and Renee Carlucci acted as judges for the Visco Prize competition. Walt DeGrange helped with the organization of the event and led a Birds of a Feather discussion on adapting when analytics projects don’t go as planned. Several CANA members, myself included, enjoyed attending briefs and networking throughout the event. A Timely Theme by Lucia Darrow Emerging techniques are often the product of a pressing need for innovation. In 2020 there was no shortage of challenges that required fast and thorough analytical solutions. As such, it was no surprise that the ETF incorporated these ideas into this year’s theme: “2020 ETF seeks advancements in tools and techniques that enable decisive action in complex environments.” Tracks covered topics such as predicting irregular events and measuring resilience, with many talks addressing uncertainty and risk management. Coming from a graduate research background in systems resilience, I was particularly interested in talks within the Systems in Crisis track. It was fascinating to see how the MORS community approached risk management questions with data-driven solutions using methods such as optimization and predictive modeling. The conference talks were accompanied by several fantastic plenary and keynote speakers covering topics from analysis during the pandemic to cybersecurity. Visco Prize Competition by Renee Carlucci In addition to the various tracks, Norm Reitter and I judged the Visco Price competition. The Eugene P. Visco prize was established in March 2019 to honor and to memorialize Gene Visco, FS, who was an ardent supporter of collaboration within the international operations research community and for years represented MORS during the ISMOR. Gene was also a constant supporter of MORS junior analysts and a champion for quality presentations. The purpose of this prize is to promote collaboration between the international operations research community and MORS by providing a high-quality presentation selected at the annual Emerging Techniques Forum (ETF) to the International Symposium on Military Operational Research (ISMOR) every year. This prize will provide a Junior Analyst the opportunity to present at the ISMOR, held in the United Kingdom every summer. The selected presenter will be provided admission to the ISMOR along with housing and travel expenses. Gene Visco was well represented in spirit through six great presentations featuring junior analysts at this year’s virtual ETF. A common theme seemed to be artificial intelligence since machine learning was a featured technique in four of the six presentations. MAJ Jaison Desai, Ph.D., had the winning presentation on “Determination of Influential Factors on Roadway Bridge Sufficiency Using Inspection Data and LASSO: A Proof-of-Concept”. While most existing work using data on our aging bridge infrastructure has focused on optimizing the use of bridge inspectors, MAJ Desai’s work used machine learning to determine what factors are most important for bridge management. In summary Altogether the MORS ETF delivered! Delivered interesting and engaging tracks, delivered opportunities for leadership and participation to this CANA team, and most of all delivered consistency - even though virtual - in providing yet another high-quality conference. If you are interested in learning more about MORS events and conferences, you can visit their website at https://www.mors.org/events. MORS UPCOMING EVENTS: -Designing Tactical Games -Certificate in Cyber Wargaming Tuesday, 9-11 February 2021 Monday, 15-19 March 2021 -Acquisition Analytics for Counter UAS Workshop -Certificate in Survey Process Tuesday, 2-4 March 2021 Tuesday, 27-29 of April 2021 Tuesday, 4-5 of May 2021

2020 was...well, it’s in the past now! It brought us quarantine, working from home, and a whole lot of sitting in front of a screen. Now 2021 is here and your body AND MIND are probably feeling the repercussions of 2020. Here at CANA Advisors we’re used to working from home, it’s how we roll and how we’ve rolled since our founding day over 12 years ago! So, we know a little about an abundance of screen time, desk sitting, and seclusion in one place all day every day. What we also know about, a lot about, are the most beneficial ways to avoid the mental, emotional, and physical stress and strains that come along with these, what our world now calls, new norms. Our Mind Let’s start with the mental and emotional effects of working from home. You no longer have to leave your house for work, and with online shopping, home grocery delivery, telehealth, and the like, you may very well not be leaving your house for much of anything. Along with staying at home likely comes not changing your clothes, not fixing your hair, and… psst… did you brush your teeth today? Plus, ladies, no-make Monday is now 7 days a week, right? Losing a daily routine might seem nice at first, a little time-saving, and maybe it even reduces the stress of your morning, especially if you’re not an early bird like this night owl here. But a routine, especially a morning routine, is so important! In a world that throws so much uncertainty at us, we need to have something solid, something steady in our lives to keep us grounded and sane. For some of us, coffee is the one thing we must have before we can proceed on with the rest of the day. For others, a few minutes in a good personal development book or devotional can set your day on the right path. For me, nothing wakes my soul in the morning like music and my nutritional supplements. It gets me ready for the day's work and workouts! Remember, I’m a night owl, not an early bird! If you don’t have that “it factor” in your morning yet, try one of these to see what works for you. If nothing else, get up, change your clothes, and brush those teeth! You’ll thank yourself all day long! Our Body Alright, that body! It is sitting, staring, slouching, for hours on end. It goes from bed to desk chair, to lunch/dinner chair, likely to the couch, and right back to bed. If you squeeze some exercise in there, you’re rocking it already but you can always do more! If you’re not exercising, it’s easier than you think! I want to share two things with you: basic daily movement and simple exercises suitable for nearly every BODY. Let’s actually start with exercises because it really doesn’t need to be fancy and complex. Number one recommendation… walk! Walk around your room, throughout the house/office, if it’s nice (or if you don’t mind a little weather) take your walk outside. You don’t even need to leave your yard, just get those legs moving. You’re so busy though, right? You’re too swamped at work to leave your desk let alone the house. First of all, that’s an entirely separate blog about not becoming too “busy” and understanding what “busy” really is and is not, but I digress. Second of all, I get it, sometimes you’re in an all-day training, conference call, review session, and that’s understandable. Walk before work, walk after you’re done working for the day, or place that phone on speaker and walk in place during your meetings. I promise, it’s doable. Want something more? Squats, lunges, pushups, planks, are all basic exercises* that can be done right at your desk and can be modified to suit any physical limitations. A fantastic idea to help you stay accountable, and promote corporate wellness at the same time, is to engage your co-workers in these exercises. Here at CANA Advisors, nearly every meeting is a video teleconference. On several occasions, CANA team members have shut their cameras off for a few moments and engaged in some motivational, mid-day push-ups. When they come back on screen, their blood is flowing, their face a bit pink, and their mind is ready to get back in the game. It’s just one part of the CANA culture that I love! Still focusing on that body but let’s talk about movement. Something as simple as just getting out of that chair for two minutes every hour can make a world of difference. Movements involving stretches can relieve body stresses, muscle strains, and (shoutout to mental and emotional benefits) can reset your clarity and focus. Any movement, even rotating your ankles while still seated in your chair is beneficial but there are two focus areas that suffer the most from extended periods of sitting and computer work: shoulders/neck and lower back/hips. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “he/she carries the weight of the world.” Do you know where we carry it? We carry so much tension in our shoulders which ultimately affects our neck as well. Do me a favor, right now, just sit back in your chair, roll your shoulders up-back-down, and hold them there. Do you feel that? I bet you took a nice deep inhale and exhale when you rolled those shoulders. You just exhaled stress! Now while those shoulders are relaxed, allowing your chest to rise and fall with more ease, slowly tilt your head side to side, holding for a few seconds on each side. So simple and so effective! These are two phenomenal moves if you find yourself suffering from headaches as well. You’re going to need to push your chair away from your desk for this next part. Our hip flexors are one of the most overused yet overlooked areas on our bodies. Brace yourself, this next movement tip is more challenging and intense. Stand up. Ok, so I exaggerated a bit on the level of challenge and intensity but the level of benefit is definitely high. If you can spend even a small part of your day standing, I encourage you to do so. Once you’re on your feet, be sure to take a few moments throughout the day to hinge at the hips, bending forward to reach for your toes. Then stand tall, reaching your arms overhead, arching back and side-to-side to lengthen along with the hip flexors, obliques, and abdominal muscles. An instant “wake-up” for your body which not only improves your posture, circulation, and muscle health but, again, these stretches improve mental clarity and focus. So whether your work situation has changed over the past 12 months or not, whether working from home is new to you or business, as usual, get dressed, brush your teeth, integrate frequent movement, stretching, and exercise throughout each day, and just take time to breathe.

CANA's Program and Project Management (PPM) team recently conducted a successful virtual offsite event in November. Together, the PPM team members built a vision framework to support the development of strategies and tactics to achieve their mission for the upcoming 2021 year. CANA’s PPM team worked over two days to complete their activities on MURAL. MURAL is a virtual collaboration whiteboard that CANA uses both internally and for client activities. It’s particularly helpful since our team is widely dispersed throughout the U.S. and Canada. MURAL’s boards allow us to add a variety of resources onto the board including pdfs, website links, photos, videos, text, and sticky notes. For more MURAL projects at CANA, you can see our blog here. The PPM team Director, Connie McKissack, led the group in a series of team-building activities that would eventually result in vision framework products. Beginning with the MURAL board below, she used brainstorming techniques to spark creativity within the team and create a flow of ideas to identify team values and behaviors. Each team member independently shared a set of images that were used to shape the team’s purpose and mission. From this foundation, the PPM team developed distinct strategies for the upcoming year. Mural Board Demonstration CANA's team-building, in-person, offsite events are key components in the company's culture. As a virtual company, CANA makes offsite events a priority to bring the employees together face-to-face for team building, strategizing, and of course FUN! Although 2020 introduced some significant challenges, it enabled our PPM "CANA Bunch" to creatively adapt and overcome. We proved the year’s virtual offsite events could be just as productive and enjoyable as ever before!

Use the same code three times, create a function. Use the same function across multiple projects, create a package? At CANA, we use the statistical programming language R across several projects for its ease of creating data-driven applications and reproducible reports. It’s a great option for exploring data, prototyping solutions, or even taking a model to production. This last summer, several R programmers on the CANA team collaborated on an internal package, canaR, to share standard functions and formatting across our R products. In this post, we share some lessons learned from creating an internal package. The DRY Principle Most programmers are familiar with the DRY principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself) which aims at reducing repetition in code. Reasons to follow this principle are abundant: less effort for the programmer, reduced chance for error across multiple uses of the same code, and streamlined testing. In R, this translates to the use of functions and packages as a best practice. Packages are a natural unit to distribute code within a team as they include functions, tests, documentation, and vignettes. The package development process has become increasingly accessible in recent years due to tools such as usethis, testthat, and roxygen2. Package Development Approach The canaR development process was a collaborative effort led by CANA’s R programmers. For our internal package, functions fell into three key categories: style and branding, rounding, and visualizations. Style and branding functions in the canaR package provide uniformity across our R products by creating a standard for document, table, and plot appearance. These offer a jumping off point for tailoring by analysts as they utilize the formatting functions and geoms on different projects. The canaR development team worked with CANA’s graphic designer, Koa Beam, to create custom, color blind-friendly palettes to fit categorical, sequential, and diverging types of data visualizations. Rounding functions are another crucial and often underestimated challenge for standardized results. Working with repetition results of a simulation and/or collaborating with team members that use a different software can lead to some tricky rounding challenges. Sample functions in the canaR package that tackle these challenges perform actions such as aligning rounding results to what is expected in Excel, or controlling rounding for aggregations. Visualization functions in canaR create unique data visuals not covered by existing packages. One of the functions that is helpful for working with dateless planning scenarios is the ‘relative timeline,’ created by CANA team member, Aaron Luprek. This data visualization function creates a time line centered around zero, which allows for showing results that are time-based but not associated with a certain date. Sample Relative Timeline Graphic Once the functions were built, the package development team worked together to create clear documentation, examples, and vignettes for future users. We used the testthat package to streamline our testing approach. The final touch was the package naming convention. In the tradition of some of our favorite tidyverse packages, we saw the opportunity to incorporate a little French (ala magrittr) and an animal reference (ala purrr). Hence, canaR as a sly reference to the ‘canard,’ French for duck, and a diverting duck logo. Resources Interested in creating your own R package? There are many resources available! Here are just a few that our team found helpful in developing canaR: Hadley Wickham and Jenny Bryan - R Packages (Book) Hilary Parker - Writing an R package from scratch (Blog) Malcolm Barrett - Zen and the Art of R Package Development (Video) John Muschelli - R Package Development Series (Video)

The Problem The R programming language is a popular open source environment for statistical computing. CANA runs multiple R algorithms on a server using the Plumber framework, which converts existing R code into web APIs by adding a couple of special comments. A key issue with R is that it is single threaded, meaning that only a single block of code, inside an application, can execute at any given time. In other words, while that single block is executing, all other code is blocked. This is not typically an issue unless there is a block of code that takes a long time, such as a complex algorithm or a call over a network. CANA’s application performs both, and supports multiple users concurrently, so being single threaded does not scale for us. One solution I pursued over the last year was to use the AWS Lambda service which allows standalone functions to execute in the cloud. The challenge with Lambda is it does not natively run R code and is better suited for Java, Python, and other languages. While it is technically feasible to run R inside of Lambda, we had not yet implemented it because it is non-trivial, requiring that R run inside a Python container with supporting frameworks and libraries. The Solution A coworker came up with an elegant solution to this programming problem. The solution is to run a Node.js server that simply makes calls to shell scripts (R scripts) running on the host operating system. Each shell script runs in its own process, so one won’t block another. And, even though Node.js is, itself, single threaded, it uses non-blocking input/output calls (“callbacks”), allowing it to support tens of thousands of concurrent connections without incurring the cost of thread context switching. Simple, elegant, and trivial to implement.