Friday, December 29, 2017

It Was a Great Operations Research Year!

As the New 2018 Year approaches, and the holidays are behind us, it is only fitting to reflect on the past year.

It was a great Operations Research Year!

When I look back, some of the highlights that come to mind, and also bring on a big smile, include:

  •  Seeing my 19th PhD student, Sara Saberi, receive her PhD at UMass Amherst commencement ceremonies:
 

  • Celebrating with my former Isenberg School undergrad OIM student Karen Li, on her receipt of the 21st Century Leaders Award from UMass Amherst, and then having our paper published in Operations Research for Health Care. Joining Karen and me in the photo below are: Isenberg Dean Mark A. Fuller, Amherst Fire Chief Tim Nelson, and Associate Dean of Engineering Tilman Wolf.


  • Having dinner at the UMass Club in beautiful Boston last summer with 3 recipients of the INFORMS Judith Liebman Award: Dr. Amir H. Masoumi, Dr. Michael Prokle, and to be Dr. Thiago Serra:


  • Spending 2 months as a Summer Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and getting to see many students (present and former), colleagues, and even relatives while living and working in Cambridge again; below I am with two of my doctoral students: Deniz Besik and Pritha Dutta.
 
  • Having my 20th PhD student, Shivani Shukla, successfully defend her PhD, and assume a tenure track Assistant Professorship in California: 


Enjoying speaking and seeing many friends and former students at numerous conferences including the humanitarian operations one in Vienna, Austria  (organized by my former doctoral student, Professor Tina Wakolbinger), the Dynamics of Disasters one that I co-organized with Professors Panos M. Pardalos and Illias S. Kotsireas in Kalamata, Greece, the fabulous IFORS conference in Quebec City, and the INFORMS one, which amazingly took place and was very successfully not that long after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston:

 





It was also a tremendous year for research for our supernetworks group with multiple publications in journals, interviews, and also publications in the popular press and interviews in the media.

And, of course, it was truly special to see our great UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter being recognized with the Magna Cum Laude Award at the INFORMS Conference in Houston!



I wonder what kind of Operations Research adventures and discoveries 2018 will bring!

Friday, December 15, 2017

Congratulations and Kudos to the Supernetwork Team at the Isenberg School of Management

Every year, at this time, as the Center Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, I prepare a Congratulations and Kudos to the Supernetwork Team.
 
2017 was a fabulous year for the Supernetwork Team, one in which we continued to have a global reach and impact! It gives me great pleasure to highlight below some of the accomplishments and achievements of the Center Associates of the Virtual Center for Supernetwork in the past year.
Congratulations to Center Associate Dr. Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy on her promotion to Full Professor! Also, it is not very often that there is a paper with 4 female co-authors. I was delighted that the paper, "Cybersecurity Investments with Nonlinear Budget Constraints and Conservation Laws: Variational Equilibrium, Marginal Expected Utilities, and Lagrange Multipliers," co-authored with Gabriella Colajanni, Dr. Patrizia Daniele, and Dr. Sofia Giuffre,  is now in press in the International Transactions in Operational Research. Dr. Daniele took part in the 3rd Dynamics of Disasters conference,  in early July, 2017 in Kalamata, Greece, and jointly presented a paper with Emilio Alvarez-Flores, a former undergraduate Isenberg School alum, a student of Dr. Daniele's, Valeria Caruso, and me, on game theory and disaster relief.

It was a pleasure co-organizing the Dynamics of Disasters conference with Dr. Ilias Kotsireas from the Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada and Dr. Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida. Also speaking at this conference were Center Associates: Dr. Dmytro Matsypura of the University of Sydney in Australia, whose recent paper, "Wildfire Fuel Management: Network-based Models and Optimization of Prescribed Burning," co-authored with Dr. Oleg Prokopyev of the University of Pittsburgh,  was published in the European Journal of Operational Research, and Dr. Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford, who spoke on disaster communications. We had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Matsypura at the Isenberg School, his PhD alma mater,  through the UMass Amherst INFORMS Speakers Series on November 3, since he was on sabbatical this Fall.

Also presenting at the Dynamics of Disasters conference was Timo Gossler, a doctoral student of Center Associate Dr. Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria. Dr. Wakolbinger was the organizer of the fabulous 2017 EURO HOpe conference, which focused on humanitarian operations and which took place at her university, shortly before the Dynamics of Disasters conference.

Center Associate Dr. Stavros Siokos, who is the Managing Partners of Astarte Capital Partners, based in London, England, deserves a big congratulations! His company was recognized as a "Most Innovative Manager of 2017" by the Institutional Asset Management Awards at a ceremony at the Pierre Hotel in NYC in November. And he was featured on the cover of the Finance Monthly with an interview in the November Issue!

Congratulations also to Center Associate Dr. Shivani Shukla, who successfully defended her PhD dissertation: Game Theory for Security Investments in Cyber and Supply Chain Networks, and assumed a tenure track Assistant Professor position at the University of San Francisco in California. She is my 20th PhD student to receive her doctorate. The paper, "Multifirm Models of Cybersecurity Investment Competition vs. Cooperation and Network Vulnerability," that we co-authored, was published in the European Journal of Operational Research in 2017.

Kudos to Center Associate Dr. Sara Saberi of the Foisie School of Business at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts, who is lead author of the paper, "A Competitive Multiperiod Supply Chain Network Model with Freight Carriers and Green Technology Investment Option," with Center Associate Dr. Jose M. Cruz of the University of Connecticut, her colleague, Dr. Joe Sarkis, and me, which is in press in the European Journal of Operational Research. Dr. Saberi presented this work at the MSOM conference at the UNC Flagler School in June. Dr. Saberi also received a grant from APICS joint with Dr. Sarkis.

Center Associate Amir H. Masoumi was again heavily involved in organizing the latest Business Analytics competition at Manhattan College, which took place last May and is now an international competition. Center Associate Dr. Dong "Michelle" Li of Arkansas State University, was one of the judges. Kudos to Dr. Masoumi on his publication, "Mergers and Acquisitions in Blood Banking Systems: A Supply Chain Network Approach," that we co-authored with Center Associate Dr. Min Yu of the University of Portland, which was published in the International Journal of Production Economics in 2017. Also, Dr. Yu was a co-author of our paper, "Consumer Learning of Product Quality with Time Delay: Insights from Spatial Price Equilibrium Models with Differentiated Products," with Dr. Li, which is now in press in the journal Omega.

Congratulations to Doctoral Student Center Associate Deniz Besik, who had two papers published in 2017, one in the Journal of Global Optimization and the other in Socio-Economic Planning Sciences. This year she was elected President of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter.  The chapter was recognized with its 12th award, in as many years, at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Houston in October, with the Magna Cum Laude Award  for its activities in 2016. In 2016, Doctoral Student Center Associate Pritha Dutta served as the Chapter President. Kudos also to her for receiving the first place award by a PhD student at the NEDSI conference in Springfield, MA, in March for her presentation on a game theory model for blood donations.

We welcome Mojtaba Salarpour as a Doctoral Student Center Associate. Mr. Salarpour matriculated into the Management Science doctoral program at the Isenberg School in Fall 2017 and will be working on disaster relief.

The INFORMS Houston conference, October 22-25, 2017,  served as a great venue for many Center Associates to reconvene, with participants and speakers including Center Associates Professor Patrick Qiang of Pennsylvania State University Great Valley, Professor Trisha Anderson of Texas Wesleyan University, Professor Amir H. Masoumi of Manhattan College, Professor Min Yu of the University of Portland, Professor Dmytro Matsypura of the University of Sydney in Australia, Professor Jose M. Cruz of the University of Connecticut, Professor Dong Li of Arkansas State University, Professor Sara Saberi, and Center Associates Professor Shivani Shukla as well as Deniz Besik and Pritha Dutta.

Also, articles that we authored on topics from blood supply chains to investing in infrastructure to disaster relief and game theory to FirstNet in The Conversation were reprinted in many major publications outlets and I had the pleasure of being interviewed for multiple radio news shows in the US and in Canada. Finally, it was wonderful to be back at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University as a Summer Fellow and to also speak at the ORBerlin Conference in September!

Thanks for the support! We wish everyone a Marvelous New 2018 Year!

Below are links to examples of some of our recent publications.
 
Multifirm Models of Cybersecurity Investment Competition vs. Cooperation and Network Vulnerability,
Anna Nagurney and Shivani Shukla, European Journal of Operational Research 260(2): (2017), pp 588-600.
 
A Competitive Multiperiod Supply Chain Network Model with Freight Carriers and Green Technology Investment Option,
Sara Saberi, Jose M. Cruz, Joseph Sarkis, and Anna Nagurney, in press in the European Journal of Operational Research.
 
Quality in Competitive Fresh Produce Supply Chains with Application to Farmers’ Markets,
Deniz Besik and Anna Nagurney, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences 60: (2017), pp 62-76.
 
Mergers and Acquisitions in Blood Banking Systems: A Supply Chain Network Approach,
Amir H. Masoumi, Min Yu, and Anna Nagurney, International Journal of Production Economics 193: (2017), pp 406-421.
 

Cybersecurity Investments with Nonlinear Budget Constraints and Conservation Laws: Variational Equilibrium, Marginal Expected Utilities, and Lagrange Multipliers,
Gabriella Colajanni, Patrizia Daniele, Sofia Giuffre, and Anna Nagurney, in press in the International Transactions in Operational Research.
 


Hospital Competition in Prices and Quality: A Variational Inequality Framework,
Anna Nagurney and Karen Li, Operations Research for Health Care 15: (2017), pp 91-101.
    
               
 

Saturday, December 9, 2017

We Celebrated a Great Semester for the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter with a Fabulous Party!

In academic circles this is a very busy time of the year with the end of the Fall semester upon us, final exams ahead of us, and with both faculty and students finishing up numerous projects and classwork. 

At the same time, one needs to celebrate accomplishments of the wonderful community that is the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter! I have had the privilege and fun of being its Faculty Advisor since 2004, which means that I have seen many of our Operations Research and Management Science students graduate with their PhDs and some are even Full Professors now (Dr. Tina Wakolbinger, for example, who was my PhD student and helped to found the chapter in 2004).

This semester, the student chapter hosted spectacular speakers: Dr. Shannon Roberts, Dr. Renata Konrad, and Dr. Dmytro Matsypura, and  began an exciting initiative of establishing a UMass INFORMS youtube channel, which now has two videos of interviews with the latter two speakers. The interviews, thus far, have been conducted by this year's Chapter President, Deniz Besik, and last year's President, Pritha Dutta, with technological assistance in videotaping and video production provided by Rodrigo Mercado and Mojtaba Salarpour. Another highlight this semester was having the chapter recognized with a Magna Cum Laude Award from INFORMS at the Annual Conference in Houston, Texas, October 22-25, 2017!

Yesterday, our wonderful end of the semester party took place at the Isenberg School. The terrific Chapter Officers, led by Deniz Besik, prepared the lovely poster below announcing the party.
In my "spare" time (while chairing a faculty search committee, finishing up two papers and working on another one, plus getting ready for a dissertation proposal defense, in addition to teaching and various other service commitments and writing letters for 5 job candidates), I was getting ready for the party.

I managed to bake some goodies:
and my husband, after spending most of the day at his Engineering School's student design project presentations,  helped to arrange and heat up the pierogies/varenyky and the sausage, which are always very popular. He also helped me to carry the food to the Isenberg School from our car:
The students had extended personal invitations to many faculty and the turnout was fabulous. Since the students are operations researchers, they are also excellent when it comes to the logistics of  procuring various dishes and refreshments for the party and even had a special cake!
Faculty and students  came from my Operations and Information Management Department, including the Department Chair, Dr. Agha Iqbal Ali,  and my colleagues: Dr. Ahmed Ghoniem and Dr. Senay Solak, as well as from the College of Engineering from the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, including Dr. Ana Muriel, Dr. Erin Baker, and Dr. Hari Balasubramanian,  and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and from Computer Science! It was very special to also see Dr. Peter Haas, one of our newest faculty members, who spent decades at IBM, is an INFORMS Fellow, and is now at UMass Amherst!  Given that both Computer Science and the College of Engineering are on the opposite side of the UMass Amherst campus from the Isenberg School, and that it was quite cold yesterday, the great attendance speaks to the special community that the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter is part of and has also helped to build. The students at the party are from the US, Mexico, Turkey, China, Greece, Scotland, Iran, Pakistan,  India, Sierra Leone,  and Iran - a true United Nations.
 
The camaraderie was fabulous as were the appetites.

A big thank you to the amazing UMass Amherst INFORMS Student  Chapter Officers for such a warm and fun event! Below is one of my favorite selfies ever, thanks to Destenie Nock!
Best of luck to everyone on a great end of the Fall semester and early wishes for a Fantastic New Year!