Celebrating Student Achievements - A First Prize Award

The best part about being a faculty member is working with students.

And with the beautiful month of September and the beginning of the new academic year, there is a renewed energy on campus.

Faculty who work closely with students are also happiest when their students achieve and such achievements should be celebrated.

This past week has been filled with wonderful news concerning students.

For example, yesterday evening, my doctoral student in Management Science, Shivani Shukla, who had traveled by public transportation - quite the challenge in itself  - to our sister campus, UMass Lowell, to take part in the Air Force Association (AFA) Cyber Workshop  shared with me some wonderful news. The poster that she had presented, "Game Theoretic Model for Cybersecurity Investments with Nonlinear Budget Constraints," was awarded the first prize in the poster category!

Part of Shivani's poster presentation was based on the paper: A Supply Chain Game Theory Framework for Cybersecurity Investments Under Network Vulnerability, Anna Nagurney, Ladimer S. Nagurney, and Shivani Shukla, which was just published last week in Computation, Cryptography, and Network Security, N.J. Daras and M.T. Rassias, Editors, Springer International Publishing Switzerland (2015) pp 381-398. A nice writeup is here.

Below is a photo of Shivani with Bruce Baikis from MITRE and Joe Carriere from L3 Communications, who gave her the award. MITRE is also the home base of one of my absolutely favorite INFORMS colleagues, Dr. Les Servi (who is also a fellow Brown U. alum).

The prize consisted of a check plus an Air Force medal, which is considered a badge of honor.

The first prize in the paper category went to Patrick Dynoff, who is a high school student, and has been working with faculty at the Naval Postgraduate School. So impressive!


Congrats to all the entrants in the AFA Challenge!

Clearly, the way forward with cybersecurity is through research and education, which must include great students!  At the Isenberg School of Management and at UMass Amherst our students are fabulous and a delight to work with.

Speaking in Hawaii on Network Design

I am getting ready for the Workshop on Social Theory and Social Computing: Steps to Integration, which takes place next weekend in Honolulu, Hawaii. This workshop is sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and is the brainchild of Dr. Sun-Ki Chai of the University of Hawaii.

According to the workshop website:

The rise of the internet, both as a platform for social action and a rich source of social data, has turned computer science's focus increasingly to measuring, analyzing, and predicting social phenomena. However, the level of engagement between this work and the body of existing social science work leaves much to desired. While certain social science methodologies and formalisms have been adopted widely, social networks being by far the most notable, more disconnect is more generally noticeable than dialog and integration. By bringing together a group of prominent social scientists (themselves from different disciplines), computer scientists, and engineers who are studying similar kinds of social phenomena but generally do not move in the same academic circles, we hope to kick-start this interchange of ideas and to promote further interdisciplinary collaboration.

I am so honored to be an invited speaker at this workshop and am so looking forward to the presentations and intellectual exchanges.

My presentation is on: "Network Design -- From the Physical World to Virtual Worlds."

Abstract: In this talk, I will present recent research on the design of networks from different perspectives (centralized/cooperative vs. decentralized/competitive). The approach is sufficiently general to capture the network designer's multicriteria-decision-making behavior. I will illustrate how this theoretical and computational framework can be applied to physical networks, ranging from transportation to telecommunication ones, as well as to logistical ones (including supply chains). I will also discuss issues of redesign, as well as network integration, with applications as varied as corporate mergers and acquisitions and humanitarian logistics operations.

I will then overview how networks such as social and knowledge ones can also be subject to network design (and even be integrated with physical networks) and discuss the unique challenges of network design in virtual worlds.

More information about the workshop can be found here.

I have only been in Hawaii while being processed at the airport en route to/from Australia. Although I will be spending most of the time indoors at the workshop I hope to somehow absorb this state's beauty.