Last Day of the Computational Management Science Conference in Vienna

Today is the last day of the 2010 Computational Management Science (CMS) conference that is taking place in Vienna, Austria. The weather is now cool and rainy but it should be clearing up later today.

It has been absolutely wonderful to listen to talks on topics ranging from the design of transportation networks for hazardous material shipments, to the analysis of earmarks and financing in humanitarian operations to the formulation of teams and resource allocation.

I have been going to the supply chain, transportation, and networks stream of talks and also to several of the game theory and stochastic programming ones.

Many of the participants have told me that they will be coming back to future CMS conferences since they have learned so much from this conference and have also had a wonderful time socially.

The next CMS conference will take place in Spring 2011 in Neuchatel, Switzerland.

Today I will be attending another plenary lecture (the final one and the closing session of this conference) which will be delivered by Dr. Claudia Sagastizabal who is Argentinian but works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

I commend the organizers for having two female plenary speakers (out of four)!

My plenary talk, Supply Chain Networks: Challenges and Opportunities from Analysis to Design, can be accessed, in pdf format here. Given the number of positive comments that I have received from audience members, I believe that I got the importance of this topic and the fascinating applications across.

Plenary talks play a very important role at scientific conferences. I have already extended my congratulations to the other plenary speakers -- Professor Campi of the University of Brescia in Italy and Professor Pistikopoulos of Imperial College in London. The content of their talks as well as their delivery of them were fabulous. I am getting intellectually spoiled here by the originality of and creativity behind the research presented.

The organizers have done a magnificent job of getting this conference together and I thank them as well.