Networks and Variational Inequalities Rock at the ECMI Conference in Stunning Taormina, Sicily

We made it back to Gothenburg, Sweden last night after 10 days in southern Europe where, although the Internet was not always stable or speedy, the conferences and seminar venues as well as the ambience, beauty, and great people I will never forget.

Exactly one week ago, we were in Taormina, Sicily, which was the location for 2014 ECMI (European Conference on Mathematics for Industry). Taormina is a stunning, historical city.

I was at the conference, upon the invitation of Professor Patrizia Daniele of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Catania. She had organized the session below, which was broken up by a delicious lunch and also a plenary session but it worked!

Conference Room 3 - Vincenzo Bellini Room: MS 48
Patrizia Daniele
Recent advances on equilibrium problems with applications to networks
12:00 Patrizia Daniele, Fuminori Toyasaki and Tina Wakolbinger
A Variational Inequality Formulation of Equilibrium Models for End-of-Life Products with Nonlinear Constraints
12:30 Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, Jonas Floden and Ladimer Nagurney
Supply Chain Network Competition in Time-Sensitive Markets

17:00 Tina Wakolbinger, Fuminori Toyasaki, Thomas Nowak and Anna Nagurney
When and for whom would e-waste be a treasure trove? Insights from a network equilibrium
17:30 Fabio Raciti
Nash equilibrium problems with uncertain data.

This conference was also a great reunion! Patrizia and I have co-authored several papers, and she and I organized a Complex Network Workshop a few years back at her university when I held a Senior Fulbright Specialist Award there. Patrizia has also worked with me as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard when I was a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study there on my sabbatical in 2005-2006.

It was great to see my former doctoral student, Dr. Fuminori Toyasaki, who is now on sabbatical in Vienna, having received promotion and tenure at York University in Toronto, Canada.  Their first paper in the session, with another former doctoral student of mine, Dr. Tina Wakolbinger, who is a Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business,  was recently published in the European Journal of Operational Research.

My presentation at ECMI, with colleague Professor Jonas Floden from the University of Gothenburg, my former doctoral student, Dr. Min Yu of the University of Portland, and Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford, can be downloaded here.

Dr. Toyasaki presented our paper, with Tina's doctoral student, Thomas Nowak (3 generations of scholars!), which was just published in the International Journal of Production Economics!

Dr. Raciti of the University of Catania gave a fabulous presentation on his latest work on variational inequalities in which the data in uncertain.

It was great to meet again face to face in this remote but magical location. The photos below capture how happy we were to be together again! Nothing beats meeting collaborators in exotic venues and exchanging the latest research results!

 

 

Professors Daniele and Wakolbinger are Center Associates of the Supernetwork Center at the Isenberg School of Management and very much enjoy visiting me at UMass Amherst and have hosted me at their universities.