RENeW

One Girl's Romp Through MIT's Male Math Maze -- The Play to be Peformed at Mount Holyoke

2012-01-26T17:05:00.018-05:00

On my way home from UMass Amherst today, I spoke with a neighbor of mine, Dr. Margaret Minsky (I am sure that you recognize the surname, especially if you have had some computer science), who, appropriately, has a PhD in Computer Science from MIT.

Then, coincidentally, when I arrived home, the headline of an article in the Amherst Bulletin immediately caught my attention (and it came with a photo):

MATH WHIZ: Play recalls tough days at male-dominated MIT.

The article was about a play written by Gioia de Cari. It was the late 1980s when Gioia de Cari was a doctoral student in math at MIT, having earlier received a degree in math from UC Berkeley.

She spent 4 years at MIT, earned her master's degree, wrote part of her dissertation, but did not complete it.

The experience for her at MIT was very different from that at UC Berkeley. She even would change her attire to try to figure out how to best fit in and a male professor expected her to serve cookies at a seminar. It was even suggested to her by professors and students that she'd be happier at home raising children.

Eventually, she realized that theater was her passion and she became a full-time actor but she started writing down her "math stories" in a journal and had started working on plays. She also began to wonder whether the climate had improved for females in math.

Then came the Larry Summers bombshell. de Cari was at the academic conference at Harvard in January 2005, when Dr. Summers, then the President of Harvard, suggested that innate differences between men and women, rather than discrimination, could be one reason that fewer women succeeded at math and science.

Her reaction to the media response and backlash to Professor Nancy Hopkins of MIT walking out of the conference, led her (she said that she felt an obligation) to complete the play: Truth Values: One Girl's Romp Through MIT's Math Maze. It took her ten years to write.

The play will be presented Monday, Feb. 6, at Mount Holyoke College's Rooke Theatre at 7:30 p.m.

The Springfield Republican has a terrific article about the play and the playwright:

Gioia De Cari's 1-woman play at Mount Holyoke College to explore the question 'Are women inherently inferior to men in math and science?'

The article also quotes the wife of a colleague of mine, who served for a long time as the chair of the math department at Mount Holyoke, Dr. Margaret Robinson, who said:

“The topic is what graduate school in mathematics is like, in particular for women,” "But those studying science, computer science, physics, chemistry and biology will also relate."

The performance is also “good theater,” she said.

I was a doctoral student in Applied Math at Brown University in the 1980s and can honestly say I consciously chose as my dissertation the only female faculty member in Applied Math, Dr. Stella Dafermos. She also had a faculty appointment in Engineering and, yes, she was also the only female faculty member in Engineering.

In 2005-2006, I was a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University, and you can read some of my reflections on meeting Dr. Summers on this blog (and we even got treated to dinner at his presidential home).

I had spent two years at MIT (one year in Engineering and one year at the Sloan School of Management) in the late 1980s and 1990.The climate has been changing and there are now more female faculty that I can name off the top of my head (several of whom I know quite well). Interestingly, they all received their PhDs from MIT or had a chair of their doctoral dissertation from MIT.

A (Humorous) Test for Your Potential as Dean

2012-01-26T11:23:00.016-05:00

I have been invited to apply for certain deanships through contacts by search firms and other networks.

I also regularly write about leadership on this blog because, as an academic, I am naturally observant and curious and have had enough war stories both from several years in industry and many more as a female professor to have insights as to how effective organizations are run.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a test for evaluating prospective deans.

The Gotcha Quiz was composed by an actual Dean, Dr. Scott Dalrymple.

My favorite questions on it are:

4. Do you want to be provost or president someday?

YES , Incorrect. We haven't even interviewed you yet, and already you're halfway out the door. We need someone who wants to do this job. How can you give your best effort if you're constantly planning your next career move? Sheesh.

NO , Incorrect. Have you no ambition? Do you expect to simply coast into retirement, collecting an annuity from us? Not here, pal.

5. In a faculty meeting, you spend 20 minutes pontificating on a budget matter. Later you realize that some of your assumptions were wrong, making what you said complete drivel. You suspect that faculty members will never discover this on their own. Do you issue a mea culpa?

YES , Incorrect. Show any sign of weakness and the faculty will eviscerate you. Picture a lion and a three-legged gazelle. You aren't the lion.

NO , Correct. +5 points.

6. Are you a technology enthusiast, e.g. iPods, iPads, etc.?

YES , Incorrect. The last guy treated us like his own personal Best Buy, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in charges for "educational technology." Overhead projectors were good enough when we were in school, and they're good enough now.

NO , Incorrect. The gal before Mr. Best Buy was a complete Luddite, and what a legal-pad-infested nightmare that was. We need someone who can relate to today's techno-savvy students. Someone who is up on the latest trends, like Prodigy, Geocities, and MySpace.

The full quiz can be accessed here.

The Global Data Deluge and the World Economic Forum

2012-01-26T06:46:00.014-05:00

Many notables, from corporate leaders to academics to government leaders and humanitarians, are convening in Davos, Switzerland this week at the World Economic Forum.

One of the dominant themes that is emerging is that of the Global Data Deluge and what to do about it.

As reported in The New York Times Bits technology blog by Nick Bilton: data-related sessions at the World Economic Forum are now prominent with titles such as: "From data to decisions: How are new approaches to data intelligence transforming decision-making?” “Data deluge and citizen science.” “Incidents from digital crime to massive incidents of data theft are increasing significantly, with major political, social and economic implications.” “How is big data being used to uncover individual and collective human dynamics?”

The World Economic Forum has also released a 2012 report entitled: “Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development,” and since I have begun teaching a new course, Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare, this week, I was pleased to see Ushahidi noted therein as a powerful means of communicating information in disasters.

I was also delighted to read a piece on the data deluge on the World Economic Forum website by a Professor of Applied Mathematics from Brown University (I have 3 degrees in Applied Math from Brown, including a PhD with a specialty in Operations Research, and 1 degree in Russian Language in Literature), Dr. Jan Hesthaven.

In his writeup, Dr. Hesthaven eloquently states: As a global society, we face a host of major challenges – whether it’s dealing with climate change, seeking new sources of energy and security, curing cancer or lifting billions of our fellow humans out of poverty. There are thousands of people engaged in solving these problems, in scores of laboratories and research centers around the globe. They are generating large amount of data about the issues at hand; yet we find ourselves at a juncture where we have so much data that it’s created a bottleneck. We’re faced with a classic needle in a haystack problem – finding the data that are most useful. We struggle to determine which data we can share and how to share it. We struggle with understanding how data can open new questions for us to pursue.

Dr. Hesthaven goes on further to emphasize the needs for education in this area and says: To realize this vision, data and data awareness needs to be integrated into the educational curriculum. We need to teach students how to use massive amounts of data, in higher-education curriculums and even at secondary-school levels. Our educational focus must change, or our children won’t be prepared to handle the vast amounts of data that they invariably will encounter every day.

I could not agree more and have been writing about the data deluge and the importance of revamping our curricula regularly on this blog.

There are tremendous opportunities now to bring many disciplines closer and analytics and operations research, computer science, and, I believe, economics, will play leading roles.

Most Influential Articles on the Economics of Traffic Congestion and Our Translation of the Braess Paradox Article is Included

2012-01-22T11:11:00.024-05:00

I had not even realized until this past week that the edited volume, The Economics of Traffic Congestion, containing

the most influential articles written over the past eight decades that contribute to an understanding of the economics of traffic congestion

had been published by Edward Elgar Publishing in its series: the International Library of Critical Writings in Economics.

When I saw the list of articles that had been reprinted, I was struck by the names of the authors, many of whom I cite very regularly in my papers and books since their works are, indeed, classics in transportation.

And then I saw my name on the paper with Braess and Wakolbinger in the first volume; see the contents of Part I of the first volume below, taken from the Edward Elgar page on this book.

Contents:

Volume I

Acknowledgements

Introduction Erik T. Verhoef

PART I CONGESTION AND ROAD PRICING: CLASSIC CONTRIBUTIONS
1. A.C. Pigou (1920), 'Divergences between Marginal Trade Net Product and Marginal Individual Net Product'
2. F. H. Knight (1924), 'Some Fallacies in the Interpretation of Social Cost'
3. John Glen Wardrop (1952), 'Some Theoretical Aspects of Road Traffic Research'
4. Martin Beckmann, C.B. McGuire and Christopher B. Winsten (1956), 'Equilibrium' and 'Efficiency'
5. M.J. Lighthill and G.B. Whitham (1955), 'On Kinematic Waves. II: A Theory of Traffic Flow on Long Crowded Roads'
6. Paul I. Richards (1956), 'Shock Waves on the Highway'
7. A.A. Walters (1961), 'The Theory and Measurement of Private and Social Cost of Highway Congestion'
8. William S. Vickrey (1963), 'Pricing in Urban and Suburban Transport'
9. Dietrich Braess, Anna Nagurney and Tina Wakolbinger (2005), 'On a Paradox of Traffic Planning' [Translated from the German: D. Braess (1968), 'Über ein Paradoxon aus der Verkehrsplanung']

To be in a volume with Pigou, Knight, Wardrop, Beckmann, McGuire, and Winsten, Lighthill, and even the Nobel Laureate Vickrey, is humbling, to say the least.

The full contents of volumes I and II are available here and what a wonderful list of "classics." Plus, I can say that in this group there are even quite a few still with us that I consider my friends.

We had been approached by the editor of this two volume edition, Eric Verhoef, a while back, and Dietrich Braess, Tina Wakolbinger, and I had given permission to have our article, published originally in 2005, in the journal, Transportation Science (which is an INFORMS journal), reprinted and had gotten the necessary permissions. The article is unusual since it is a translation of the famous Braess (1968) paradox paper from German to English, that was accompanied by a preface written by David E. Boyce and me.

According to the publisher: The first volume explores the classic contributions on congestion and road pricing and includes papers in dynamic models and second-best congestion pricing. The second volume analyses ownership arrangements such as private roads, investment and financing, urban land use, social acceptability and distributional aspects of road pricing.

Professor Dietrich Braess visited the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst shortly after our translation was published. Tina Wakolbinger, who, at the time,was one of my doctoral students at UMass Amherst, and I, along with others had a wonderful time hosting him and he spoke in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speakers series. Some photos and other information can be found here. Tina is now a Full Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

This volume also brings forth some of the amazing synergies between economics and operations research, a theme that has always been very dear to me and my research. But then again, Martin Beckmann was on my doctoral dissertation committee at Brown University, with Stella Dafermos as my dissertation chair. George Majda, who, like Stella, died much too young, was my other committee member. Beckmann is still with us and continues to amaze with his mind and love of life.

United States in Science and Engineering Research and Education -- Stunning 2012 Report from the National Science Board

2012-01-21T07:44:00.017-05:00

The National Science Board has released its report: Science and Engineering Indicators 2012, which contains a broad base of quantitative information on the U.S. and the international science and engineering enterprise.

The report is organized into various chapters with fact-filled findings and stunning, informative graphics and figures.

I have been pouring over the report and am especially interested in the higher education chapter and the academic research and development chapter; the latter chapter has interesting data on the average number of papers published per year in different science and engineering disciplines by an author and the average number of co-authors on a paper, along with trends. It also discusses how the volumes of international collaborations have changed over recent years. Interestingly, according to the academic research and development chapter:

Article output trends since about the mid-1990s have two defining features: the rapid growth of articles with authors from the developing world, and a rise in the percentage of global article output that is the result of collaboration among researchers internationally. Articles with authors from different institutions in the United States and from different countries have continued to increase, indicating rising knowledge creation, transfer, and sharing among institutions and across national boundaries.

The report was brought to my attention by Catherine Rampell, writing in the New York Times Economix blog on Why Students Leave the Engineering Track.

Interestingly, in last Sunday's New York Times, there was a provocative essay, The Rise of the New GroupThink, by Susan Cain, that argued that creativity required solitude and intense focus -- think of great artists and novelists but also of Steve Wozniak, who is quoted as saying: “Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me ... they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone .... I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

For me, hours of intense sessions in solitude work for certain research problems and projects, whereas, for others, I thrive on brainstorming sessions with collaborators and students, in a combination of virtual and face-to-face communication.

As for my most recently completed paper, it was with a new French collaborator, Dr. Christian Mullon, who is a mathematical ecologist and with whom I completed a paper on predator-prey models and game theory using some of my previous work on migration networks and his expertise on ocean fish. We had been corresponding for a while and I had a chance to meet him and his wife when I was in Paris last October to give a plenary talk at the NetGCoop conference.

If one works on crossing disciplines, one needs collaborators, and, besides, it is just very rewarding intellectually and personally to work with others.

How Did You Get That Great Faculty Position -- from The New York Times to The Economist and The Chronicle of Higher Ed

2012-01-20T06:09:00.029-05:00

We are now in the midst of faculty recruiting season and are having the special experience of interviewing candidates on campus and today our beautiful area of Amherst is covered in several inches of pristine white snow (the first significant snowfall of 2012)!

My department alone at the Isenberg School of Management is looking to fill 4 faculty positions (1 in Operations Management, 1 in Information Systems, and 2 in Finance), so it is a very exciting time. It is also a very busy couple of weeks with additional "job" talks to listen to, more elegant meals than usual to attend, and interview sessions with the candidates.

I am delighted by the excellent caliber of (soon-to-be) PhDs that are being "produced" nationally.

It is always interesting to hear/learn how someone found out about a particular university faculty opening.

I am an avid New York Times reader and actually found the job ad for my first tenure track appointment at UMass Amherst in a Sunday edition of the Times. The New York Times used to run all sorts of job ads in the Week in Review section (which recently was replaced by Opinion and Review articles).

Many of my doctoral students now respond to openings announced on the INFORMS job postings, POMS, and DSI ones, and also carefully study the job listings in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Sometimes, I will also hear of faculty openings through my personal networks and I have been recruited by various universities in this manner (and gotten offers) and have heard of openings for my students in this form, as well.

I have been a subscriber to The Economist for many years and it continues to be one of my favorite magazines.

I also very much enjoy perusing the job ads in The Economist where all sorts of exciting opportunities beckon (at Unicef, the International Monetary Fund, various United Nations relief agencies, just to name a few). The Economist, at times, also has postings for faculty openings and I appreciate universities that advertise in The Economist (some business schools regularly do, for example).

Last spring, my husband brought to my attention an ad in The Economist (he had gotten to our copy first) that he thought would be of interest to me since I was working on planning my sabbatical for 2012-2013.

The ad was for the Visiting Professorship Programme (the British spelling adds a level of sophistication) at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Since I have long had a love affair with Sweden, its people, and culture (I think part of it must be due to my genes since I am of northern European heritage and my first language is Ukrainian so, perhaps, I have some Viking blood in me).

I was very intrigued by the job ad since,although my family and I had lived in Stockholm, and I had spent weeks in Umea and Linkoping in Sweden, I had never been to Gothenburg.

It's now official: I have been appointed a Visiting Professor at Gothenburg University (GU).

I will be spending part of my sabbatical there and will have my first visit there in March. I will be interacting with the Logistics and Transport group, the Environmental Economics group, and the Centre (note this spelling, too) for Finance. I will also be participating in the networks Northern Lead and the Strategic Transport Initiative. I could not be more thrilled about this terrific opportunity.

GU has wonderful industrial connections (I do admit, one of our cars has always been a Volvo) so I am also very much looking forward to working with top Swedish companies.

In the meantime, Hej då, which means "good-bye" in Swedish.

Computer Programming Should be Part of the Curriculum

2012-01-17T07:35:00.009-05:00

I often tell my students that if they know how to write computer programs (that solve problems) that they will never be out of a job.

Computer programming (sometimes called coding, although I prefer the former term) requires knowing a computer language and being able to break up a problem that you want to have solved into component parts.

In developing an appropriate computer program or software, you have constructed a usable product.

It may involve constructing an algorithm (a series of steps) that, when executed by the computer, will deliver the answer to you, a client, or an organization.

It has even been said that automobile companies are software companies, since cars are now so dependent on computer programs.

Douglas Rushkoff, in a column, Learn to code, get a job, for CNN.com argues eloquently for coding to be on a par with knowing the alphabet and numbers or how to read and write and do math.

He notes: If you know how to code, you can get a high-paying job right now, or make valuable stuff right now. You will understand more about how the world works, and become a participating member in the digital society unfolding before us. You will be enabling America to compete effectively on both the economic and military frontiers, where we are rapidly losing our competitive advantage due to our failure to teach ourselves code.

I couldn't agree more.

My exposure to computer programming came in college at Brown University, beginning with a course in Operations Research and Linear Programming. Senior year I spent a lot of time writing code in a computer science course and getting the code to work correctly and nicely was time-consuming but also fascinating and, may I say, "addictive." Upon graduation, it was easy to get a job in the high technology sector because I had such skills and programming in assembly language to be used on submarines was my first assignment (my first industry job was at System Consultants, which had many contracts for the Navy and I was based in Newport, Rhode Island, quite the idyllic setting).

Now as a faculty member, I still enjoy implementing the algorithms to solve complex network problems ranging from supply chains to dynamic transportation networks.

Computer programming is about solving problems and it is fun!

It should be part of the curriculum and every college student (and probably high school student, as well) should have the experience of how creative and powerful of an experience it us to be able to write computer programs. We would not have Google, Facebook, or Twitter without computer code. It's hard to imagine what the world would be like without software!

Three Years of Blogging and Post Number 767

2012-01-16T17:10:00.021-05:00

This week, I mark the third birthday or "anniversary" of this blog, which I began on January 19, 2009.

When I first started this blog, I never imagined that I would learn so much from the experience -- from my fellow bloggers, especially those in Operations Research, as well as from my readers (and I continue to be surprised when former students, locals, and those from thousands of miles away let me know that they appreciate what I write about).

The focus of this blog has been to highlight research, education, and networks, and it has featured quite a few amazing individuals, from Kings to Presidents (of universities, as well), to individuals who are making a difference and these have also included children (the trips of students and alums from The Bement School to the Dominican Republic to help out in a boys orphanage, for example).

The research that I have highlighted on this blog has ranged from humanitarian logistics and healthcare to a variety of advances in supply chains, transportation, electric power, and financial networks.

I have also included numerous photographs from conferences, and from celebratory events (graduations from high school, from universities, awards and grants received, and even sports achievements, from the World Cup to figure skating) as well as from my world-wide travels. Such posts continue to be some of my most accessed posts (who is not fascinated by Argentina, New Zealand, Iceland, Ukraine, China, or Italy)?

I've also tried to voice what it is like to be a female academic, who loves math and science; who teaches in a business school, who does a lot of research, writes journal articles and books, and who also is a mother and wife. The challenges never end and resiliency matters.

I write to get good news out when it happens and to recognize unfairness and inequities. I also try to comment from an analytical angle (as I do in the classes that I teach) on what is happening in the world.

This is post 767, which (I can't help but love numbers) reminds me of the Boeing 767 aircraft, and, given the amount of time that I spend on airplanes and at airports, this suits me fine. If your area of expertise is transportation, logistics, and networks, you need to be out there.

Humanitarian Logistics and Preparing for the Next Global Disaster

2012-01-15T15:32:00.004-05:00

My Op-Ed piece, Preparing for the Next Global Disaster, appears in today's Sunday Republican newspaper as part of the Viewpoint series.

In the article, which is available online, I argue for more education on humanitarian logistics in all aspects of disaster management from preparedness and mitigation to recovery and reconstruction.

The article was written to mark the second anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti and to recognize the disasters that have befallen our area of Massachusetts in the past year. The number of disasters is growing as well as the number of people affected by them.

I start teaching my new course on the subject, Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare, on January 24 at the Isenberg School of Management. This is a truly unique course and I have spent weeks preparing the lectures and course materials.

Advanced Analytics for Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Networks

2012-01-13T07:33:00.042-05:00

Drugs produced by pharmaceutical companies not only keep people healthy, but can prolong and even save lives.

Hence, when shortages of medicines occur there can be devastating impacts.

There has been a lot of coverage lately in the media about drug shortages, with the number of drugs that were reported in short supply in the US in the first half of 2011 rising to 211 – close to an all-time record – with only 58 in short supply in 2004. According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), hospitals have reported shortages of drugs used in cancer treatment as well as in surgery, anesthesia, and intravenous feedings. The consequences of such shortages include the postponement of surgeries and treatments, and may also result in the use of less effective or costlier substitutes. The American Hospital Association reports that all US hospitals have experienced drug shortages, and 82% have reported delayed care for their patients as a consequence.

The reasons for such shortages are complex, and this important issue is starting to receive even increased governmental attention. As we note in our latest paper, "A Supply Chain Generalized Network Oligopoly Model for Pharmaceuticals Under Brand Differentiation and Perishability," co-authored with two of my doctoral students, Amir H. Masoumi and Min Yu, most cases appear to be related to manufacturers’ decisions to cease production in the presence of financial challenges. Pharmaceutical companies secure notable returns solely in the early lifetime of a successful drug, before competition takes place. This competition-free time-span, however, has been observed to be shortening, from 5 years to only 1-2 years. Hence, the low profit margins associated with certain drugs may be forcing pharmaceutical companies to make a difficult decision: whether to lose money by continuing to produce a lifesaving product or to switch to a more profitable drug.

The FDA, however, cannot force companies to continue to produce low-profit medicines even if millions of lives rely on them. On the other hand, where competition has been lacking, shortages of some other lifesaving drugs have resulted in huge spikes in prices, ranging from a 100% to a 4,500% increase with an average of 650%.

In addition, in 2011, pharmaceutical products valued at more than $30 billion were losing patent protection, with such products generating more than $15 billion in sales in 2010.

More than 80% of the ingredients of drugs sold in the US are made overseas, mostly in remote facilities located in China and India that are rarely -- if not ever -- visited by government inspectors.

Supply chains of generic drugs, which account for 75 percent of the prescription medicines sold in the US, are, typically, more susceptible to falsification with the supply chains of some of the over-the-counter products, such as vitamins or aspirins, also vulnerable to adulteration.

In the past, product recalls were mainly related to local errors in design, manufacturing, or labeling, a single product safety issue today may result in huge global consequences.

In our pharmaceutical supply chain network paper, we developed an analytical model, based on game theory and generalized network theory, that captures many of the realities of complex pharmaceutical supply chain networks today -- from competition, to brand versus generic drug consumption, to product perishability and even waste management issues. For flexibility purposes and generality, we modeled both elastic and fixed demand scenarios.

The analytical framework also allows for the quantitative investigation of the impacts of patent rights expiration on a pharmaceutical company's profits, as we demonstrate in a case study of cholesterol-lowering drugs. Our paper, we are pleased to report, has now been accepted for publication in the journal, Transportation Research E: Logistics and Transportation Review. In addition, we will be presenting it at the upcoming POMS Conference that will take place in Chicago, Illinois April 20-23, 2012.

And for a brilliant panel discussion, A Worldwide Standard of Care, at the World Science Festival in NYC, that includes Dr. Eric Lander, the head of the Broad Institute, click here.

Marking the Second Anniversary of the Haiti Earthquake

2012-01-11T18:28:00.011-05:00

On January 12, 2012, we mark the second anniversary of the devastating Haiti earthquake, which resulted in about 300,000 lives lost, numerous injuries, critical infrastructure from roads to communication and energy lines destroyed, along with buildings and homes. And, yet, two years after the earthquake, there are still hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in tents without running water and without electricity.

Two years, and so many still have no relief or a place that they can call a proper home. Have not they suffered enough?

The Boston Globe has marked this painful anniversary through photos, which graphically show the glacial pace of recovery and reconstruction.

To mark the anniversary of this disaster, I wrote an OpEd piece arguing for more education in humanitarian logistics. It is scheduled to be published this coming Sunday in the Springfield Republican newspaper, the major newspaper in western Massachusetts.

I will be teaching a new course on Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare at the Isenberg School of Management beginning in two weeks and today I finished the lecture on supply chain risk management in which risk management of commercial supply chains is compared with risk management of humanitarian ones. Cooperation is critical in humanitarian logistics as is proper management of the financial funds that flow from donors.

When will Haiti rise again from the ashes?

Scientists, Networks, and Cambridge Nights -- But Where are the Females?

2012-01-11T10:05:00.017-05:00

In yesterday's Science section of The New York Times there is a very interesting article by John Markoff, Scientist's Online Interviews Draw His Peers Out of Lecture Mode, about an initiative at MIT's Media Lab (which I am a big fan of) called Cambridge Nights. This is a series of video interviews with scientists on their lives and research.

The interviews are conducted by Dr. Hidalgo, who is a physicist, and whose dissertation advisor was Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, of network science fame, who is now at Northeastern University. Barabasi spoke in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series and, as always, was provocative, energetic, and very informative. The last time that I saw Professor Barabasi was at the Network Science Conference, held at the Media Lab in Cambridge, MA, May 12-14, 2010, where we presented a paper on our critical needs supply chain network design research.

All of the scientists interviewed in the Cambridge Nights videos, to-date, however, are males, which was disappointing to me. Perhaps, the female President of MIT, Dr. Susan Hockfield, could be included in a future interview or how about Dr. Lisa Randall, the physicist at Harvard? I could easily prepare an appropriate list. Having spent a year as a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, I can attest to the female brainpower in Massachusetts.

One of the scientists interviewed (not unexpectedly given the above academic genealogical connection) in Cambridge Nights is Dr. Barabasi, and he speaks about how he became interested in networks and how his work evolved from material sciences to network science. I appreciate his honesty regarding how, initially, he had difficulty publishing his papers. He deserves a lot of credit for bringing deep data analysis to network problems. However, in listening to the video, someone might get the mistaken impression that there was no research on networks until the mid 1990s and that is factually incorrect.

In operations research (and even in economics), the modeling, analysis, and solution of network problems has a long history, dating to the 1940s (and I can even go back further in the case of economics and finance and have done so in quite a few articles that I have published).

In terms of transportation alone the book by Beckmann, McGuire, and Winsten (1956) provided fundamental results in capturing complex behavior of people (drivers) interacting with one another on transportation networks, among other innovations. Also, everyone in operations research is familiar with the book by Ford and Fulkerson, Flows in Networks, published in 1962.

By dissertation advisor at Brown University, Dr. Stella Dafermos, was publishing on networks, starting in 1969, and she helped to inspire me, although she died in 1990, to write quite a few books on network themes, beginning with my first book in 1993.

Some of the classical books on networks that are available for download can be found on the Supernetworks Center website.

Supernetwork News

2012-01-09T16:42:00.008-05:00

There certainly was a lot to report in the 2012 Winter Edition of The Supernetwork Sentinel, which is the newsletter of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst. From keynote talks, invited conference presentations, and seminars in Paris, Montreal, Miami, Raleigh, Rapid City, Charlotte, and even Amherst; new titles, awards, and other distinctions, plus many paper acceptances, as well as publications, it has been a very productive time since our 2011 Fall Newsletter was published.

All of our newsletters can be found on this page.

As Center Director, I thank all of our terrific supporters.

Operations Research Tutorials from Sports Scheduling to Black Swans and Severe Uncertainty, Fragile Networks, and Humanitarian Logistics

2012-01-08T08:08:00.020-05:00

The two volume edition of the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) is now available and just in time (see the Table of Contents above). The January-March 2012 double volume is a refereed compendium of papers, edited by Celso Ribeiro and Irene Loiseau, and is based on tutorials given at the ALIO-INFORMS meeting that took place in glorious Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 6-9, 2010.

I am using two of the tutorial papers in my new course, Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare, that I am teaching this coming term at the Isenberg School of Management. The syllabus is available online.

These papers are: Using OR to adapt supply chain management best practices to humanitarian logistics (pages 307–322) by Luk N. Van Wassenhove and Alfonso J. Pedraza Martinez, and the paper that I co-authored with Q. Qiang: Fragile networks: identifying vulnerabilities and synergies in an uncertain age (pages 123–160).

I have also read several other tutorials in this volume including the very intriguing one by M. Sniedovich,

Black Swans, New Nostradamuses, Voodoo decision theories, and the science of decision making in the face of severe uncertainty (pages 253–281). In his tutorial paper, Sniedovich has quotes from Nassim Taleb, who not only is a best-selling author, much quoted in the Wall Street Journal, but also had a faculty appointment in my department at the Isenberg School for a period of time. Indeed, Taleb's published papers that year were included in our Research Beat of 2005 (along with those of other faculty) and he even published with Emanuel Derman of Columbia, who is the featured interviewee in the most recent INFORMS podcast with Barry List!

Sniedovich cites the book, Algorithms for Worst-Case Design and Applications to Risk Management, by Rustem and Howe, published by Princeton University Press. In addition, he cites the book Minimax and Applications by Du and Pardalos, and published by Springer. Coincidentally, I know both Berc Rustem and Panos Pardalos well and they were among the invited speakers in the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Workshop on Humanitarian Logistics: Networks for Africa that I organized and that took place in May 2008.

I had the pleasure of attending several of the tutorials at the ALIO-INFORMS conference, including Celso Ribeiro's one on sports scheduling (with a focus on soccer, which was perfect since the World Cup was just beginning) and, of course, I was there to give the tutorial on Fragile Networks (the theme of my book with Q. Qiang). My tutorial can be accessed in part I, part II, and part III.

For photos taken at the conference, including several of the tutorial givers, see this post on this blog and this one.

I tried to capture some of the magic of this historical city in other photos as well.

Medical Instruments and How They Work on You -- These Students Know

2012-01-07T08:32:00.008-05:00

As a faculty member, at the end of a semester, I often have the wonderful experience of seeing how students have synthesized the course materials through their projects and presentations. I have the privilege of listening to student presentations in all the classes that I teach and it is always a highpoint of the semester.

My husband, Dr. Ladimer S. Nagurney, is also a faculty member but, unlike me, he is an expert in hardware and he is a professor of electric, computer, and biomedical engineering at the University of Hartford. This past semester, he taught a bioinstrumentation course and, in the graphic above, which he prepared, snapshots of his student presentations are captured.

I have been hearing about the great student projects and found them so impressive and timely that I wanted to write and comment about them.

The students in the class chose a biomedical instrument to research in depth. As part of their research, they created a presentation that highlighted the Physiology that led to the development of the instrument, the Physics behind the measurement, and the Clinical Use of the instrument.

Among the biomedical instruments that were delved into: a Blood Pressure Monitor, a Pacemaker, an Electronic Stethoscope, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), a Pulse Oximeter, an Ultrasound Machine, a CT Scanner, a Ventilator, a YAG Laser, Kidney Dialysis Equipment, a Continuous Blood Monitor, EMG/EKG data collection, a Defibrillator, an Angiogram, and even Radiosurgery and Radiotherapy Instruments.

I must say, I am impressed (and it takes a lot to impress me). What is also terrific is that the students learned from one another's presentations and they had a chance to develop their public speaking skills.

And, if you notice in the graphic above, there were quite a few females in the class (maybe there is hope for the future of females in engineering).

Nice to know that these senior year students (and some of them already have great jobs after graduation, whereas others are applying to grad school) will be prepared to develop biomedical instruments that can both save lives and create jobs in healthcare.

Investing in Teachers -- the King of Jordan, a Deerfield Academy Graduate, Speaks

2012-01-06T06:45:00.023-05:00

Photo extracted from HRM King Abdullah II of Jordan Deerfield Academy video

Lucky are those who have had a teacher or several teachers that made a difference in one's education and, hence, in one's life. I will never forget the wonderful elementary, high school, and college teachers that I had and I can still hear some of their voices in my head.

The positive impact of a teacher can last for years and The New York Times is reporting on a study that quantifies the lasting impact that a great teacher makes.

My daughter attends Deerfield Academy, which was founded in 1797, and, on several occasions, I have written about this outstanding educational institution, various activities there, as well as the books that have been written by graduates or those closely related to the institution (The Headmaster and Death be Not Proud are two well-known examples).

The King of Jordan, His Majesty, Abdullah II, is a Deerfield Academy graduate, class of 1980.

In a recent video, Imagine Deerfield, he speaks of the education that he had at Deerfield and especially of his teachers. It is a beautiful commentary that also notes the role of technology in today's world, and it should be listened to. He especially emphasizes investing in teachers and notes some of the great teachers that he had while he was a student at Deerfield, including Madame Lyons, his French teacher (who was my daughter's French teacher last year and we had the experience of sitting in on her class during Parents' Day). A photo of the King with Ms. Lyons is available on a Deerfield webpage, which has additional information about the video.

Great teaching even a King acknowledges decades after.

And, I have heard from Deerfield Academic grads who even decades after still have dreams about their teachers -- how can one forget the unique experience of vocabulary tests given by a teacher who was a Rhodes Scholar?!

Also (and this is another example of a small world phenomenon), a brother of the king, Prince Faisal bin Al Hussein, attended The Bement School, also in Deerfield, MA, which was my daughter's elementary school, and he went to Brown University, my alma mater. Plus, he was a student in one of the Applied Math courses that I was a TA for and I recall him living in Hope College, and usually walking with two bodyguards carrying tennis rackets.

Doing More Good with Great O.R. (Operations Research)

2012-01-05T06:54:00.025-05:00

This is a time of the year when many make their New Year's resolutions: to be kinder, to spend more time with one's family, to run a marathon, write another book, visit a country you have never been to, climb Mt. Everest, swim the English Channel, get a pilot's license, run for President, to stop and smell the roses, etc.

This month's INFORMS blog challenge is, hence, appropriately, thanks to Mary Leszczynski: O.R. and Resolutions.

Upon some serious reflection (these challenges are, indeed, challenging), the theme, and, may I say, resolution that resonated with me is a slight transformation of the overall theme Doing Good with Good O.R. set forth by one of our former INFORMS Presidents, Professor Cynthia Barnhart of MIT, to:

Doing More Good with Great O.R.!

As noted in a terrific interview with Cynthia by Peter Horner in OR/MS Today, Cynthia got the theme for her presidency -- with permission -- from a plenary talk, Doing Good with Good O.R., that Professor Margaret Brandeau of Stanford University had given.

Whether tackling issues of poverty and foreclosures, hunger, inadequate healthcare, substandard transportation and infrastructure, environmental degradation, insecurity, inequity and injustice, Operations Research, through the consistent hard work and diligence of Operations Researchers, is making a difference. Disciplinary boundaries are being broken, new generations of students are being educated, research is being applied more quickly in O.R. and analytics practice, and more are joining the profession.

And according to the psychologists, and even Plato before, the keys to happiness lie in doing good! Indeed, doing good, feels good.

Power in Numbers -- Fabulous Article and Interview with Dr. Eric Lander

2012-01-03T19:18:00.008-05:00

Gina Kolata has written a fabulous article on Dr. Eric Lander, the head of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA, which now has 1,800 scientists involved in genetic and medical research.

The article has an accompanying video (with music in the background) in which Dr. Lander speaks on his math background and his love of working in scientific teams that break down boundaries.

The article is a must read (and do check out the video, too).

Dr. Lander's father died when he was only 11. He went on to graduate from Princeton University at age 20 with a degree in pure math and as the valedictorian. While at Princeton he also very much enjoyed writing and took John McPhee's narrative nonfiction course. John McPhee had gone to Deerfield Academy, the school that my daughter now attends, and is the author, of among other books, The Headmaster, about Frank L. Boyden of Deerfield Academy.

Lander received a Rhodes scholarship, and completed his PhD at Oxford in 2 years, also in math.

Although he was not trained in economics, after getting his PhD, he landed a faculty position at the Harvard Business School to teach managerial economics but soon became intrigued by biology. Dr. Botstein of MIT, a biologist, needed a mathematician and, through some nice networking, connected with Dr. Lander and the rest is history.

Lander enjoyed the social aspects of math (being on a math team, for example) and found pure math too isolating. I think he should have, perhaps, chosen applied mathematics or operations research (but I am a bit biased). Indeed, his first work in biology involved algorithm development.

His charisma shines through in the article and video and I wish him and his team of hundreds many scientific discoveries that can change the future of medicine.

The Man of the Year Lived in Our House and the Case of the Missing Manuscript

2012-01-03T12:57:00.019-05:00

As my readers know, I often like to say that Amherst is the center of the universe.

We have had some amazing residents in our town from famous authors to renowned scientists and humanitarians and there are still many in the midst that inspire.

As a Brown University alumna (4 times over) and officially also a Harvard alumna (having been a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), I stay in touch with these communities and periodically also catch up with news by checking out their websites.

Today I found out on the Brown University website that Chinua Achebe, the renowned Nigerian-born novelist, former professor at UMass Amherst and Amherst resident (wait -- there is more, so do read on), and now professor at Brown University, has been selected as The Man of the Year by The Guardian.

The lovely article and tribute begins with the following paragraph:

GREATNESS is an attribute much in retreat in our society these days. But it is the quality that is imperative for a nation, for a people to make progress. Greatness is the depth of character that is unswayed by material attraction and superficial rewards, especially of the sort that is flaunted by persons of lesser pedigree, and craved by many, including sundry jobbers and petty crooks. Greatness is the strength to say no when everything and everyone else seems swept away by a certain madness that benumbs the senses. Greatness is the ability to look past the present and see beyond the future. It is the courage to envision a better society, to insist on what is right, on what is proper to realize that better society.

Amazingly, and for those of my readers who like doing research it is not hard to confirm, Chinua Achebe once lived in our house on Blackberry Lane.

The connections are even stronger. One of my husband's colleagues at the University of Hartford, Professor Joyce Ashuntantang, who was featured in a Faculty column (it's the second one) in a recent issue of The Observer, which is online and can be accessed here, discovered that Achebe's original manuscript for Things Fall Apart, his groundbreaking 1958 work and first novel, was missing. She has been trying to track it down and my husband promised her that should we find it on our home (unlikely since it was given to a Cameroonian professor then living in the US) that we would let her know. She is also from Cameroon and was completely amazed when my husband told her that we live in Amherst in Achebe's former home!

I very much enjoyed Professor Ashuntantang's remarks in the article as to why finding the original manuscript is important; according to her: it may help to reveal Achebe’s thought process as he wrote. Although he told me that he was quite a neat writer and did not change anything, the manuscript may reveal otherwise. Even minor changes may prove to be important to literary critics and historians. The truth is, written literature depends on effective record keeping as a basis for new writing.

Who doesn't love a great mystery!

Congratulations and Kudos from the Supernetwork Center

2012-01-03T06:51:00.015-05:00

At the end of every year, I highlight special achievements and activities of the past year of the Center Associates at the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I founded 10 years ago at the Isenberg School of Management and that I continue to direct.

These are noted in a special Congratulations and Kudos page. What a great year 2011 was research-wise, teaching-wise, and professionally service-wise, despite tornadoes, Hurricane Irene, and the multiple day power outage after the freaky Halloween snowstorm in the Northeast.

From teaching awards at multiple universities, research and mentorship accolades, numerous conference presentations and panels (Transportation Research Board meeting in DC, AAAS meeting in DC, IEEE Supernetwork Conference in Shanghai, INTRIM in Montreal, NetGCoop in Paris, SAMSI in Raleigh, POMS in Reno, RSAI in Miami, and INFORMS in Charlotte), and plenary talks (China, France, and the US), and even help with conference organizing (SBP in Maryland and the Regional INFORMS Conference at UMass Amherst), and, of course, research publications and even commentaries, it is amazing what this great team, which now has members on 3 continents, has accomplished and has had a lot of fun throughout.

This year we were not only interviewed but even filmed in NYC.

It takes a great team to create synergies and to do important research from sustainable supply chains to humanitarian logistics and healthcare to dynamic networks from electric power to transportation. It also takes a great team to do what needs to be done from helping out with student chapters to bringing speakers in and just being supportive of others.

By working together so much more can be done (and it is much more enjoyable) than going at problems alone. For photos of some of our activities, click here.

Thanks for the support and best wishes!

New Year -- Teaching New Courses at the Isenberg School

2012-01-02T18:20:00.013-05:00

I have enjoyed this break not only because it is such a special time of the year but because I have had time to prepare two new courses that I will be teaching this 2012 term at the Isenberg School of Management.

Getting a syllabus together (as well as the course materials and lectures) requires a lot of planning and work and with this task accomplished for both my "Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare" course and my "Advanced Mathematical Programming: Dynamic Network Systems" course, I have even managed to get several lectures together that I am very excited about.

I wrote an earlier post on the Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare course and the syllabus for this course is now available online.

The Dynamic Network Systems course will be covering projected dynamical systems, some evolutionary variational inequalities, and applications ranging from dynamic transportation networks to complex supply chains and models of the Internet. We will be reading and discussing many journal articles and it will be an exciting and challenging course. What I find truly fascinating is how the methodology that we developed (along with Dupuis, Zhang, and others) has now broken through other disciplines and has generated additional interesting results and applications to population games in economics, predator-prey networks in ecology, and even neural networks and neuroscience, to start. I love it when applications drive innovations in methodologies and vice versa.

I will make available to the students in this course two of my books: Network Economics: A Variational Inequality Approach, the second and revised edition, published in 1999, and Projected Dynamical Systems and Variational Inequalities with Applications, written with Ding Zhang, and published in 1996. The latter book is the second book in the International Series in Operations Research and Management Science, edited by Fred S. Hillier. In addition, I will be making use of Patrizia Daniele's book, Dynamic Networks and Evolutionary Variational Inequalities, published by Edward Elgar Publishing in 2006. Patrizia wrote this book while she was a Visiting Scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University while I was a Science Fellow there in 2005-2006 and we collaborated. I wrote my Supply Chain Network Economics book that year that was published by Edward Elgar Publishing in the New Dimension in Networks series.

The syllabus for the Dynamic Network Systems course is now available online.

Happy New 2012 Year!

2012-01-01T07:15:00.004-05:00

I'd like to wish all of my readers the best of health, happiness, and success. May your dreams come true in 2012!

Thanks for all the interesting and memorable experiences of the past year.

Festive Scenes from Boston

2011-12-29T10:40:00.012-05:00

Wherever you may be during this peaceful, yet, festive, time of the year, the wonder of this season makes it truly special.

Being a resident of Massachusetts, albeit the more rural western part, I never miss an opportunity to travel and to see other sights. Much of my travel is work-related, which I do enjoy immensely.

Yesterday, my family and I were in Boston, not for work, but to experience the celebratory atmosphere at this time of the year and to see some friends.

Above are some photos taken yesterday in Boston that capture the serenity and spirit from Quincy Marketplace to Faneuil Hall, the State House with its gold dome, and the skaters on the Boston Common.

Amazing not to have snow as a blanket but green grass instead.

Even the geese seem to be having second thoughts about migrating south.

Beware -- Why the European Union Cap and Trade Aviation Emission System May Lead Paradoxically to More Carbon Emissions

2011-12-24T15:36:00.021-05:00

As families are set to gather for the holidays and to celebrate the New 2012 Year, and this may include taking planes, trains, or automobiles to reach the desired destinations, the European Union's (EU's) highest court in Luxembourg has approved the European Union's cap and trade system for aviation, which is to officially be put into practice on January 1, 2012. This news was reported in The New York Times.

According to the article in The Times: The European initiative involves folding aviation into the six-year-old emissions trading system, in which polluters can buy and sell a limited quantity of permits, each representing a ton of carbon dioxide. The legislation requires that airlines account for their emissions for the entirety of any flight that takes off from — or lands at — any airport in the bloc.

The goal, European officials have said, is to speed up the adoption of greener technologies at a time when air traffic, which represents about 3 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, is growing much faster than gains in efficiency.

I have done research on emission permit trading systems in a series of papers focused not only on reducing pollution of firms but also in transportation. Some of the latter research was done with my former doctoral students, Padma Ramanujam and Kathy Dhanda. Padma, who now works at SAS, in Raleigh, North Carolina, received the Transportation Science Section of INFORMS Dissertation Prize in 1999 for her doctoral dissertation, "Transportation Network Policy Modeling for Congestion and Pollution Control: A Variational Inequality Approach."

I have also published papers that one needs to be careful in designing and implementing transportation pollution and congestion abatement policies since if the entire network and user behavior are not captured then the policies may have paradoxical outcomes! One paper that I wrote on the topic is, "Congested urban transportation networks and emission paradoxes," which was published in Transportation Research D and another, joint with June Dong, was "Paradoxes in networks with zero emission links: Implications for telecommunications versus transportation," which was also published in Transportation Research D.

In fact, the major theme of my Sustainable Transportation Networks book, published in 2000, was how to capture rigorously policies for pollution reduction in transportation systems, including the use of cap and trade systems.

Consider now about the following scenario: Suppose that you are a global logistics company and your goal is to minimize total costs and to route your planes and cargo accordingly. If it will cost you more to transport the cargo from Asia directly to Europe because of the "price" imposed on emissions generated you may decide to stop midway and then to proceed, knowing that you will just be charged for the emissions generated on the flight leg (the last one) that ends up in Europe.

The Wall Street Journal in its Wednesday, December 21, 2011 edition has an article that illustrates precisely the above strategy. The article, "UPS weighs EU flyaround," complete with a map, discusses how UPS may add stopovers on cargo flights to Europe in hopes of reducing EU charges for excess carbon emissions. Rather than flying from Hong Kong to Cologne directly, a current route of about 5,700 miles, flights would land in Mumbai, and then head for Cologne, Germany, a proposed alternate route of 6,800 miles, and one with obviously greater emissions not only because of the distance traveled but the increase in the number of takeoffs and landings! But, UPS would reduce the cost of the tax by about a quarter because it could only be charged for the distance flown from Mumbai to Cologne.

I have images of cargo planes being flown just to the border of the European Union, landing, and then taking off again.

The Times article did not capture the above major issue and it is clearly an environmental (and business) one, but The Wall Street Journal article did so and did it brilliantly.

Risk Reduction and Cost Synergy via Supply Chain Network Integration

2011-12-23T14:50:00.014-05:00

Nothing like waking up and having a message from a publisher that the galleys of your paper are ready for proofing.

Plus, when there are no changes needed, and the paper looks great, it makes it all even sweeter.

This morning, my co-author, Dr. Zugang "Leo" Liu, and I were delighted to experience the above and our paper, Risk Reduction and Cost Synergy in Mergers and Acquisitions via Supply Chain Network Integration, is the lead paper in the December 2011 issue of the Journal of Financial Decision Making and appears in volume 7(2), (2011), pp 1-18.

I had blogged about our research on which this paper is based in a post: Supply Chain Risk, Mergers and Acquisitions, and Synergy.

In this paper, we developed a network model that captures the costs and the risks associated not only with the production, transportation, and storage activities in supply chains, but also with the merger / acquisition (M&A) itself. The framework allows one to estimate the expected total cost and the total risk of the supply chains before and after the merger. In addition, we provided three synergy measures that can assist decision-makers in the evaluation of potential gains of M&As from different perspectives. The measures are: the expected total cost synergy, the absolute risk synergy, and the relative risk synergy.

The first measure quantifies the expected total cost savings obtained by the merger; the second measure represents the reduction of the absolute risk achieved through the merger, and the third measure reflects the reduction of the relative risk through the merger.

Our results provide interesting managerial insights for executives who are faced with M&A decisions. The first set of examples showed that, if the expected total costs and the risks of the merger are negligible, both the total cost and the total risk would be reduced through the merger. In addition, the risk reduction achieved through the merger was more prominent when the uncertainty of link costs was higher. Our second set of examples showed that the cost and the risk of merger could have a significant impact on the total cost and the total risk of the post-merger firm, and should be carefully evaluated. Our examples also demonstrated that whether a merger makes sense economically may depend on the priority concerns of the decision-makers, and on the measures used to evaluate the gains. For instance, a merger that could not lower the expected total cost might still be able to reduce the total risk, and, hence, may be considered beneficial to the firms' stakeholders.

With all the articles appearing recently in The Wall Street Journal on Mergers & Acquisitions (horizontal as well as vertical) it is exciting to be doing research that is both interesting and timely and that includes networks applied in new ways!

My Humanitarian Healthcare Hero -- Dr. Daniel Clapp

2011-12-22T09:48:00.016-05:00

He was standing in our driveway holding a plate on which was an exquisite Scandinavian sweetbread and watching us decorating our Christmas tree.

He had been watching for awhile.

I glanced out our bay window and saw Dr. Dan Clapp, our neighbor, wearing a UMass Amherst jacket and smiling at us.

We invited Dr. Clapp in, and thanked him for the Scandinavian sweetbread that has become a tradition in our house on Christmas morning after the gifts are unwrapped.

I told Dr. Clapp that I had promised my students to broach the cutbacks at the University Health Services (UHS) to him to see what could be done and he mentioned, in his humble way, that he would be interviewed by a reporter, Scott Merzbach, soon and we could proceed from there. He and I agreed that health of our communities (students, faculty, staff, and neighbors) should always be a top priority.

He did not state the reason for the interview and that was that he is the recipient of the 2011 Andrus Award for Community Service given to an individual in each state by the AARP. Dr. Clapp is the winner out of 26 nominees in the state of Massachusetts. The coverage has now hit the media with articles in our local papers (the Daily Hampshire Gazette and The Amherst Bulletin) and beyond.

Dr. Clapp had worked at the UMass Amherst University Health Services for 32 years and considered it, at that time, as a model university health center. Since "retiring" in 2002, and throughout his professional career, his volunteer work would make someone half his age (he is now 75) panting for breath.

In 1964, he and his wife, Solveig, moved to the Philippines to work as missionaries at an orphanage where he treated patients suffering from malnutrition and other illnesses that affect those living in poverty. They stayed there for a year, and, after assuming his position at UHS, he and his wife would return every few years for a month to the Philippines. While in the Philippines, he also was a field agent for the Pathfinder Fund of Boston, which focuses of female reproductive health services.

Dr. Clapp's volunteer activities have included Meals on Wheels, starting a free clinic in the community, which serves 300 patients, many homeless and without health insurance. He is Chairman of the Council on Aging in Amherst, an on-call physician at the Westover Air Reserve Base in Chicopee, where he does examinations of military recruits, and is the physician for the Senior Health Services Nursing Center at the Amherst Senior Center, to name just a few of his volunteer healthcare and humanitarian activities.

He is also a great supporter of UMass Amherst women sports teams and plays the trumpet in the Oompah Band that I have heard play at many festive community occasions and events.

Dr. Clapp was nominated for the Andrus Award for Community Service by Nancy Pagano, the Senior Center Director in Amherst, who according to the wonderful front page article in the December 23, 2011 edition of the Amherst Bulletin by Scott Merzbach, said "the award recognizes a man who doesn't seek attention. His modesty is his cloak as he moves quietly and reliably serving those in need."

Dr. Clapp, you are our hero. Thank you for considering me to be your friend.

You are an inspiration and role model for us all.

Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain Management Using Game Theory

2011-12-21T15:03:00.026-05:00

Does one ever get tired of doing research and publishing?

I know that I certainly haven't, and recently marked what seems like a milestone, at least to me -- and now have over 150 of my articles published in refereed journals.

I do research and write (as well as teach) because I love what I do and solving tough problems is not only challenging but also satisfying (once you figure out the solution).

I received the digital offprint of our latest paper, "Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain Management Under Oligopolistic Competition and Brand Differentiation," joint with Min Yu, which has now been published in a special collection in the International Journal of Production Economics on Green Manufacturing and Distribution in the Fashion and Apparel Industries. The guest editors are: Tsan-Ming Choi, Chris K.Y. Lo, Christina W.Y. Wong, Rachel W.Y. Yee.

Seeing an article that we worked hard on in print is always thrilling.

The fashion supply chain management paper is part of a body of work that we have completed on sustainability and network themes. The fashion and apparel industry is facing vast challenges in terms
of environmental issues and has some unique features, which made it very interesting from a mathematical modeling point of view.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), textile manufacturing pollutes as much as 200 tons of water per ton of fabric. In China, a textile factory may also burn about 7 tons of carbon emitting coal per ton of fabric produced. Polyester is a man-made fiber whose demand from the fashion industry has doubled in the past 15 years and its manufacture requires petroleum and releases emissions into the air and the water. The production of cotton accounts for a quarter of all the pesticides used in the United States, which is the largest exporter of cotton in the world.

In the last three decades, there has been a migration of clothing manufacturers from developed to developing countries. Whereas in 1992 about 49% of all retail apparel sold in the United States was actually made here, by 1999 the proportion had fallen to just 12%. Between 1990 and 2000, the value of apparel imports to the
US increased from $25 billion to $64 billion.

However, lower production costs are not the only reason for the globalization of apparel manufacturing. Some firms may be taking advantage of a looser environmental regulatory system and/or lower environmental impact awareness in developing nations.

Given the global dimensions, it is crucial to quantify the emissions generated along the entire supply chains associated with the fashion and apparel industry, including the emissions generated in the transportation and distribution of the products across oceans and vast tracts of land.

Increasingly, the pressure to minimize the environmental pollution is coming not only from consumers but, more recently, even from fashion firms that wish to enhance or to maintain a positive brand identity. For example, H&M identified that 51% of its carbon imprint in 2009 was due to transportation. In order to reduce the associated emissions, the company began more direct shipments that avoided intermediate warehouses, decreased the volumes shipped by ocean and air by 40%, and increased the volume of products shipped by rail -- a quite impressive achievement.

In our sustainable fashion supply chain management paper, we used game theory to develop a new model of oligopolistic competition for fashion supply chains in the case of differentiated products with the inclusion of environmental concerns. The model assumes that each fashion firm’s product is distinct by brand and the firms compete until an equilibrium is achieved. Each fashion firm seeks to maximize its profits as well as to minimize its emissions throughout its supply chain with the latter criterion being weighted in an individual manner by each firm.

The competitive supply chain model is network-based and variational inequality theory is utilized for the formulation of the governing Nash equilibrium as well as for the solution of the case study examples. The model and computational scheme can be applied to explore the effects of changes in the demand functions; in the total cost and total emission functions, as well as in the weights associated with the environmental emissions.

Fashion and apparel can be beautiful and it is important that its production and transportation does not mire the beauty and sustainability of the environment.

The Anonymous $350 Million Donor is Revealed and It Is a Cornell Alum

2011-12-20T16:22:00.005-05:00

He always flies coach. He does not own a house and his watch cost $15.

The mystery man who gave $350 million to Cornell to support the new science center that it was awarded yesterday by Mayor Bloomberg of NYC, in partnership with Technion of Israel, has now been revealed.

The magnanimous donor is a Cornell University alum, who graduated from its School of Hotel Management in 1956.

His name is Mr. Charles F. Feeney, and The New York Times has a wonderful article on him and his generosity and vision. He views this initiative as transformational and I concur.

According to The Times, Cornell and Technion promise to start offering classes next September in temporary space, and to complete 300,000 square feet of space on Roosevelt Island by 2017 and more than 2 million square feet by 2037. Plans call for about 280 faculty members and 2,500 students in master’s and doctoral programs, a larger contingent than the universities had proposed a few months ago.

The schools have also committed to training at least 200 teachers each year in science education.

The universities plan to organize the campus around three overlapping, shifting “hubs”: technologies for “connective media,” applicable to everything from finance to social media; health care industries; and sustainable development, chosen in part to mesh with the city’s existing strengths.

Now isn't the above something that one can get excited about?!

It's Official -- Congrats to Cornell and Technion!

2011-12-19T16:44:00.010-05:00

Mayor Bloomberg of NYC has chosen Cornell University in partnership with Technion - Israel Institute of Technology to build a $2 billion graduate school of applied sciences it was just announced in The New York Times. Congrats to both institutions on this achievement that may spawn a Silicon Valley II in one of my favorite cities in the world.

According to Bloomberg, this project, to be constructed on Roosevelt Island will be transformative.

According to the article: The school, which will not be fully built for 30 years, calls for 2,000 students, 300 faculty members and two million square feet on a patch of city-owned land that now houses a little-known hospital. In addition, the universities are offering a $150 million fund for startups begun on the campus that remain in New York for three years.

There was some major drama surrounding this competition, since Stanford University, considered another top contender, pulled out last Friday and The Chronicle of Higher Education had a provocative article emailed out this morning, entitled, "Stanford's Dream of 'Silicon Valley II' Dissolves Into Angry Recrimination."

Best of luck to Cornell and Technion and a salute to Mayor Bloomberg for his promotion of science and engineering!

How exciting that Cornell’s plan calls for 500,000 square feet of public space and partnerships with the public school system, including math and science support for at least 10,000 students.

I very much enjoyed the quote of Cornell’s president, Dr. David J. Skorton, “This is a story of connectivity — of connectivity between people and their ideas, between researchers and business people, between students and their dreams.” “This is an exercise in inclusion and having all the ships rise in this fine city. New York City is positioned to become the new technological capital of the world.”

I have a fondness for Cornell having been there multiple times to give invited talks and I even served on the National Allocation Committee for the NSF Supercomputer Center there before it lost its funding. Last time I was at Cornell was this past summer.

I am sure that the champagne is flowing in Ithaca and in NYC.

You can read the press release here.

Before Disasters Strike -- Assessing Supply Chain Performance Under Disruptions

2011-12-19T10:18:00.019-05:00

As documented in numerous studies, as well as books, including our Fragile Networks book, the number of disasters is growing as well as the number of people affected by disasters.

Having the appropriate supply chains in place that are resilient to disruptive scenarios will not only save lives but make the disaster recovery process less painful and costly.

Along with my collaborators, notably, Dr. Qiang of the Graduate School of Professional Studies at Penn State University Malvern, and my doctoral students, Min Yu and Amir H. Masoumi, we have been developing quantitative tools and metrics for supply chains in humanitarian operations and healthcare.

In particular, we have been focusing on a broad class of products known as critical need products.

Critical needs products and supplies are those that are essential to human health and life. Examples include food, water, medicines, and vaccines. The demand for critical needs products is always present.

Our first paper on the topic, Supply Chain Network Design for Critical Needs with Outsourcing, Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, and Qiang Qiang, was published in the Papers in Regional Science 90: (2011) pp 123-142.

Critical needs supply chains also play a pivotal role during and post disasters during which severe disruptions can be expected to have occurred. Indeed, the past few decades have visibly demonstrated that disasters, whether natural or man-made, may severely damage infrastructure networks, such as transportation and logistical networks, may cause great loss to human life, and also may result in tremendous damage to a nation's economy.

Hence, critical needs supply chains are essential in both healthcare and humanitarian logistics operations. Given their importance also in terms of emergency preparedness and planning, special attention to them is needed, since their functions are so important to the well-being and the very survival of our societies.

Specifically, in the case of disruptions to critical needs supply chains, there are two primary parameters that may be seriously affected:

1. the capacities of the various supply chain network activities (production, storage, transportation, etc.) and

2. the demands for the products may not be satisfiable.

Indeed, as shown by numerous recent disasters, disruptions may tremendously reduce supply chain capacities as well as impact the demands for critical needs products.

Hence, it is essential for organizations to have performance metrics which enable them to assess what are the costs associated with supply chain disruptions under different scenarios. Moreover, will the demands be met and, if not, what can one expect to be the unmet demand?

To provide appropriate metrics and tools to organizations ranging from humanitarian ones to governmental ones as well as international bodies, as well as corporations, we have constructed a bi-criteria supply chain performance indicator that captures the probabilities of capacity disruptions under different scenarios as well as demand being unsatisfied.

The indicator is developed, discussed, and applied in our paper, A Bi-Criteria Indicator to Assess Supply Chain Network Performance for Critical Needs Under Capacity and Demand Disruptions, Qiang Qiang and Anna Nagurney, to appear in Transportation Research A: Special Issue on Network Vulnerability in Large-Scale Transport Networks.

Since the goals of supply chains for critical needs are quite different from those of commercial supply chains, they should be evaluated by distinct sets of metrics. As pointed out by Beamon and Balcik (2008), the goals for humanitarian relief chains, for example, include cost reduction, capital reduction, and service improvement (see also Altay and Green (2006)). Tomasini and van Wassenhove (2004), similarly, argued that: A successful humanitarian operation mitigates the urgent needs of a population with a sustainable reduction of their vulnerability in the shortest amount of time and with the least amount of resources.

We hope that our paper has contributed to this growing research and application domain in a rigorous way.

Our earlier work on supply chain disruptions in commercial supply chains included the paper, Modeling of Supply Chain Risk Under Disruptions with Performance Measurement and Robustness Analysis, Qiang Qiang, Anna Nagurney, and June Dong, in Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability: Tools and Methods for Supply Chain Decision Makers, T. Wu and J. Blackhurst, Editors, Springer, Berlin, Germany (2009), pp 91-111.

Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Business School Dean?

2011-12-17T08:10:00.019-05:00

Have you ever thought of yourself as having the corner suite and leading a top-flight organization?

Have you ever envisioned yourself as being the CEO?

One doesn't have to lead a major corporation to be a leader and one can accomplish an immense amount as the consensus and esprit de corps builder/spokesperson and communicator/top manager/top fundraiser/energizer/moderator/negotiator and hirer of outstanding talent as the Dean of a Business School.

Plus, what could be more rewarding than seeing students getting the best education possible and thriving?!

Those of us in education have seen the best and, perhaps, also the worst, in deans and other administrators, and although we hope to forget the latter, the impact on an institution can be quite damaging especially to the morale and energy and to what is left, if I may say, of "team spirit."

So, what does it take now to succeed as a Business School Dean? The lessons are actually useful for other Deans as well, including Engineering ones (and there certainly has been national press lately about winners as well as losers).

According to the The Chronicle of Higher Education, Business Schools Are Hiring a New Kind of Dean, and the example that is highlighted, along with an interview, is Dr. Sally Blount, the relatively new Dean of Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. She is a fellow blogger; see Dean Blount's Blog: reflections on Kellogg, management education and life in the 21st century.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed article is motivated, in part, by the release of a Korn/Ferry Institute report, The Business School Dean Redefined, which is a very interesting read. The Institute studies executive recruiting trends, so it has a good perspective.

According to the report: "Managing the 'business of the business school' is a complex job, similar to that of a CEO, yet with challenges that do not constrain private-enterprise chief executives." "Few CEOs, for example, must grapple with the concept of a tenured work force, highly diffused authority, and funding constraints placed by donors."

The report notes that a new leadership profile for business deans has emerged, one that emphasizes:

1. Strategic skills
2. Enterprise management
3. Innovation
4. People and relationship effectiveness.

And, according to Dean Blount,"Instead of simply looking for someone who gets along with the faculty, has a solid research reputation, and gets things done, search committees want someone who can build rankings, as well as market share, and "manage relationships with multiple stakeholders."

I would say that what is needed now is a leader who can manage complexity and optimize the scarcer resources, remembering that any organization rests on its people and without successful and creative people (faculty, students, staff, and administration) that also enjoy working together, and thrive together, one has simply a set of individuals doing what they may perceive is best for themselves and not for the organization.

(Sorry, but with my research in networks, transportation & logistics, and operations, I do view organizations as complex networks and we can have system-optimization (unselfish behavior) or user-optimization (selfish behavior) and with the right incentives, they will coincide.)

Any great leader, and that includes a Dean of a Business School, must have the respect of her/his constituents, must be a team-builder, must recognize talent, and must create an environment in which everyone can thrive (and enjoy the process) in a mutually supportive manner.

And when the successes happen (and they will) the Dean needs to acknowledge them and to make sure that they are communicated to the world beyond.

Stanford Pulls Out of NYC Science Center Competition So Will Cornell Get It?

2011-12-16T16:14:00.007-05:00

It's just been announced that Stanford University has pulled out of the science center competition in NYC, which is the initiative and dream of Mayor Bloomberg.

The Chronicle of Higher Education just emailed the following article," In a Surprise Reversal, Stanford Pulls Out of Competition for NYC Campus," which can be accessed and read here.

I have been blogging about this competition and it seems that now Cornell, with a partner in Technion in Israel will, indeed, be the frontrunner.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Ed article:

Of the five bidders still in contention—the city eliminated a proposal from Amity University, in India, and another from a consortium of New York research institutions—only Cornell and the Technion are vying for the 10-acre site on Roosevelt Island, seen as the most desirable of locations the city offered.

"There's a little bit of Yahoo-ing around here," said Lance R. Collins, Cornell's dean of engineering and a key academic architect of the university's bid. But he said even with Stanford's withdrawal, the negotiations continue. "Until I hear the mayor say our name, I'm not counting our chickens."

The Awesomeness of Math, Physics, and the Higgs Particle -- Professor Brian Greene Captured It Best

2011-12-16T07:34:00.011-05:00

This past week, I received a very informative email from one of the major scientific publishers, Elsevier, that stated:

Traditional scientific coverage is slowing due to a fall in the number of professional science media working today. In 2009, Nature chronicled the situation by noting that the number of dedicated science sections in American newspapers fell from a peak of about 95 to 34 between 1989 and 2005. Accordingly, in the same survey, 26% of global journalists reported job losses, and of the remaining journalists, 59% had less time per article available.

The Nature article appeared in the same year that more than 1.5 million articles were published, a figure that is growing by 3-4% each year. Meanwhile, research is becoming more technical, inter-disciplinary and global in nature.

In other words, when we need experienced traditional science media professionals most, we have fewer of them. However, the number of freelance science journalists and bloggers is increasing. In fact, as of 2009, of the 2,000 US-based National Association of Science Writers members, only 79 were full-time staff science writers for newspapers. Further, remaining science reporters cited getting more story leads from science bloggers, which suggests science is still being covered, but by a new breed of reporter.

One scientific endeavor that has, nevertheless, been getting a tremendous amount of news coverage in both the press and on the internet is that of the 40-year search for the elusive Higgs particle, which may be nearing an end because of the physics experiments (with help from engineers and computer scientists) being conducted at the Large Hadron Collider, a 17 mile tubular underground track outside Geneva, Switzerland, that crosses the Swiss-French border and then back again. Some researchers have dedicated decades of their lives in the quest for the Higgs particle in order to understand the "basic constituents of the universe" as Professor Brian Greene of Columbia University stated so eloquently in his excellent OpEd Piece, "Waiting for the Higgs Particle," that was published in yesterday's New York Times.

The excitement and suspense of conducting scientific research is captured by Professor Greene, who is a Professor of Physics and Mathematics. He ends his OpEd piece in a truly thrilling way, that captures the awesomeness of scientific research and the beauty of math and how he got hooked on science (yes, as I have written several times, it is often a teacher as well as a parent that inspires).

His concluding paragraphs from his outstanding New York Times OpEd:

Within a year, additional data should settle the question. Perhaps the finding will be disproved. That’s the nature of cutting-edge research. But if confirmed, wow. The legions of physicists, engineers and computer scientists, whose collective efforts created the Large Hadron Collider, will have revealed the deepest layer of reality our species has ever probed.

For me, as a theorist standing outside the experimental effort, the result is no less exciting. Years ago, when I was in high school, my physics teacher gave the class a homework problem: calculating the trajectory of a ball swinging from the ceiling by a piece of chewing gum. That night, when I finished the calculation, I ran down the hallway to show my father — I was utterly and profoundly amazed that mathematical symbols scratched in pencil on a piece of paper could describe things that actually happened in the real world. That’s when I became hooked on physics. With Tuesday’s announcement, tentative though it may be, I’m awed yet again.

I had the honor and privilege of meeting Dr. Brian Greene when I was a panelist at the World Science Festival in NYC in June 2009. He and his wife, Tracy Day, are the brainchilds behind that amazing annual scientific extravaganza.

This is certainly an exciting year both in science as well as in the reporting and discussing of it!

Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare -- Teaching a New Course at the Isenberg School

2011-12-14T16:28:00.013-05:00

I will be teaching a new Spring semester course, beginning in January 2012, entitled, Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare.

The course will be offered in the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst and will be meeting Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:30AM-10:50AM.

The number for the course is SCH-MGMT 597LG and the course is an upper level undergraduate / graduate level course. Students should have a background in operations research / management science and, ideally have had a course similar to my Transportation & Logistics course, although I am being flexible in prerequisites, since this is the first time that this course is being offered.

I have already started preparing lectures for this new course and am very excited about being able to teach it.

We will be using primary sources, results from case studies, journal articles, videos, and there will be invited practitioners to discuss real-world experiences from the field.

The course will also be covering rigorous analytical models and performance metrics.

I became very interested in this topic of research and practice several years back and organized a workshop on the topic that was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation at that took place at its Bellagio Center on Lake Como in Italy.

The website for the conference along with the findings and many of the presentations by both practitioners and researchers can be accessed here.

Will Your Children be Operations Researchers?

2011-12-12T07:15:00.023-05:00

I like to ask colleagues and even fellow travelers while flying how they got interested in and selected their chosen field/profession.

I, also, if the conversation gets animated and interesting, may even venture and inquire about whether their parents or another relative may have been an influence on the career that they have chosen. Or was it a teacher who saw a special spark and talent and commented on it and nurtured it?

Being immigrants, my family always valued and emphasized math and science and many males in my family were engineers, including my father and uncles, whereas my mother, although trained as a pharmacist in the old country, became a teacher in the US.

Trying to optimize the allocation of scarce resources was an underlying theme while I was growing up, with my father paying careful attention to the budget. As children, we never felt that we were wanting. But, then again, living close to NYC, we had the most magnificent museums and other cultural institutions to explore and enjoy, which we did on many Sundays. Summers, when not working at either summer camps or in hospitals (another early career interest was medicine), we would spend in the Poconos in a very primitive, rustic bungalow colony, which was heaven (despite no running hot water, etc.). We would explore the woods for hours, swim in fresh water lakes, and pick berries in the wild. A special treat would be going to a drive-in movie or walking 4 miles round-trip to get a New York Times.

Also, there would be math games that we would play and even math competitions with chalk problems on oiled dirt roads. These would, typically, take place on weekends when the fathers would come to visit their families or when they had their vacations.

Making the most of what we had was how we lived, so scarcity made for abundance.

Also, as far back as elementary school, Mrs. Fuller, my seventh grade teacher, said that one day I would be a calculus professor (I do teach in a business school and am proud to say that the students in my classes do make use of calculus).

I do wonder what roads/paths the children of INFORMS members will take (or have taken) and hope that you can join me in sharing your stories.

This blogpost is my second entry to this month's INFORMS Challenge on O.R. and Families.

My first post was on My Academic Mother.

The Global Outsourcing of Electronic Recycling -- Profits at What Costs?

2011-12-10T09:25:00.021-05:00

Yesterday's New York Times ran an article, which I shared with some of my collaborators and students, and one already responded with the following message: It breaks my heart whenever I hear this kind of news. A big powerful country should not take advantage of its position.

The article, "Lead from Old U.S. Batteries Sent to Mexico Raises Risk," focuses on the immense health costs and environmental damage from outsourcing of electronic waste recycling to Mexico, a practice that has grown over the past several years.

The article is filled with ironies.

According to the article: The rising flow of batteries is a result of strict new Environmental Protection Agency standards on lead pollution, which make domestic recycling more difficult and expensive, but do not prohibit companies from exporting the work and the danger to countries where standards are low and enforcement is lax.

Also, according to the article, "lead is gold" and the American car battery industry likes to boast that it has the highest recycling rate for any commodity — 97 percent of the lead is recycled — and most states have laws mandating that stores take back old batteries. Whether deposited at the store where they were purchased or with a local mechanic, used batteries are redirected to recycling plants, where the real goal is not environmental stewardship but extracting the precious lead that is the gold of a protean trading system where traceability is impossible.

By outsourcing electronic recycling to Mexico not only are domestic recyclers in the US being hurt economically, but Mexicans who reside near recycling plants that do not adhere to proper lead recovery standards are faced with extraordinary health risks and negative impacts. There are schools located close to such facilities and more and more children are being identified with high lead amounts in their blood. Lead leads to neurological disorders, delayed/stunted learning, and behavioral problems.

I have conducted research on environmental sustainability for about 15 years now and have written both papers and books on the subject with my doctoral students who continue to produce scholarship on this topic. One of my most heavily cited papers is a paper with my former doctoral student, Fuminori Toyasaki, who is now a Professor at York University in Canada.

The paper is: Reverse Supply Chain Management and Electronic Waste Recycling: A Multitiered Network Equilibrium Framework for E-Cycling, Transportation Research E 41: (2005) pp 1-28.

Several of my former doctoral students, who are now all professors at business schools, just had a co-authored paper accepted on closed loop supply chains that is also relevant to electronic recycling. The paper, The Closed-loop Supply Chain Network with Competition, Distribution Channel Investment, and Uncertainties, by Qiang Qiang, Ke Ke, Trisha Anderson, and June Dong, will appear in OMEGA -The International Journal of Management Science.

Another relevant article of ours, Environmental and Cost Synergy in Supply Chain Network Integration in Mergers and Acquisitions, co-authored with Trisha Woolley (nee Anderson) quantified synergies, including environmental ones, associated with mergers and acquisitions, a topic of clear relevance to this application domain.

Along with Dr. Toyasaki, Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business and I are now completing a study on outsourcing, regulation, and electronic recycling.

I lived in Mexico the summer between my graduation from high school and my freshman year at Brown University. That experience remains one of my most wondrous ones of living in another country.

Businesses must look at the entire product supply chain life cycle to ensure that it is socially responsible and environmentally sound. Outsourcing to countries with low environmental awareness and poor environmental standards monitoring is contrary to civilized business practices.

Besides, what is more important than a company's reputation!

For an informative and accessible presentation on e-cycling, delivered by my husband, who also provided the above collage of images, see: Our Campus - Our Planet at the University of Hartford Freshman Orientation (pdf)

Photos from the International Cuisine UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Party

2011-12-09T20:25:00.012-05:00

As is our tradition, today the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter hosted an end of the semester party with international cuisine.

The party took place in the Isenberg School of Management.

Students came from the Isenberg School of Management and from Industrial Engineering as well as from Public Health. Some staff and faculty and special guests also came.

The food was fabulous (I spent so much time talking and eating that I did not get a chance to take many photos of the food). There was cuisine from China, Vietnam, Turkey, Greece, Iran, Ukraine, Poland, the US, etc.!

We took photos of chapter officers (past and present who could make the party).

A wonderful time was had by all.

Financial Networks -- Special Issue of Computational Management Science

2011-12-07T15:24:00.004-05:00

Last December I very much enjoyed speaking on Financial Networks at the Measuring Systemic Risk Conference, organized by Lars Peter Hansen of the University of Chicago, Andrew W. Lo of the Sloan School at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and David Marshall of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

I wrote about the conference in a blogpost entitled, Oprah was not there and neither was George Clooney but Chicago still Sparkled with Intellectual Brilliance.

Recently, I received an invitation from the editor of the journal, Computational Management Science, Dr. Berc Rustem of Imperial College, to edit a Special Issue on Financial Networks.

This invitation I also could not refuse.

Below is a Call for Papers, which will also be posted shortly on the journal website.

Call for Papers

Special Issue of Computational Management Science

Financial Networks

Guest Editor:

Anna Nagurney

Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Areas of Interest

Networks are a powerful scientific framework for the modeling, analysis, and solution of complex economic, social, and management problems.

Financial networks, in particular, have evolved to become a theoretical and computational paradigm for a spectrum of decision-making problems from the micro to the macro levels, and ranging from portfolio optimization to systemic risk assessment, financial intermediation, contagion analysis, and even electronic finance.

This special issue of Computational Management Science seeks to capture the state-of-the-art of financial networks through high quality, original research papers that include numerical results.

Reviewing Information

The submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by anonymous reviewers according to the standards of a leading international journal.

Submission Information

The deadline for submission is July 15, 2012. Manuscripts must be written in English and conform to the style of the journal Computational Management Science and not exceed 25 pages.

Please submit manuscripts to:

http://www.editorialmanager.com/cmsc/

and select Article Type: S.I. Networks, to ensure proper processing.

If you have questions, the Guest Editor can be contacted at:

e-mail: nagurney@isenberg.umass.edu

Faculty Openings in Operations Research and in Logistics at Gothenburg University

2011-12-07T10:19:00.012-05:00

I received a message from a colleague at Gothenburg University in gorgeous Sweden about two faculty openings and a request to disseminate the announcement further, so I am delighted to be doing so.

Specifically, there are two open positions for senior lecturers in logistics and operations research at University of Gothenburg.

Interview with Dr. Ruth Simmons, President of Brown University, on Leadership

2011-12-06T16:20:00.005-05:00

Dr. Ruth Simmons, the President of my alma mater, Brown University, will be stepping down at the end of this year. She will have served Brown brilliantly over a period of 11 years.

The New York Times has a great interview with Dr. Simmons, as part of its Corner Office series.

What especially impressed me in the interview, was how she had to overcome some tough times (it was suggested to her to leave the PhD program at Harvard, for example), and how she learned from those experiences. She very much values team-work, ambition in her employees and members of her leadership team and people who are genuinely interesting (physicists who like poetry, for example).

One of my favorite excerpts from the interview with Dr. Ruth Simmons is below:

I keep going back to this fundamental idea of being able to respect other people, especially if you’re in a senior position. You can get a lot more done if people have a sense that you respect them, and that you listen to them. You would be surprised at the number of interviews I’ve done where the person never stops talking. If I’m interviewing someone and if they never stop talking, I will never hire them, no matter how qualified they are. If you cannot listen, you can’t be the site of welcoming, nurturing, facilitating new ideas, innovation, creativity, because it really is ultimately only about you. So I look for people who listen well and can respect the ideas of others.

It is truly amazing what this youngest of twelve children from Mississippi has been able to accomplish.

Her shoes will be really tough to fill.

I wish the next President of Brown a lot of luck.

UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Hosts Party at the Isenberg School

2011-12-06T15:56:00.004-05:00

It has been a very busy semester not only with classes but also with numerous conferences, seminar presentations, and other events.

We made it through Hurricane Irene and a multiple day electric power outage due to the October snowstorm.

So, before final exams begin, join us for a party this coming Friday at the Isenberg School, as is a tradition of the award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter.

There will be many different international cuisines and great students and colleagues, so come, if you can.

Didn't Get Tenure but Got the Nobel Prize

2011-12-04T19:20:00.007-05:00

I hadn't realized that Tom Sargent, the co-recipient of this year's Nobel prize in Economic Sciences, with Chris Sims (sorry for shortening their first names but they are colleagues from Computational Economics and the latter even from supercomputing days), did not get tenure at UPenn. UPenn must be smarting a bit from declining him tenure.

The article in today's New York Times about this great pair of economists, who dazzle with their math and who continue to do research, highlights their cameraderie, work ethic, and a bit of discomfort at all the media attention. It also broke the news (at least to me) that Tom Sargent was denied tenure at the University of Pennsylvania. He then went on to join Chris Sims at the University of Minnesota.

I loved the quote from the Times article: Mr. Sargent says his most important work is spoken “in the beautiful language of math.” (Although he knows it’s not widely understood.)

“The kind of work we do, that real economists do, will never catch on with the public,” he said.

So the moral is: do what you love, and even if you don't get tenure at your first academic institution, you can even get the Nobel prize, like Tom Sargent did.

Fixing Glaring Gender Gaps in US Research Labs

2011-12-03T07:35:00.008-05:00

You look around and realize only you and the secretary in the research lab are females.

Years after, one of your students who now works at the same research lab realizes that she is one of 5 females out of 500 at the same research lab.

The above experiences happened at the Los Alamos National Lab, a top scientific research lab in the United States.

And, the female scientist who had the first experience above is now doing something about it.

Her name is Dr. Maria Gomez and she teaches at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, which is part of the 5 College System in western Massachusetts (I teach at one of the five -- UMass Amherst).

Yesterday, I read an outstanding article, written by Chad Cain, in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, on what Professor Gomez is doing to inspire and educate females in science and especially in her specialty -- chemistry. I enjoyed the article so much that I wrote to both Professor Gomez and Mr. Cain yesterday and congratulated them (and heard back from both of them).

I saved my hardcopy and shared it also with my daughter.

You can read the full article here (minus the nice photos).

Professor Gomez ( I did some additional research) completed her PhD at Brown University, as I did, and although she only saw her father several times in her life, he was a mathematician and her mother would tell her it is in your genes something which I keep on telling my daughter since her parents have PhDs in physics and applied mathematics (from Brown).

The article further highlights the misrepresentation of females in what are the STEM (sciences, technology, engineering and math) fields. The relatively few women who do receive degrees in those fields are concentrated in the physical and life sciences.

According to the article: Although women fill close to half of all jobs in the U.S., they hold less than 25 percent of STEM jobs, according to a 2009 report from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The report, culled from U.S. Census figures, found that women comprised 27 percent of the computer and math workforce (the largest of the four STEM components) and about 14 percent of the engineering workforce. The numbers are higher in the physical and life sciences, at 40 percent female.

In a 2010 report called "Why So Few?" the American Association of University Women offers a similar picture.

Women have closed the gap in the fields of biology and agricultural sciences, making up some 50 percent of those earning a doctorate, according to the report. The numbers drop off considerably for other fields. The figure for women earning doctorates in math, for example, stands at about 30 percent, while about 20 percent of computer science doctorates are awarded to women.

Students need more role models such a Professor Maria Gomez to see what is possible and how rewarding and satisfying research in math and sciences can be.

Baking Holiday Cookies with Photos

2011-12-02T15:58:00.009-05:00

December is a time of the year when, in academia, projects and papers for courses are due, exams are being prepared, then taken (by students), and graded (by professors).

While working on finishing up the semester and writing up a final exam I every year look forward to baking and distributing cookies with my daughter.

Yes, I am a professor who likes to bake (and also loves to give out and eat cookies).

Somehow (I think we in Operations Research just tend to be very efficient at our tasks), I managed to finish a paper this past week that I will be presenting in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, this Monday, and did my first batch of holiday baking.

I also very much enjoy the logistics of baking (from the shopping for the ingredients to the preparation to the artistry and science of assemblying the cookies, decorating them and baking them).

Above are some photos taken of the results. All the cookies (except for one plate) have already been distributed to some friends and neighbors (hope to bake more after the semester and grading are over with).

In the meantime, enjoy this holiday season!

My Academic Mother

2011-12-01T07:05:00.024-05:00

It was my second year at MIT.

My first year at MIT, back in 1988-1989, I had spent in the Transportation Systems Division in Engineering, supported by an NSF Visiting Professorship for Women (VPW). During that year, I taught a course and also organized a speaker series to bring Women in Operations Research to MIT, and their talks took place at the MIT Operations Research Center. My dissertation advisor at Brown University had been Stella Dafermos, who held appointments in Applied Mathematics and in Engineering. Stella also had had a VPW earlier at MIT and I had decided to apply and received the NSF grant/award.

My first year at MIT was terrific. I had received my promotion and tenure two years prior (four years after getting my PhD from Brown University in Applied Mathematics, with a specialty in Operations Research) and I was always open for new challenges and experiences.

UMass Amherst, I suspect, was pleased with what I was doing in terms of research and I was lucky to receive a UMass Faculty Fellowship after my VPW, which allowed me to take another year to think, conduct research, and to write, so I elected to stay at MIT. I loved living on Mass Ave (past Harvard right next to a trolley bus station), riding the T, interacting with the students and colleagues at MIT, and taking advantage also of seminars at Harvard. That year, I hosted several visitors from around the world, whom I would treat to the buffet lunch on the top floor of what was then the Sloan School of Management building.

I especially enjoyed running into the Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson, whether in the cafeteria, the snack shop, or the elevator, resplendent always in his bow tie, who seemed to like to eat as much as I did. His query: "Anna, have you proved any good theorems lately?" stays with me. It was a marvelous year and even on Saturdays (I won't mention names) there was always a Full Professor who put on the pot of coffee at Sloan. Surrounded by brilliant, collegial minds in operations research and in economics, life was good!

As Dickens, however, wrote in his Tales of Two Cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

That September, of my second year at MIT, my mother passed away and that April, shortly before she would have turned 50, my dissertation advisor, Stella Dafermos, also died. I received the phone call in my Sloan office just before I was to give a seminar at the OR Center, which I did. Stella's funeral in Providence and her burial in April, 1990 in the cemetery on Blackstone Boulevard, as the snow was melting and the daffodils were popping up, I will never forget.

Within 7 months, I had lost my two mothers.

Stella had been the second female PhD in Operations Research. I was asked to write several obituaries, including one that was published in Operations Research, and, as her first PhD student, this was a special, albeit painful, honor and privilege. In preparing my writeups I conversed with many leaders in OR (including Nemhauser) and we concluded that she had been the second female OR PhD (although some of us had thought that she had been the first). She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, moved on with her husband to Cornell, and then settled at Brown University.

I never had Stella as an undergraduate at Brown, but heard from my fellow Applied Math majors (many of whom were female), including my room-mate, about what a great teacher she was.

After receiving two degrees from Brown and working in the defense sector in Newport, RI, running marathons, and having my companies pay for my Master's degree at Brown, I decided to enroll full-time at Brown and Stella became my advisor. Her grants supported me and in 3 years I completed my PhD. Stella needed a student who was good at computing and since I had really enjoyed computing while at Brown and in industry plus I was always fascinated by transportation and networks, it was a great match. I also sought out the only female faculty member in Engineering and in Applied Math.

We would talk for hours in her office and even in her home, when she would welcome her children from school. Regularly, on Thursdays, she would go up to MIT for the OR seminars.

Together we published multiple papers that appeared in Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Transportation Research B, and several economics and regional science journals.

We would read our papers out loud since not only did the work have to be good but it had to sound good --OR as poetry/literature (non-fiction, of course)! Manuscripts were written and rewritten multiple times until it was time to get them typed-up and then submitted.

Being a teaching assistant for Stella was always enjoyable, and with the likes of Irv Lustig, in classes, it made my job easy (and with Les Servi also at Brown then always pleasant).

Even as a doctoral student, I had opportunities to travel with Stella to conferences (sometimes with my husband as the navigator). At OR conferences, during the academic year, while I was an Assistant Professor, we would often share rooms at conferences (not only to save grant funds but because it was fun).

With Stella, we explored Tokyo, Athens (she was the guide there), and had some of our most memorable adventures in Amsterdam (en route to my first European conference, which was in Delft). We thought we would be settled in our hotel room, and then there would be a knock on the door -- it would be Stella asking us to join her on another adventure (in Amsterdam, we were even offered "family discounts" and on a dinner canal boat ride asked whether we wanted to be seated with our "mother-in-law" or not).

All four of Stella's PhD students (3 of whom were females) are now Full Professors (she died while her 4th student had not yet completed her PhD) and three of my former PhD students have also reached the Full Professor rank.

Stella, you gave us standards that we continue to aspire to.

Your legacy is eternal and your academic children, grandchildren, and cousins thank you.

This blogpost was written for the INFORMS blog Challenge on OR and Families.

For additional perspectives on academic genealogies and words of wisdom, connect with the writings of my fellow colleagues, Mike Trick and Laura McLay.

Design of Sustainable Supply Chains for Sustainable Cities

2011-11-30T19:28:00.020-05:00

As I wrote in my previous blogpost I am very much looking forward to being in Amsterdam next week to speak at and take part in the Complex-City Workshop.

The program is now available and support for this workshop is being provided by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (many thanks).

I will be speaking on a paper that I just completed, Design of Sustainable Supply Chains for Sustainable Cities.

I love cities and over the past few weeks have been to Boston, Paris, Miami, and New York City.

Cities, as dynamic complex networks, are the systems in which more people now live than don't and which represent the economic engines for commerce, research and development, education, health care, and even culture. They have evolved over space and time on built infrastructure from transportation networks to telecommunication and electric power networks.

At the same time, cities are the centers of resource usage from electricity and other forms of energy and fuel, to food, water, and a plethora of other products. Hence, they also are the repositories and generators of waste output and other environmental pollutants, such as carbon and other emissions, sewage, noise, etc.

The term Sustainable Cities has come into increasing use in the past two decades, with a focus of making cities more livable, with an eye not only on the present generation but towards future ones, as well. A recent World Bank report noted that the world is shrinking with cheaper air travel, large-scale commercial shipping, and expanding road networks. Today, only 10% of the globe's land area is considered to be remote, that is, more than 48 hours from a large city. Hence, our world is becoming a network of interconnected cities or a supernetwork of cities.

Urbanization is one of the most pressing and complex challenges of the 21st century, with the citizenry characterized by a growing awareness of a threat to the sustainability of the earth's natural environment, coupled with the increase in the number of people moving into and living in cities.

Supply chains consisting of suppliers, manufacturers, transportation service providers, storage facilities and distributors, as well as retailers, and consumers, serve as the backbones for the provision of goods as well as services on our modern global economy. Supply chains have revolutionized the way in which products are sourced, produced, distributed, and consumed around the globe. They may involve thousands of stakeholders from suppliers and manufacturers to hundreds of thousands of consumer demand points around the globe. Cities are supplied by a complex array of supply chains servicing an immense spectrum of economic activities from food stores and restaurants, office supplies and high tech equipment, apparel, construction materials, as well as raw materials, to name just a few. The sustainability of supply chains is, hence, a precursor to the sustainability of our cities.

According to a Business for Social Responsibility (2009) paper, it is now widely acknowledged that making significant progress on mitigating the impact of climate change depends on reducing the negative environmental impacts of supply chains through their redesign and enhanced management (see also McKinsey Quarterly (2008)).

Furthermore, as noted by Capgemini in its 2008 report: 2016: Future Supply Chain, Preserving energy and raw materials and other resources like water will become a crucial aspect in future supply chains, as costs will likely remain volatile and supplies will continue to dwindle. These conditions may well create substantial pressure on current supply chain models.

Although the importance of sustainable supply chains to the sustainability of cities is being increasingly recognized, in terms of not only the enhancement of business processes in terms of efficiency and cost reduction but also the reduction of negative environmental externalities as well as waste, there have been only limited modeling efforts that capture supply chains within a cities framework. Models of sustainable supply chains are important since they enable the evaluation (before expensive investments are actually made) as to alternative network designs, technologies, as well as sensitivities to cost and demand structures.

A feature of cities that we capture in the new sustainable supply chain network design model is the frequency of freight shipments, and other supply chain network activities, which tend to be higher in urban environments, due to the larger population density. Just think of all the stores and restaurants, to start, that need to be supplied with fresh products. By optimizing the frequencies, one may minimize not only the operational costs and replenishment costs but also the environmental damage (pollution, noise, wear and tear, etc.).

My paper, in pdf format, may be downloaded.

Complex-City Workshop in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2011-11-28T15:18:00.013-05:00

Next week I will be taking part in the COMPLEX-CITY Workshop, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Each invited speaker/participant will be presenting an original research paper. I have completed my paper,"Design of Sustainable Supply Chains for Sustainable Cities," and am very much looking forward to presenting it and taking part in this workshop in one of my favorite cities.

This workshop is being organized by Dr. Peter Nijkamp and Dr. Emmanouil Tranos and will take place at the Tinbergen Institute/VU University. According to the organizers, the aim of the workshop is to bring together scholars with an expertise at the interface of spatial-urban dynamics and complexity theory. Through a presentation of advanced research papers, the organizers hope to ensure both a stock-taking of the scientific state of affairs in this field and an exploration of new and promising research endeavours. This workshop will be sponsored by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and further supported by the Tinbergen Institute and the Department of Spatial Economics at the VU University, Amsterdam.

A more detailed Aims and Scope forwarded by the organizers can be found below.

Aims and Scope of the COMPLEX-CITY Workshop

With half of the world’s population now living in cities and predictions that this will rise to three quarters by the end of the 21^st century, cities represent one of the key foci around which important problems in real-world complex systems are clustered. There are clear policy implications for all dynamic urban models being developed. It seems logical that urban policy making should seek to intervene in much more sophisticated ways than hitherto and that complexity theory will provide us with the means for identifying how small changes can lead to dramatic and lasting beneficial effects which are both more equitable and efficient that anything developed hitherto. Pressing problems such as aging and climate change all involve changes in human behavior, particularly travel and social interactions, and our focus here directly identifies both data and models that are pertinent to these complexity issues.

Complexity prompts many intellectual challenges, both conceptually and empirically. The intellectual domain in which the workshop on COMPLEX-CITY is situated, is focused on the development and use of theories and models that explain, simulate and predict the dynamics of cities defined across spatial/geographical scales from the global to the local, from the world city to the village. In the last twenty years, the field has embraced new developments in complexity theory based on the inescapable logic that such systems mainly develop organically, from the bottom up, illustrating fascinating, surprising and sometime chaotic patterns of emergence, which show order al all scales and are hard to understand as anything but the remorseless action of decision-making at the lowest levels. This presents also one of the grandest of challenges to urban policy analysis: current policy instruments are often pitched at the wrong scale, producing methods of intervention which are largely ineffective in that they ignore the essential logic of the way such human systems actually develop.

The workshop has a stock-taking and exploratory nature and aims to identify critical parameters for urban policy analysis with respect to problems of development in large city systems. It will address new developments in complexity theory, based on the existing body of knowledge. What makes this particularly opportune is the fact that massive new streams of data with respect to movement and location patterns in city systems are rapidly becoming available. These are providing the momentum for new developments in theory and modeling which are taking the slow but sure developments of the last twenty years to new kinds of applications relevant to policy making. What is different is that comprehensive data are being routinely collected at the individual level relating to where economic and social activities are carried out in cities and how individuals cooperate and conflict with one another in geographical terms. The prospect exists for the first time of demonstrating how aggregate patterns in cities do actually emerge from bottom-up actions and interactions, linking physical patterns of transportation to social networks, patterns of trade to the flow of information. These developments rely on unobtrusive and automatic data collection using digital technologies that are penetrating every aspect of social and economic life, providing unprecedented possibilities for the analysis of data about human spatial behaviour. This is essential in taking complexity science to the point where it becomes truly applicable in urban policy analysis.

The quest of the workshop is to demonstrate how several long-standing ideas about urban dynamics can be tested and validated using new data sources that provide information about routine decision-making concerning locations and interactions. We envisage that many well-established models of the mechanisms governing how cities change are built around models of reaction-diffusion, which generate both smooth and abrupt change reminiscent of criticality, catastrophe, and chaos, can be tested and extended using new digital data. These range from a synthesis of monetary and social transactions to mobile phone records, electronic ticketing, financial payments, routine compilations of network geometry focusing on infrastructure and locational change, and a host of other data from which value can be easily added through synthesis with other data sets. The workshop will focus on urban models that simulate processes involved in transactional flows ranging from physical movements on transportation systems to information flows associated with phone networks to the assembly of economic data associated with markets.

There are clear links to the resilience and sustainability of city systems with regard to travel and interaction as well as to methods for sensing what is happening in real time with respect to policies that are being implemented. These links have been exploited in complexity theory with respect to spatial/geographical scales but they have not been realised in terms of temporal scales. Thus the workshop will focus on linking frequent to less frequent, and routine events to strategic one-off events, and will provide new ways of examining the link between the micro and the macro.

Photos from the Miami Regional Science Conference

2011-11-28T08:16:00.015-05:00

From November 10-19, 2011, my co-authors and I presented papers at three conferences -- from the Regional Science conference in Miami to the INFORMS Conference in Charlotte, to the most recent one, which was a physics conference at UMass Amherst and required no flying! I also spoke on two panels at the INFORMS Charlotte conference.

The conferences were fabulous (and you can get a sense of the Charlotte conference from the blogposts on the conference website that I also contributed to).

Many of our conference presentations on topics ranging from medical nuclear supply chains, to predator-prey ecological networks as nature's supply chains, to blood banking systems, and even fashion supply chains can be found on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website.

However, since sometimes pictures are worth thousands of words, above I have posted photos from the Miami Regional Science conference.

Congrats to the organizers of all of these conferences -- they were a great success!

Time to Give Thanks at This Time of the Year

2011-11-25T07:05:00.003-05:00

I hope that you have had a pleasant Thanksgiving Day and to those colleagues and friends around the globe that do not celebrate this special day, thanks for the friendship and adventures to many lands.

We are part of many communities -- professional, familial, neighborhood, and others, and it is always good to reflect on the people that make the world that we live in stimulating and never dull.

Special thanks to those who always have a kind word and comments of special support and, in the meantime, enjoy this holiday season and time of the year, and take care!

Sustainability of Transportation Networks by Including the Critical Human Element -- Commentary for Resources for the Future

2011-11-21T13:25:00.015-05:00

I just heard from Resources for the Future (RFF) that my policy commentary, Designing Transportation Infrastructure to Include the Human Element, has been published.

It is also posted on the RFF homepage (and should reside there, I am told, for two weeks).

Resources for the Future is a Washington DC non-profit policy think tank, which focuses on environmental, energy, and natural resources issues. The invitation to contribute a piece came after my SAMSI presentation on Sustainability: Methodology with Applications in Raleigh, North Carolina in September.

In my commentary (with a nice graphic included, compliments of Resources for the Future), I also discuss the Braess paradox and several instances around the globe. The translation of the famous Braess paradox (1968) paper from German to English, which Tina Wakolbinger and I, together with Professor Braess did, is cited in the commentary as well as the preface to the article that I wrote with David E. Boyce (whom I recently had the pleasure of seeing in Miami at the Regional Science conference). Both the translation and the preface appeared in the INFORMS journal, Transportation Science.

With 7 billion people now on our planet and with the number of cars and other vehicles growing globally, there is a lot that we can and must do together to minimize not only congestion but also environmental emissions.

The Meet the Executive Lecture with Photos

2011-11-18T20:15:00.012-05:00

Today we were truly informed by Mr. Dan Viederman, the CEO of Verite', as to corporate social responsibility and global supply chains especially in the context of labor practices.

The problem is that many consumers are completely unaware as to some of the business practices in the countries from which their products have originated.

His talk, "Sweatshops and Slavery in the 21st Century: What Business Can Do," focused on labor practices around the world, which people in the US (as well as other consumers) may not be aware of.

He spoke of what his organization, Verite', is doing to promote a civil society.

He emphasized its work in social auditing, training, and how multinatinal corporations can make decisions that empower consumers.

He noted how people may be working and not be getting paid, be working in horrific conditions in certain countries, and noted that, in the US, it is not illegal for children to work on farms.

He noted that bad labor practices can be improved through both formal and informal regulation.

Companies that were embarrassed when news about how their products were produced changed their processes (think Nike as an example). He noted that Gap had a tremendous leader and that corporate social responsibility was big in San Francisco so the company learned.

The pressure to reduce the price of products is resulting in corners being cut and, oftentimes, at the expense of the workers.

Procurement and purchasing are essential to the supply chain and socially responsible practices in this dimension can make a huge difference. If there are multiple tiers of suppliers and even subcontractors how can the contracting firm know exactly under what conditions the product is being produced by the various workers in the factories?

He emphasized that one needs to talk to the workers and some of the major problems lie in the conditions that migrant laborers are exposed to. They may have to pay a lot of money to obtain jobs in other countries and then may not be paid for weeks at a time or be consistently underpaid. The laborers who have a lot of debt are especially in dire straits.

Verite engages in supply chain interventions and provides a toolkit for companies.

He talked about outsourcing risk (and we have written several papers on this topic but not specifically from the CSR perspective).

I very much appreciated hearing Mr. Viederman speak about the importance of having a systems perspective and to understand the various linkages in a supply chain (this reminded me of the network models that we have been working on).

The UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter did the hosting today and did a terrific job.

The magna cum laude award that the chapter had recently received from INFORMS was displayed along with various treats at a reception before.

The audience was terrific and had really good questions and it was great to see undergrads and grad students in attendance as well as faculty and even staff.

Above are some photos from Mr. Viederman's wonderful presentation today.

Social Entrepreneur of the Year to Speak at Isenberg on Sweatshops and Slavery in the 21st Century: What Business Can Do

2011-11-18T08:02:00.008-05:00

Today, the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter will be hosting Mr. Viederman of Verite in our "Meet the Executive" Speaker Series.

His talk will take place in the Isenberg School of Management, Room 210, at 11AM today.

Immediately prior to his presentation on "Sweatshops and Slavery in the 21st Century: What Business Can Do," we will be holding a reception, beginning at 10:30AM.

At the reception we will be serving coffee and pastries and will have the magna cum laude award plaque displayed, which the chapter was awarded this past Tuesday morning at the 2011 INFORMS Charlotte conference.

Please join us, if you can.

The students (with help from Ms. Ellen Pekar) designed the event flyer above.

Great Red Chair Interview with Yul Kwon on CNN and an INFORMS Connection

2011-11-17T18:37:00.009-05:00

I have this uncanny ability to be thinking of someone and then they appear (or at least contact me).

In speaking on the Newsmakers panel at the 2011 INFORMS Charlotte conference this past Monday, which was organized by Barry List, in my presentation I included a photo of being interviewed by Yul Kwon on Broadway last March for the PBS production America Revealed, which should be airing this winter. Yul was the winner of the TV show Survivor (Cook Islands) and is a Stanford and Yale Law school grad. He gave up working as a lawyer (and at the FCC to which he was appointed by Obama) to work on TV.

I got back from the INFORMS conference only to find that Yul was a subject of a CNN Red Chair Interview, with an accompanying article, which mentioned America Revealed in the first line.

The interview is special and emphasizes Yul's Korean American roots, his struggles to fit, and how he is reaching out to others.

I enjoyed talking to him for over 3 hours on that cold March 15, 2011 day and having the experience of being filmed by a great LionTV crew. The conversation focused on the Braess paradox, the closure of Broadway between 47th Street and 42nd Street to vehicular traffic, and basketball.

Yul is not only really smart but he is also really nice and is a great interviewer, as well!

My slide presentation on the Newsmakers panel can be downloaded, in pdf format, here.

The Student Chapter Awards Breakfast at INFORMS Charlotte was Splendid

2011-11-17T06:33:00.013-05:00

Mr. Amir Masoumi, who has served the chapter in numerous capacities, holding the award plaque for our chapter

Ms. Mary Magrogan, Professor Barrett Thomas, and Ms. Tracy Byrnes
Speaking about the great resource the INFORMS Speakers Program is

Many of us are still basking in the afterglow of the wonderful 2011 INFORMS Charlotte conference.

One of my favorite events at the INFORMS Annual meeting is the breakfast at which the student chapters are recognized for their activities.

In an earlier post, I noted this year's awardees.
Being at the breakfast is exciting for several reasons:

One gets to see other chapter Faculty Advisors and officers as well as the INFORMS folks, especially Ms. Mary Magrogan and Ms. Tracy Byrnes, who work so hard with the student chapters across the country.

In addition, one gets to see the smiling faces on those who are recognized. INFORMS also gives out the Judith Liebman award and the Moving Spirit Award at this breakfast, in addition to the student chapter awards.

Joining me at the table were two former UMass Amherst INFORMS Student chapter officers and two newly elected ones. We received the magna cum laude award this year -- the fifth time in as many years that we have been recognized by INFORMS for our activities. I might add that two previous officers of our chapter also received the Judith Liebman award from INFORMS and I received the Moving Spirit award, which meant a lot to me.

I also had the opportunity to speak at the breakfast to emphasize the hard work behind our INFORMS Speakers Program this year. INFORMS will be unveiling the new pages soon and we are delighted to have added many new speakers to broaden diversity and geographical representation. We have also included more speakers from industry and are emphasizing analytics, in addition.

I hope that you enjoy the photos above taken at the breakfast this past Tuesday.

Congratulations to everyone and thanks for all the great service and activities!

Students are the profession's future and certainly make the present much more fun.

Please visit our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter website, which is also engaging social media.

Congratulations to Dr. Nathan Gartner, the Recipient of the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation

2011-11-16T17:16:00.008-05:00

Dr. Nathan Gartner standing next to me before receiving his award
Dr. Gartner being recognized with the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science

At the Society for Transportation Science and Logistics meeting at the INFORMS Conference in Charlotte this past Monday evening the 2011 Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science was given.

This award is given every two years and previous recipients are listed on this link.

I have served on this award selection committee and have even chaired it and it is a distinct honor to be recognized in this way. Professor Martin Beckmann, who received this award after Robert Herman (the award is named after him now) was on my doctoral dissertation at Brown University committee. Other recipients include Professor David E. Boyce (whom I had just seen a few days prior at the regional science conference in Miami) and Professors Michael Smith and Michael Florian (I have cited almost all of the recipients in my work).

Although I did not serve on this award selection committee this year (and the awardee's name is kept, more or less, in secret, until the official announcement is made) as soon as I saw Dr. Nathan Gartner from UMass Lowell enter the big room where our business meeting was taking place I knew.

I went up to him to tell him that I had mentioned his name to my students last week in the transportation & logistics class that I am teaching this term since we were covering the elastic demand transportation network equilibrium model and its reformulation using the excess overflow reformulation into a fixed demand model pioneered by him in an article in Transportation Science. He then kindly introduced me to his wife (so I immediately knew that he would be getting the award).

This recognition is also very exciting since Professor Gartner is a Professor at UMass Lowell in the Department of Civil Engineering and he has done so much work over the past 4 decades in transportation -- from traffic flow models to signal setting models and even work, as noted above, on transportation network equilibria.

Above are photos taken of Dr. Gartner this past Monday that I could not resist posting.

I will share this great news with my students tomorrow morning (unless some get a preview by reading this post).

Media Tips from the Newsmakers Panel

2011-11-16T07:10:00.020-05:00

First, I would like to thank Barry List, the Communications Director of INFORMS, for organizing the Newsmakers Panel that took place at the 2011 INFORMS Charlotte conference. Barry was a terrific moderator and the panelists and the audience benefited a lot from the presentations and discussions. The session was videotaped.

The panelists were: Jack Levis of UPS, Margaret Brandeau of Stanford, Sheldon Jacobson of the University of Illinois, and yours truly. The panelists have had experience with major news outlets, including the Associate Press, radio shows, TV programs, and documentaries.

Some tips on how to handle the media (and also on how to get the good news out about your research / work):

1. Nurture relationships with your organization's Office of Public Information as well as with those in the media. If you have a publication that will be appearing in a good journal, let the relevant contacts know and work with them.

2. Be prepared: this is very important. When you get contacted by the media you need to be available, so when the news about your work gets out be ready to handle interview requests. There is a short time window. Your organization's Public Information Office may be able to offer valuable assistance and even training as to how to handle interview requests.

3. Realize that the news is about the science behind your research / discoveries. Nevertheless, keep it simple (as far as possible) and be clear.

4. In speaking to the media make sure that you have items (almost irrespective of the questions asked) that you want emphasized. Remember that catchy phrases and counterintuitive results tend to get "picked up."

5. Working with the media is a service and helps to promote not only your work and your organization but perhaps, most importantly, our profession of operations research and analytics.

And, of course, keep up the great work -- sooner or later great work gets recognized!

Leaders Offer Advice on How to be Successful

2011-11-15T09:23:00.012-05:00

I very much enjoyed the panel yesterday morning at the 2011 INFORMS Charlotte Conference on "Leaders Offer Professional Advice to Both Women and Men."

The panel was sponsored by WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences).

Joining me on the panel: Dr. Eric Wolman, Dr. Radhika Kulkarni, Dr. Les Servi, and Dr. Mark Daskin.

Below I highlight some of the advice offered that resonated:

1. Find your passion and stick with it -- have fun and make your life worth living.

2. Your character, credibility, and integrity matter -- be fair and others will respect and trust you. Also, realize the importance of your organization's culture and that culture is local.

3. Hire the best people that you can for your team and believe in your plan. Understand the big picture.

4. Celebrate accomplishments and make sure that you give "pats on the back" for great performance.

5. Communications are key -- how can your ideas be used by the organization? Innovation happens when you put great ideas into action. Also, remember the human element.

6. You, as an individual, should define success for yourself so know yourself.

7. Find a great mentor and also mentor others.

8. Take advantage of opportunities and engage in networking. Be open to opportunities and new responsibilities.

9. Realize that you are a member of different communities and gain support from them and solace, if need be.

10. Look at the trajectory that you are on and imagine yourself 5 years from now.

Many thanks to WORMS for sponsoring this great session which also had a terrific discussion!

Thanks to all the panelists -- We all learned alot from them and from one another.

What a Great Regional Science Conference in Miami

2011-11-13T09:16:00.006-05:00

The regional science conference in Miami was a great success.

I especially enjoyed the sessions organized in honor of Professor Walter Isard, the founder of regional science, who passed away several months ago.

The venue at the Hyatt Regency hotel was perfect as well as the style of the conference, which included a discussant for each paper presentation.

I enjoyed speaking about our work on medical nuclear supply chains as well as on the dynamics of predator-prey ecological networks as nature's supply chains (and their relationship to classical spatial price equilibrium problems as well as to multitiered supply chain network equilibrium problems).

It was wonderful to see so many of my wonderful regional science colleagues from around the world at this conference -- there were many hugs and catching-up conversations.

Many thanks to the organizers for such an intellectual feast.

As for Miami, the warmth of the climate as well as the people, plus the gorgeous sights (the hotel is in downtown Miami but there are parks along the water a monorail and amazing skyscrapers) will be hard to leave.

Why do I live in Massachusetts -- perhaps I forgot to include weather as an amenity in my utility function?

My previous trip to Miami was a decade ago -- my first flight and conference after 9/11 and it was to the INFORMS conference.

I am now heading to INFORMS Charlotte, which should be fabulous, as well.

I will be posting many photos after I return to Amherst.

Designing Sustainable Blood Supply Chains

2011-11-09T05:57:00.008-05:00

My doctoral student, Amir Masoumi, will be presenting our joint research on the design of sustainable blood supply chains at the upcoming INFORMS Annual Meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina. The presentation, which can be accessed here, is based on the paper of the same title, which is scheduled for publication, we recently heard, in early 2012, in the book, Sustainable Supply Chains: Models, Methods and Public Policy Implications, T. Boone, V. Jayaraman, and R. Ganeshan, Editors, Springer, London, England.

In addition, as I wrote in a recent blogpost, we will also be presenting our research on sustainable fashion supply chains at this conference.

Mary Leszczynsli of INFORMS has now posted the October Blog Challenge Results: O.R. and the Environment and the posts by bloggers in our community is not only informative but illuminating and entertaining, as well. You can access her summary and all the links here.

I contributed two posts to this challenge and wrote about meeting the Nobel laureate Dr. Elinor Ostrom (the only female to have been awarded the Nobel prize in Economic Sciences to-date) and on our research on sustainable supply chains. Enjoy the great writing of my fellow O.R. bloggers from Frommer to Marco-Serrano, McLay, Poppelaars, Serra, Smith, Subramanian, Trick, and Rubin! And let's not forget the Capgemini team!

The quality and sustainability of the environment affects us all.

Sustainable Fashion Supply Chains Using Game Theory

2011-11-08T06:47:00.011-05:00

We have conducted a lot of research on sustainable supply chains with applications ranging from products in health care to electric power generation and distribution networks.

An industry, which just recently has started to receive attention because of its impact on the environment, is the fashion and apparel industry.

However, not much research has been conducted as to capturing the scope of the issues and the realities of this industry which includes different brands as well as competition, and even the speed of this industry, as in fast fashion.

A doctoral student of mine, Min Yu, has been working with me in this area for about two years now as part of our research on time-sensitive supply chains, in particular, and sustainability overall.

We will be presenting our latest study, "Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain Management Under Oligopolistic Competition and Brand Differentiation," at the INFORMS Annual Conference next week in Charlotte, North Carolina. This paper is in press in the International Journal of Production Economics, Special Issue on Green Manufacturing and Distribution in the Fashion and Apparel Industries.

In the paper, we developed a new model of oligopolistic competition for fashion supply chains in the case of differentiated products with the inclusion of environmental concerns. The model assumes that each fashion firm's product is distinct by brand and the firms compete until an equilibrium is achieved. Each fashion firm seeks to maximize its profits as well as to minimize its emissions throughout its supply chain with the latter criterion being weighted in an individual manner by each firm, since some firms may care more or less about their impact on the environment.

The competitive supply chain model is network-based and we use both game theory and variational inequality theory for the formulation of the governing Nash equilibrium as well as for the solution of the case study examples. The numerical examples illustrate both the generality of the modeling framework as well as how the model and computational scheme can be used in practice to explore the effects of changes in the demand functions; in the total cost and total emission functions, as well as in the weights.

Our full presentation can be downloaded, in pdf format here.

Data and Analytics Are the New Currency

2011-11-07T20:06:00.007-05:00

The science of analytics, coupled with massive amounts of data, is transforming the world that we live in.

Cyber-physical systems, which we have been calling Supernetworks for a decade now, are impacting transportation, the electric grid, health care, complex supply chains, and provide promise for smart cities.

The EE Times has a marvelous article which notes that: According to the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, such “cyber-physical systems” will eventually constitute 50 percent of all electronics worldwide, making them a U.S. strategic asset.

In response, the National Institute of Standards and Technology recently announced a standardization effort to define interfaces for interoperability, as well as metrics and methods for measuring and comparing performance among smart systems. Such efforts set the stage for U.S. entrepreneurs to build successful smart systems from homegrown designs, but to realize those designs with electronics that are manufactured at low cost overseas.

Mr. Mario Morales of International Data Corp. (IDC) has a great quote in the article: "Data is the new currency" and he proceeds to say that "Enterprises have yet to figure out how to monetize all this data, but there is a tremendous opportunity here."

I would say that Data and Analytics Are the New Currency, since without analytics not much sense can be made of the massive data streams now available.

Our latest National Science Foundation project, "Network Innovation Through Choice," will, we expect, drive innovation in network choices and options through novel payment systems that monetarize performance based on reputation and success.

Conference Chaining -- From Regional Science to INFORMS

2011-11-07T17:21:00.004-05:00

In transportation we talk about "trip chaining," where a driver combines several errands in a car trip.

This week I will be "conference chaining," since I have back to back conferences but at least they are both on the East Coast.

I will be flying on Wednesday to Miami, Florida where I will be speaking at the 58th Annual North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International.

Then, next Sunday, I will be flying from Miami to Charlotte, NC to take part in the Annual INFORMS Conference.

At the regional science conference, I will be speaking on "Medical Nuclear Supply Chain Design: A Tractable Network Model and Computational Approach," as well as on "Dynamics and Equilibria of Ecological Predator-Prey Networks as Nature's Supply Chains." The latter paper I will be delivering in a special session honoring the memory of Professor Walter Isard, the founder of regional science. It has now been published in Transportation Research E.

This year I chaired the Regional Science Association International Fellow Selection Committee and am looking forward to seeing this honor bestowed on Professor Ake Andersson, who will be traveling from Sweden to receive the fellow plaque.

The Vulnerability and Complexity of Our Global Supply Chains -- What the Disasters are Revealing

2011-11-06T19:27:00.014-05:00

Last week, while I was in Canada to give a seminar on perishable supply chains in health care at McGill University, I picked up a copy of The Globe and Mail, which is the national Canadian newspaper.

I love Canada, and not only because I was born there, but also because of its people, its landscape, history, excellent schools, and health care. Since April I have been invited to give three talks there (two at McGill University and one at the University of Waterloo) and whenever I am back I always feel very welcome and at peace there.

I was very impressed by the coverage of the disruptions to global supply chains due to the horrific floods in Thailand by The Globe and Mail, a week ahead of coverage in The New York Times, I might add.

The article, Why the mad migration of parts to your iPhone matters, was especially interesting and highlighted that it may take a crisis (and we certainly have had our share of disasters this past year) for the complexity of global supply chains to be noted.

The Thai floods are now having major disruptive effects. According to the article, Honda Motor stopped production in Malaysia due to a lack of parts from Thailand. The computer industry is now bracing for a shortage of hard-disk drives after Thai factories were flooded.

Indeed, it is expected that the Thai floods may disrupt global electronic supply chains for several quarters.

The number of deaths from the floods in Thailand has now surpassed 500 so the toll on the loss of lives and human suffering is also huge.

I managed to reach one of our former students from Thailand, who, just this past August, successfully defended his PhD in Management Science at the Isenberg School of Management and was awarded the doctorate officially in September from UMass Amherst.

Part of his response, sent last week:

Dear Prof. Nagurney,

Thank you very much for your concerns.

The flood situation in Thailand is indeed very bad. Some say it is the worst ever in the past 50 years of Thai history.

As I am sure you have seen the news. Lots of agricultural areas have been affected and will be under water for at least 3 weeks, same as half of industrial area of Thailand. In brief, it affects more than 3 million people, they either have to evacuate or else live in an upstair-level of their homes, surrounded by water and disconnected from the outside world. There are now lots of logistic and supply-chain problems, e.g. to get food and other consumer products to people who insist to live there underwater in their homes, or to move people from affected villages to evacuation zones. Worse than that, in my opinion, the government has no experience in dealing with this kind of situation ... Now the water is at the doors of BKK (Bangkok), some have entered! So we now totally freak out and are afraid that BKK will be under water soon. The government even declared a special public holiday last week to clear people out of BKK. Most schools delayed the start of the new semester to 11/15 or even later than that (normally schools start on 11/01). Now BKK is totally paralyzed, people do nothing except wait for the water to come.

In my case, I've already fled BKK to my family hometown (which is still safe from the water). So my family and I are now safe and sound. However, my home in the suburb of BKK is now under water (not totally submerged, but half of it). Fortunately we have moved important stuff out before the water reached.

I think it will take a month or more before everything turns better, but truly hope it is sooner than that. Again, thanks for your kind concerns. I will update you as soon as there is any major news about this catastrophe.

Thanks to UMass Amherst and the Isenberg School and to My Students

2011-11-06T07:56:00.017-05:00

It is the 8th day since the unseasonable October snowstorm hit the Northeast of the US and knocked out electric power to over 3 million people.

The electricity has been essentially restored to the Amherst area but there are still thousands of homes in Massachusetts and Connecticut without power including the home of one of my former students, who received 5 degrees from UMass Amherst and is now a professor at the University of Connecticut, which, miraculously, did not have to close during the power blackout. He and his wife and two little children are, since Friday, staying in Springfield, Massachusetts, which was also battered.

I am writing this post to thank UMass Amherst and the Isenberg School.

During the disaster, officially declared, that befell us last week, UMass Amherst, probably because of its electric power co-generation capabilities, and underground utilities on campus, managed to essentially maintain electric power, which meant that there was heat, water, light, and Internet service in the dorms, offices, cafeterias, and many research labs and facilities.

Last Sunday morning, 1 week ago, my husband and I woke up to a freezing house, since we had lost power at around 9:45PM the previous night. Our daughter, luckily, had spent the night at Deerfield Academy, her school, since there had been a special Halloween party that evening.

After donning clothes, and without caffeine in us, we proceeded to drive around to see what our areas had experienced and you can see photos here and read more here.

Above are photos taken last Sunday and Monday of the Isenberg School and the UMass Amherst Berkshire Dining Common, where we ate several dinners and were joined by some of my students.

Special thanks to Ken Toong, the Director of Dining Services at UMass Amherst, for feeding not only thousands of students during this time but also many faculty, staff members, and their children. My husband had a conversation with him and he told him that records were being broken as to the numbers that UMass had fed during this disaster.

Some students had joined us for the meals, which even included a special Halloween meal. Thank goodness that the refrigerators and cooking facilities at UMass never lost power and the meals provided some distractions and nourishment during this difficult week.

Also, thanks for keeping the cafeterias and restaurants open in the Campus Center where we also had delicious lunches and warmth.

Not all communications worked during this terrible week and transportation was also disrupted in a major way as well as our daily lives and rhythms but having a community such as UMass and the Isenberg School demonstrated that we are in this together.

Yesterday was Homecoming at UMass and seeing so many alums and benefactors back reinforced how important it is that we all work together and support one another. Even our new UMass System President, Dr. Caret, came. Although we lost the football game, we won the hockey game and beat the number 1 seed, Boston College.

More importantly, we shared our experiences and were even treated to some much needed entertainment by student musical groups and the Minuteman Marching band.

One of my former MBA students came running up to me during a Homecoming breakfast and melted my heart when he told me what an important role my Management Science course had played in his career success and how now his daughter is a freshman at the Isenberg School.

This disaster has clearly showed us all the importance of community and supporting one another.

The Irony of Speaking on Perishable Supply Chains on Friday Only to Throw Out All the Food in the Fridge on Wednesday

2011-11-05T15:24:00.009-04:00

What a week it has been!

On Friday, October 28, 2011, I had the pleasure of being hosted by the Management Science group at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, where I spoke on Perishable Product Supply Chains with a focus on healthcare.

In my talk, I presented our recent research on such perishable products in healthcare as vaccines and medicines, as well as medical radioisotopes used in cancer diagnostics and cardiac imaging, and even blood.

The mathematical formulations that I discussed, which ranged from competitive oligopoly models with brand differentiation for vaccines and medicines to system-optimization network models for blood supply chains, with minor modifications and adaptations, can also be used for such perishable products as food.

My presentation, in pdf format, can be downloaded here.

Today is the seventh full day after the October snowstorm hit our area on October 29, 2011 and, unbelievably, still thousands in Massachusetts are without electricity.

Our neighborhood's electricity got restored after 73 hours without power.

However, all of the food in our fridge had spoiled and had to be discarded.

One of my Finance colleagues had the foresight to purchase insurance for this kind of disaster and he will recover hundreds of dollars to compensate him for the perished/spoiled food in his fridge.

Ensuring Electric Power While Preserving Trees and Beauty -- What Deerfield Did

2011-11-05T06:35:00.020-04:00

The Historic Deerfield magazine Autumn 2011 cover of a brilliant issue

A photo of a gavel made from a utility pole from Historic Deerfield Autumn 2011 magazine

A photo of the letter from Lady Bird Johnson, wife of President Lyndon Johnson

Thousands in Massachusetts as well as in Connecticut are still without electric power for the seventh day, since the snowstorm hit our area on October 29, 2011, severely disrupting our daily lives, commerce, transportation, and education.

During this horrific week, there have been pockets of salvation, where families could seek warmth, food, and shelter because the electric power still flowed (but only if they knew of where to go).

I have been writing about what has transpired during this past week on this blog and there are new cases of people dying in their homes because of either carbon monoxide poisoning since they were doing what they could to try to stay warm or from hypothermia (freezing to death).

This snowstorm / electric power failure disaster (yes, the government has now declared it officially) happened in October and is now in the second week. It is still autumn and this set of cascading network failures does not portend well for the upcoming winter season (clearly the fact that many of our trees still had leaves on and that the snow was very wet and heavy played a huge role in the downing of the trees and the neighboring electric power lines).

During this period, our mail still got delivered and our local newspaper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, published a special disaster issue last Monday by using the editorial offices of The Greenfield Recorder, which had power, and having the copy emailed (luckily, the Internet worked there), to a newspaper in Concord, NH, which then printed the issue. Obviously, transporting the issues was not trivial, given the downed trees and power lines.

Our mailman also delivered a copy of Historic Deerfield, Autumn 2011 to us. This is a magazine produced by Historic Deerfield.

My husband read the issue first and told me that I should read it, too, and I was transfixed.

This issue was prepared and published before our snowstorm and electric power disaster and the last article, To Form a More Perfect Deerfield, by David Bosse, has lessons for our country.

The article speaks about how Henry and Helen Flynt became enamored with the beauty of Deerfield, in western Massachusetts, as well as its unique place in US history, when they enrolled their son at Deerfield Academy in 1936.

And, as early as the 1950s, Mr. Flynt started to explore the possibility of burying the utility lines in Old Deerfield in order to remove the utility poles that were marring the beauty of the landscape. He not only cared about the beauty of the area but he also wanted to preserve the stately elm trees. In letters to stakeholders he listed the advantages of removing the utility poles, noting the harm to the trees from the severe pruning done by the electric company.

The stakeholders were convinced -- even WMECO (the Western Mass Electric Company which has been in the news alot due to the pace of restoration in our area) agreed to the plan back in 1966!

According to the article, "By the following spring, power, telephone, and fire alarm service had been buried in a 10,500 foot trench. The last utility pole came down during a ceremony on May 24, 1967."

Incredibly, the Flynts (and one of their great-graddaughters was a classmate of my daughter's up the street at The Bement School), received help for their truly original project from Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Above is the letter that she wrote to Mrs. Flynt, which was republished in the autumn issue of the Historic Deerfield magazine.

And the Flynts had made gavels as souvenirs out of the utility poles that were removed.

45 years after, Old Deerfield survived the snowstorm and both historic Deerfield and Deerfield Academy did not lose electric power (and, somehow they also survived the one in 500 years flood due to Hurricane Irene).

My daughter, since we had no electricity and the night temps dipped to the 20s, lived at Deerfield Academy, during this period, and slept on the floors of dorm rooms that her friends kindly shared.

Let's improve our critical infrastructure by burying the utility lines, while preserving trees, beauty, as well as our air, at the same time.

Thanks to the Flynts for their brilliance and to Historic Deerfield for the wisdom and courage of historic preservation as well as critical infrastructure protection!

6 Days After the Snowstorm and Some Still Without Electricity

2011-11-04T12:47:00.013-04:00

The October 29, 2011 snowstorm surprised the Northeast last Saturday and thousands in Massachusetts are still without electricity.

This is day 6 after the snowstorm (see the photos taken last Sunday of our street in Amherst). I will spare you the photos of the downed trees and broken branches that are now revealing themselves as the snow is melting.

I have many colleagues and neighbors with young children and babies, as well as those who are senior citizens, who have had to endure what one does not expect to happen in the United States of America!

The electric power in our immediate neighborhood was restored three days ago (we were awaken by some lights as we had hunkered down under piles of blankets and woolly hats and were overjoyed to get heat back and lights and the Internet in our home).

My former doctoral student, who lives with his family and young children in West Hartford, Connecticut, still does not have power and my husband's university in Connecticut has held no classes for undergraduates all this week.

Our public schools in Amherst have been closed this entire week; the same holds for many of the neighboring school districts in Massachusetts and in Connecticut.

Such a serious, long-term disruption is a huge wake-up call to the leaders of our so-called civilized society and a Call to Action.

In Defense of My Chinese Students

2011-11-03T13:06:00.016-04:00

You may have read The New York Times article, which was written in collaboration with The Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled, The China Conundrum, which notes that, because of the reputation of he US higher education system, among other reasons, the number of Chinese undergraduates in the United States has tripled in just three years, to 40,000, making them the largest group of foreign students at American colleges.

The article, however, is very negative and highlights the use of intermediaries or education "agents" who are helping certain families in China, who have the financial funds, to navigate the US college admissions systems, and to have the writing of the college application essays "outsourced."

The article also singles out the University of Delaware and has quotes from its President, Dr. Patrick Harker, who many of us in the operations research and management science community know quite well. Not only was he a Dean of the Wharton School at UPenn but he was also the editor of one of our flagship journals, Operations Research.

And, as I sometimes tell my graduate students, he even did research and published on traffic network equilibrium and variational inequalities. You can see some of our common references and citations to each other's work in our earlier publications.

Harker, as President of the University of Delaware, started the Path to Prominence there in which a more international student body is being emphasized, including having more students from China.

The challenges now being faced are vividly noted in the article, as the population of Chinese students has grown from a handful to hundreds at Delaware.

I am writing in defense of the Chinese students that I know and have worked with personally over many years. (As an aside, one of our neighbors graduated from the University of Delaware last year and received a fabulous education there. In addition, we know of several from our area who applied but then decided to come to neighboring colleges instead). Furthermore, a person I truly admire who is head of the lower school at The Bement School, my daughter's elementary school alma mater), Ms. Carole Pennock, is an alumna of Delaware.

I am writing about my doctoral students.

Our program at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst is highly selective and each and every doctoral student that we admit in Management Science is interviewed, typically, by several faculty members. Yes, that consists of multiple long telephone conversations (sometimes unannounced) to China and other countries and, if feasible, face to face meetings or personal recommendations from colleagues in the US who might have met with the prospective students. Also, we follow up with the writers of the letters of recommendation.

My doctoral students from China have done path-breaking research and now many are professors themselves at US universities. They have garnered national and international research awards and are also outstanding teachers.

Three of the books that I have co-authored, have been co-authored with my former Chinese doctoral students: Supernetworks: Decision-Making for the Information Age, with Dr. June Dong, Projected Dynamical Systems and Variational Inequalities with Applications, with Dr. Ding Zhang, and Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, with Dr. Qiang "Patrick" Qiang.

Other doctoral students that I have had from China, including Dr. Zugang "Leo" Liu and Dr. Jie Pan, with whom I wrote articles for such top journals as Operations Research and Naval Research Logistics, did truly brilliant research. Dr. Jie Pan had listened to 4 hours of English radio in China daily before matriculating at UMass Amherst and his English was so good that, even as a graduate student, he was asked to teach at Amherst College.

Presently, I am supervising several doctoral students from China and we all work closely with one another at the Supernetwork Center.

I cannot ask for a more conscientious, well-spoken, hard-working, and reliable set of students.

I forwarded The China Conundrum article to my present students from China, knowing that it would be painful for them -- as it was for me -- to read.

I repost below parts of a message that I received, in response.

Professor Nagurney:

I had heard of this even when I was in China. Some parents are so happy to pay huge amounts of money for the consulting.

However, students who really have an idea about what they are going to do in the future, and why they are coming to the US, will not let the agencies do their admissions and decide on their future. I know some students whose parents are very wealthy and, surprisingly, they want to come to the US for fun, luxury, traveling, and a "beautiful" degree. They have asked the agencies for help. Study and research are obviously not their main concerns here..

They are taking this precious study opportunity for granted.

People make their own choices.

Sometimes we need money to buy education, but we cannot use money to insult education.

My daughter is now a senior in High School and is applying this year to colleges.

I hope that when she is in college she has a chance to learn from faculty as outstanding as the above professors (as well as my doctoral students) who were born in China!

Of course, as we all know, college admissions are a selective process.

Looking Forward to All the WORMS Activities at INFORMS Charlotte!

2011-11-02T13:55:00.005-04:00

The President of WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) had emailed me whether or not I had received the latest announcement about the newsletter and upcoming activities at the INFORMS Charlotte meeting and I had responded that I had not but since I had spoken at McGill last Friday only to return to what is being called the biggest snowstorm on record for October with power outages that left over 3 million people in the dark, I figured that perhaps it was an Internet or related problem. (By the way, some of our neighbors as well as colleagues in Amherst and surrounding communities still do not have electric power and have been without electricity since last Saturday night and this is Wednesday).

Further inquiries revealed that others also had not received the message so it was forwarded today and is reposted below.

WORMS activities are some of my favorites at the annual INFORMS meetings from the WORMS lunch to the panels. These forums serve as great get-together and networking events as well.

Dear WORMS members,

The latest WORMS newsletter is available here.

We're looking forward to seeing many of you at the INFORMS annual meeting in Charlotte in two weeks. WORMS has several great events happening, including our biggest event - the Tuesday luncheon - two panels of thoughtful and high-profile panelists and the first-ever "Best Of" session featuring influential publications by women in OR/MS. In chronological order:

Best of WORMS – Sunday November 13, 1:30 PM – 3 PM

Amy Ward, Dorothée Honhon and Waverly Ding present their highly influential papers published in INFORMS journals in 2010. References including coauthors available by link.

Panel Discussion: Can we do anything about women dropping out? – Sunday November 13, 4:30 PM – 6:00PM

Panelists: Mor Armony, Cynthia Barnhart, Cheryl Gaimon, Ann Marucheck, and Linda Whitaker

In 1979 women made up less than 1% of full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty in engineering. More than thirty years later, how much has this percentage increased?

Panel Discussion: Leaders offer professional advice to women and men – Monday November 14, 8:00 AM – 9:30 AM

Panelists: Mark Daskin, Radhika Kulkarni, Anna Nagurney, Les Servi, and Eric Wolman

Business Meeting – Monday November 14, 6:15 PM – 7:15 PM

Meeting in the Convention Center, Room 209A, we will vote on amendments to the by-laws. Refreshments will be served to sustain a quorum. Please bring your energy and ideas for WORMS in 2012.

Luncheon – Tuesday November 15, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM

Held in the Westin, Grand C, the luncheon will include reports on WORMS activities in 2011 and plans for 2012, as well as the presentation of the 2011 WORMS Award for the Advancement of Women in OR/MS. The biggest WORMS event of the year, the luncheon is almost sold out, so buy your tickets if you haven't already ($15, $8 for students).

Please remember to renew your WORMS membership for 2011 and for 2012. Many of us (including me) tend to renew just in time for the annual meeting – over 3/4 of the way through the year. Starting in 2012, non-members will be removed from the WORMS mailing list early in the year, so in order to be able to post to the list and continue receiving e-mails from WORMS, you'll need to be a current member. There are (at least) three ways to renew:

Renew online at http://www.informs.org/Membership/Renew-Your-Membership and, check “Forum for Women in OR/MS (WORMS)” under Fora.
Renew by phone by calling INFORMS member services (800-446-3676). Old-fashioned, but fast and easy, you can state specifically what you want to pay for, and have your questions answered on the spot.
Renew by mail using the form you will receive by mail or by downloading the form and following the instructions at http://www.informs.org/Community/WORMS/Membership. Even more old-fashioned, but it works!

Best wishes,

Eva

Eva Regnier, Ph.D.

President, WORMS

Associate Professor • Naval Postgraduate School

1 University Circle • Monterey, CA 93943-5219

phone: 1 (831) 656-2912 • fax: 1 (831) 656-2595

Electric Power Restored After 73 Hours -- Was It Because of My Last Blogpost?

2011-11-02T07:07:00.007-04:00

We know that social media can have positive and transformative effects.

Since the electric power blackout of last Saturday night due to the freaky Nor'eater snowstorm, I have been writing about this disaster, when ensconced in my Isenberg School of Management office, where my husband and I have sought shelter. I have been talking with numerous students and faculty colleagues as well as staff about their suffering due to the electric power blackouts.

I have written, on this blog, about the experiences that many have had to endure, why we must be redesigning our electric grid for resiliency and have highlighted what appears to be mismanagement in the restoration of electric power to our area and beyond.

Last night, before leaving the warmth of my office and entering our freezing home to try to endure a fourth night in the cold, I wrote The Night The Power Died -- 70 Hours Without Hear and Counting and challenged our utility, WMECO, while thanking all the crews and workers who have been laboring to restore electricity.

When driving home in darkness in Amherst on East Pleasant Street northward, my husband and I were greeted by two big trucks with colorful lights, which, to us, looked like Christmas trees, in signaling hope. My husband slowed down and observed what the WMECO workers were doing to the power lines and, given where we had seen some damage previously, figured (he is a professor of electrical and computer engineering so he knows his hardware) that this just might be the fix that was needed, at least to our immediate area.

90 minutes afterwards, we were woken up to light in a closet and the alarm clock blinking as we crawled from underneath 3 comforters that were piled on top of us on our bed, with woolly hats on our heads. We had electric power in our home and -- what joy!

I had written, a day earlier, A Call to Action -- Let's Design Resilient Electric Power Grids and get Out of the Dark Ages. And it does feel good that this blog is read and read internationally. The New York Times, now has an article, When Each Bad Storm Means More Dark Days.

Thanks to all who have sent me messages of concern, even from as far as Italy!

I do my best in conducting research and writing on networks, their fragility, and how to design them for greater robustness and resiliency with the best team of minds out there, in my supernetworks research group.

It is high time that the government, through top private-public partnerships, now does its share.

Or else, literally, the citizens will flee.

The Night the Power Died -- 70 hours without Heat and Counting

2011-11-01T20:00:00.012-04:00

Even my students from China have said that they have never experienced a power outage for as many hours as we are now enduring in parts of Massachusetts (and beyond).

With the snowstorm hitting our area, on Saturday, October 29, and with electric power out around 9:30PM in our Amherst neighborhood that night, we are still without power.

It has been 70 hours.

Our electric power utility, WMECO, is reporting some of the status as to its restoration efforts on its Facebook page, and it looks as though Amherst, which presently has about 40% of households still without power, having to wait as long as until Thursday night to get it back up.

Strangely, WMECO has abandoned the updates on its power outage map, claiming, that the map was incorrect, but, sometimes it still appears. We have taken "shelter" during the day at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst where I teach and have been able to access the Internet from there and to get defrosted.

Today President Obama declared Massachusetts a disaster area:

Here is the complete text from the White House:

The President today declared an emergency exists in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and ordered federal aid to supplement commonwealth and local response efforts due to the emergency conditions resulting from a severe storm during the period of October 29-30, 2011.
The President's action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives and to protect property and public health and safety, and to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in the counties of Berkshire, Essex, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, Middlesex, Norfolk, and Worcester.
Specifically, FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency. Emergency protective measures, limited to direct federal assistance, will be provided at 75 percent federal funding.
W. Craig Fugate, Administrator, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Department of Homeland Security, named Mark H. Landry as the Federal Coordinating Officer for federal recovery operations in the affected area.

Tonight is the fourth night that we will be sleeping in our house without any power and the temps have been in the 20s the past several nights.

I give credit to my great students, both undergraduate and graduate, who have managed to come to class despite no heat in many of their apartments, no Internet, and even, since there is no power, no alarm clocks to wake them up.

As I said in today's class, during which we discussed what is happening, it takes extreme measures for these extreme circumstances and the stories that they shared are shocking.

The restoration of the electric power to parts of our town appears to be random and the length of time for the restoration raises serious management questions.

On the other hand, I would like to salute all the workers who have traveled across states and counties to help us during this disaster and to wish them success.

Today, in South Deerfield, where we were passing through in order to be able to take hot showers at Deerfield Academy, where my daughter has literally been boarding since the snowstorm and power outage disaster (and I can't thank Deerfield sufficiently for serving as such a haven during this time), we saw MBTA workers and trucks from eastern Massachusetts assisting the locals in cleanup.

We have crews in Amherst from Michigan, Missouri, and Kansas.