Today we mark Ukraine's Independence Day (33 years of independence) and the past two days I had the distinct pleasure of taking part in the first International Virtual Conference on Ukraine. It was excellent and I wanted to express my thanks to Professors Almas Heshmati, Lars Hartvigson, and Olena Nizalova for putting together such a timely and interesting program. It was laudable how the scheduling was done with speakers and participants from Hawaii, California, Texas, Massachusetts, multiple European countries, including Ukraine, as well as Vietnam, Australia, and Morroco!
Jonkoping International Business School (JIBS) in Sweden was the host of this virtual conference, in collaboration with its partners.
I took a snapshot of the closing session, which is posted below.
Each day, the conference began at 3AM, my time; but, despite this, I thoroughly enjoyed the sessions that I managed to join and, of course, it was an honor to present our latest research with my PhD student Dana Hassani and Kyiv School of Economics colleagues Oleg Nivievski and Pavlo Martyshev.
The presentation was based on our paper, noted above, which will be published any day now in the INFORMS journal Transportation Science. The slide deck of our presentation can be downloaded here. I was delighted that all the co-authors of our paper were present! Plus, I enjoyed "seeing" colleagues in Ukraine, with whom I have also published: Elena Besedina of the Kyiv School of Economics and Myroslava Kushnir of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv.
I also thoroughly enjoyed being on a panel with:
Pham Khanh NAM, UEH University Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Hans LÖÖF, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden
Vesa KANNIAINEN, University of Helsinki, Finland
Mykola TKACHENKO, CEO of SOE Prozorro (Transparency), Ukraine.
Yuriy BILAN, regrettably, could not make our panel, as scheduled.
A remarkable amount of information was exchanged and the discussions were terrific.
The keynote talks by Roman Sheremeta and Yuriy Gorodnichenko were excellent! I wish that all presentations could have been recorded and posted since with the different time zones it was challenging to hear all in real time.
Themes that resonated throughout included: the resilience of Ukrainians; the fact that Russia's war on Ukraine is a massive threat to global security; Ukraine needs immense support from its allies; economic & military aid to Ukraine is the best investment; agriculture and IT continue to be shining lights in Ukraine whereas steel production has essentially collapsed; investing in transportation routes is critical and keeping maritime routes safe and efficient; human capital must be brought back and nurtured; security is of the utmost importance; damages are immense to educational institutions, healthcare, critical infrastructure (energy, transportation, logistics, supply chains), and the environment, and so much more!
I was impressed how much researchers and practitioners and even PhD students who took part want to help. There was emphasis on the need to get research results in front of policy and decision-makers more quickly.
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