Community Service in the Dominican Republic and The Bement School

Last year, I began this blog about the same time as my daughter, who was then a 9th grader at The Bement School in Old Deerfield, Massachusetts, was getting ready for a community service trip with her class to La Suiza Orphanage in the Dominican Republic. I wrote in this blog about the preparations, the anticipation, and the excitement of the students and their teachers prior to the trip and the life-transforming experience that this trip was for all involved.

Much has happened to the island of Hispaniola, which is shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti, since that class trip, especially the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti on January 12, 2010. This year's 9th grade class at The Bement School has now returned from their one week service trip to the same orphanage, which began on January 28, 2010.

Before they left, my daughter constructed a large poster filled with photos that she developed from her class trip last year and one of her former teachers brought the poster to the orphanage.

Above I share with you a photo that the teacher took of my daughter's poster at the orphanage, which is being admired and studied very intently by two boys at the orphanage. The teacher told my daughter that many of the children at this orphanage remembered their experiences with my daughter's class and were delighted to see the poster with the photos of very special memories. A return trip is planned next year for the Bement alums who have been able to help out at La Suiza and who wish to return to see the children and to reestablish the bonds made.

Memories of such experiences as these are priceless for all those involved and prove the importance of human connections and community service across national boundaries.

The Cybersecurity Website is Now Live!

The Cybersecurity website that details the breadth and depth of research and education activities at UMass Amherst on this topic is now live. We are delighted with this important initiative that includes faculty and students from such outstanding departments and schools at UMass Amherst as: Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mathematics and Statistics, Political Science, Communications, and the Isenberg School of Management.

You will find on this site more information about the various campus-wide activities, including the relevant research that we have been conducting at the Virtual Center for Supernetworks on the Modeling, Analysis, and Computation of Solutions to Complex Network Systems.

Last term, as part of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series in Operations Research / Management Science, we hosted the presentation of Professor Brian Levine of the Computer Science Department on cyber forensics (which the audience members are still talking about). This term, the upcoming talk of Richard Brooks on smart grids is also relevant to cyber security.

We are looking forward to further supporting the important research and education efforts on this most important topic and are glad that we were able to support financially, in part, the development of this website.

Braess paradox, queuing (standing in line), and the Boston Globe

I was pleased to see James Parker's column in the Boston Globe on queuing, which he says is what separates man from beasts. He gives credit to anthropologists for noting that queuing represents stable cooperative equilibrium and then goes out to note the Braess paradox, due to Professor Dietrich Braess, which showed that the addition of a new road may make everyone worse off in terms of travel time in the network. However, in the column he misrepresents the Braess paradox by saying that it reflects that two lines are shorter than a single line or queue. In the Braess paradox, the addition of a new road results in multiple roads or links then being shared and these are not parallel roads of different lengths.

For the exposition of the Braess paradox, along with links to the original Braess article, which was published in German, as well as to the translation to English, which Braess and I did with my former doctoral student, Tina Wakolbinger please click here. We had the pleasure of hosting the visit of Professor Braess at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst in April 2006. Of course, if one can control the flow of traffic then such a paradox cannot occur. It also does not occur in the case of uncongested networks in which the travel time of the link is independent of the flow on the link.

Last week, when I was at the Transportation Network Design and Economics Symposium at Northwestern University, I asked Professor T. John Kim of the University of Illinois at Urbana what he thought of the removal of the downtown arterial in Seoul, Korea, to recover the river and to restore the surrounding parks. Professor Kim had, of course, visited that part of Seoul and had discussed the matter with the civil engineering professor who had done the study prior to this road removal (like the reverse of the Braess paradox). He and others consider this road removal a great success.

The New York Times last week ran an article on the closure of Broadway between 47th Street and 42nd Street and the full analysis of the impacts on the traffic flow and travel time should be out fairly soon. In any event, the closure of Broadway appears to have had a similar effect to that of congestion pricing in London.

Queuing is a topic well-known to operations researchers and management scientists so I was pleased to see this topic featured in the Boston Globe.

Boston, Cambridge, and Upcoming Conference in Buenos Aires

I was in Boston and Cambridge this past week where the roads and streets were clear of snow, unlike the Washington DC area, which is being pummeled by a huge snowstorm that has grounded travel to a halt.

Having spent a year as a Science Fellow at Harvard in 2005-2006 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, I like to go back fairly regularly. Cambridge and Boston are two magnificent locations in my state of Massachusetts and I get my muse in those places (among others).

While in Cambridge, I met the Executive Director of the Latin America Research Center of the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard University, who is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Buenos Aires is the venue for the ALIO-INFORMS Conference that is taking place in early June, 2010. At the conference, I will be giving a tutorial, Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain Age. Additional tutorial topics and plenary lectures can be found here. The New York Times had a recent article on Buenos Aires which highly recommended it as a fascinating destination.

At the ALIO-INFORMS conference, which will bring operations researchers and management scientists from around the globe to discuss their latest research, I will also be taking part in a panel on International Collaborations, a topic that I have been writing about on this blog recently. The panel is organized by WORMS, Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences, a fora of my professional society INFORMS. The convener of this panel is Dr. Sadan Kulturel, a Professor at Penn State Berks. Joining me on the panel will be: Drs. M. Gulnara Baldoquin, Karla Hoffman, and Lorena Predanas. The panel will focus on different means of international collaborations such as funded projects, international research and teaching projects, sabbaticals, etc. The panelists will discuss their unique perspectives on issues affecting the success of women in academic positions in the US and in Latin American countries. I am very much looking forward to being on this panel, giving my tutorial, and to going to the ALIO-INFORMS conference.

Above I share with you some photos of the intellectual capitals of the universe (Boston and Cambridge) taken this past week (including photos of Harvard Yard and Radcliffe Yard, with a recent sculpture, and where I had my office as a Science Fellow). I could not resist also including a photo of the bronze sculptures of the ducks made famous in the book, Make Way for Ducklings, on the Boston Common. Note the absence of snow although it is February!

International Collaborations and Innovation as a Contact Sport

Dr. Indira V. Samarasekera, the President of the University of Alberta in Canada, wrote an article, "Universities Need a New Social Contract," that was published in Nature, as an opinion piece in the November 12, 2009 issue. The eloquent piece had numerous excellent ideas including that leaders from major government funding agencies from across the world -- particularly from North America, Europe, India, and China should be brought together to help to define a funding model designed to award interdisciplinary, inter-institutional and international projects. She argued that many of the most pressing problems that we are faced with today are global from international security to energy, environmental sustainability, and economic recovery. The present funding models are stuck in inertia and to solve the critical problems, international collaborations are needed.

I have had the benefit of one National Science Foundation grant through the International Programs Office to work on a project with Sweden, have benefited from two international collaborations through the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center Program, and have been on two thoroughly rewarding Fulbright adventures. I have also held other visiting positions outside of the US.

My university, UMASS Amherst, has now created a website for international research activities. I am very pleased that the center that I direct, the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, is one of the affiliated centers. This new website has a link to Fulbright scholars that have come to UMass Amherst as well as Fulbrights awarded to faculty and students. Finally, it also includes a list of recent funded research projects with an international component and I am very pleased to see that the Humanitarian Logistics: Networks for Africa conference that I organized is also on the list.

Dr. Samarasekera said in her Nature article that innovation is a contact sport and funding agencies need to work across disciplinary and national boundaries to bring researchers together who can make the greatest discoveries through intense collaborations. I fully concur!

The Pooling of Resources for Humanitarian Operations

The New York Times has a very interesting, provocative article on the pooling of resources for humanitarian operations and, in particular, as applied to Haiti, but the topic is broader and relevant in other disaster and humanitarian relief contexts. The article is focused on the pooling of financial resources and notes that the Red Cross, although it did not have a large presence in Haiti prior to the earthquake, because of its brand name recognition, has received many more financial donations than has Partners in Health, which has had a large presence in Haiti, even before the earthquake struck on January 12, 2010.

The issue of financial donations to relief organizations and providing stakeholders with proper accounting of donations is an important one and two of my former doctoral students, who are now professors, Dr. Tina Wakolbinger and Dr. Fuminori Toyasaki, are actively researching this topic.

I would argue that cooperation among humanitarian organizations in relief operations is critical and I have written on this topic earlier in this blog. In particular, as was evident in Haiti, there were numerous demand points (and there still are) for such products as water, food, medicines, and tents and the networks of different organizations were not working together in a synergistic manner. Some of the issues were obviously ones of lack of communication and coordination. Nevertheless, when it comes to the pooling of resources, including financial ones, by being able to represent the various activities of the humanitarian organizations as networks, one can actually quantify the synergistic gains from cooperation.

In joint work with Dr. Trisha Woolley and Dr. Patrick Qiang, we have developed a synergy measure that can be used to assess the benefits of cooperation by sharing of network resources. The work is documented in a study entitled, "Multiproduct Supply Chain Horizontal Network Integration: Models, Theory, and Computational Results," which is in press in the journal International Transactions in Operational Research. I presented this work earlier at the humanitarian logistics conference that I had organized, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, that took place at its Bellagio Center.

What a Transportation Symposium!

I returned from Northwestern University early this morning after a landing on a delayed United flight from Chicago O'Hare to Bradley airport in Hartford/Springfield that was preceded by an announcement by the pilot that we will be experiencing "extreme turbulence." My trip began about 5:30AM Thursday morning when I was picked up by a van service in Amherst only to have the shuttle to which the other passengers and I were to then be moved to get a flat tire right in front of Mount Holyoke College in the dark of night. Luckily, our shuttle was still in good condition so we did a swap and arrived at the airport in time for our flights. Travel is never dull and especially in the midst of a frigid winter.

My destination was Northwestern University, where its Transportation Center, directed by Professor Hani S. Mahmassani, was hosting a Symposium on Transportation Network Design and Economics. The symposium was to mark the visit of Professor Martin Beckmann (who was on my doctoral committee at Brown University) and the complete symposium agenda can be found here.

The symposium was outstanding and brought together researchers in engineering, economics, operations research, regional science, and even physics. I especially appreciated the attention to detail in the organization of this symposium with sufficient time scheduled for many exciting discussions, wonderful coffee breaks, and a delicious free lunch. Professor Beckmann had arrived on Wednesday having traveled first from Providence to NYC, where he saw an opera and visited museums. He had taken an Amtrak sleeper car from NYC to Chicago (he believes in experiencing many different modes of transportation) and told us that the service was great but his sleeping compartment was rather cold. He is traveling back to Providence also on Amtrak (but through Washington DC).

Professors Mahmassani and David E. Boyce are to be congratulated as well as the staff of the Transportation Center at Northwestern for organizing an exceptional venue and very stimulating symposium program! The discussions that took place germinated numerous research questions and ideas on a topic of great relevance regionally, nationally, and globally. The audience included faculty, students, and practitioners. There were participants from Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Urbana, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Purdue University, Roosevelt University, Loyola University, and UMass Amherst, as well as individuals from the Chicago Transportation Authority, Cambridge Systematics, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, and several independent consultants.

The symposium was a perfect way in which to honor the lasting contributions of Professor Martin Beckmann to the economics and science of transportation networks! It was thrilling to, once again, see Professor Beckmann, who is 85 years old, and whose wit and brilliance still astound.

The photo above of Professor Beckmann with me was taken at the lovely dining hall at the Allen Center at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University on January 28, 2010.