Eager to Start Work on our NSF EAGER Collaborative Research Project

The good news came just as our 4 year National Science Foundation (NSF) project was coming to a close last month. That project: NeTS: Large: Collaborative Research: Network Innovation through Choice, was a great collaboration with the PI, my colleague, Professor Tilman Wolf of the College of Engineering, who is also an Associate Dean, and fellow Co-PIs: Professors Ken Calvert and Jim Griffioen of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Kentucky, and Professors Rudra Dutta and George Rouskas of the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, and Dr. Ilya Baldine of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) in Chapel Hill, NC.

This project involved the development of ChoiceNet: An Economy Plane for the Internet and, together and individually as well as with our students, we wrote a series of papers, many of which are on the ChoiceNet site. 

The ChoiceNet project was one of five Future Internet Architecture (FIA) projects selected by NSF.

This project helped to support, in part, 3 of my female doctoral students: Sara Saberi, Shivani Shukla, and Dong "Michelle" Li, who I am very happy received her PhD from UMass Amherst with a concentration in Management Science from the Isenberg School in 2015  and is now an Assistant Professor. She's already completed 2 weeks of teaching and is very happy to be an academic.

Our new NSF grant:  EAGER: Collaborative Research: Enabling Economic Policies in Software-Defined Internet Exchange Points has as the PI (Principal Investigator) Professor Tilman Wolf of our ChoiceNet project, and we will continue to work with our University of Kentucky colleagues, Professors Calvert and Griffioen. 


We have completed all of the followup internal processing paperwork on this grant (thanks to all the administrators for signing off so quickly) and the official start date of our project is October 1, 2015. The EAGER program at NSF is for Early Concepts Grants for Exploratory Research  According to the NSF website: the EAGER program  provides a funding mechanism that can be used to support exploratory work in its early stages on untested, but potentially transformative, research ideas or approaches. This work could be considered especially "high risk-high payoff" in the sense that it, involves radically different approaches, applies new expertise, or engages novel disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives.

As we did for our NSF FIA ChoiceNet project, we will be having regular (typically, weekly) teleconferences in which we brainstorm and discuss our ideas with focused, intense period of work for research, computing, and writing.

I very much appreciate the confidence that NSF and our program officer have in us and we will do our best to aim for transformative research results. Specifically, we expect that in terms of the broader impacts that the results from this research have the potential for a transformative impact on how inter-domain routing---which is at the core of economic interactions between network providers in the Internet---is implemented and used to provide novel services in networks. The interdisciplinary nature of this work---crossing the boundaries of engineering and economics---presents particular challenges in developing solutions that are technically sound and can be adopted in practice. The work involves an education component. Results from our work will be disseminated in the form of open-source toolsets and publications.

Nice way in which to begin the new academic year!

Net Insecurity, Cybersecurity, and New Future Internet Architectures

I was mesmerized by the terrific article in The Washington Post written by Craig Timberg entitled: Net Insecurity: A Flaw in the Design.

Not only did it feature David Clark of MIT, who spoke at the Cybersecurity Rosk Analysis for Enterprise Risk Security Workshop that my Isenberg School of Management and College of Engineering colleagues and I organized, with funding provided by the Advanced Cyber Security Center (ACSC)  and which took place at the Sloan School of MIT last September, but also Richard Stallman, who was a keynote speaker at the INFORMS Computing Society Conference this past January (and I had the pleasure of not only speaking with him but also sharing a taxi with him to the airport).

Below are photos of Clark and Stallman (with my great INFORMS colleagues Bob Fourer and Matt Saltzman)  that I took at these respective events.

In Timberg's Post article, Clark is quoted as saying in regards to the development of the Internet that: "It’s not that we didn’t think about security,” Clark recalled. “We knew that there were untrustworthy people out there, and we thought we could exclude them.”

The Post article ends with the following prescient sentences: In 2008, Clark crafted a new list of priorities for a National Science Foundation project on building a better Internet. The first item was, simply, “Security.” I  could not agree more.

Coincidentally, on June 1 and 2,  the Future Internet Architecture (FIA) Spring 2015 meeting is taking place at MIT at the Stata building. Although I am in Sweden and will be taking part in a Finance conference in Gothenburg, two of my doctoral students will be presenting there on our NSF ChoiceNet project work, since we are one of five teams selected (and sponsored) by the NSF as part of its very ambitious and visionary Future Internet Architecture program.  Our ChoiceNet project aims to construct an economy plane for the Internet, which will allow more choices and cybersecurity is, of course, a possible primary feature.

Specifically, on June 2, my doctoral student, Shivani Shukla, will be presenting the poster below, which is based on a paper of ours: "Game Theoretic Model for Cybersecurity with Nonlinear Budget Constraints."

My doctoral student, Sara Saberi, will be presenting a poster on our paper, "A Network Economic Game Theory Model of a Service-Oriented Internet with Price and Quality Competition in Both Content and Network Provision," that was published in the INFORMS journal Service Science. The paper was co-authored with the lead PI on our NSF project, Tilman Wolf of UMass Amherst.

My first paper on cybercrime, "A Multiproduct Network Economic Model of Cybercrime in Financial Services,"  was also published in Service Science.

Our paper, "A Game Theory Model of Cybersecurity Investments with Information Asymmetry," Anna Nagurney and Ladimer S. Nagurney,  is now in press in Netnomics.

Also, our paper,  "A Supply Chain Game Theory Framework for Cybersecurity Investments Under Network Vulnerability,"  Anna Nagurney, Ladimer S. Nagurney, and Shivani Shukla, is in press in the book: Computation, Cryptography, and Network Security (2015), N.J. Daras and M.T. Rassias, Editors, Springer, New York. Since The Washington Post article expands on the challenges faced by encryption, especially in the early years of the Internet, this book should be very timely!

Given the importance of cybersecurity, I am delighted that the UMass Amherst  Provost Katherine S. Newman is helping to spearhead a new Cybersecurity Institute at UMass Amherst and, with the interest in the topic at the Isenberg School of Management, the School of Computer Science, the College of Engineering, and also other schools at UMass Amherst, this is a very exciting initiative!

Isenberg School of Management Prominent in UMass Amherst Annual Report on Research

Today, I received the hardcopy of the UMass Amherst Annual Report on Research, which is an elegantly produced and very informative report, thanks to the Editor, Karen J. Hayes.

The report begins with a message from our Vice Chancellor for Research & Engagement (VCRE), Dr. Mike Malone, who also is the Ronnie & Eugene Isenberg Distinguished Professor of Engineering. Research awards topped $165.5 million this year, which is quite impressive.

In the report is a segment called Faculty Bookshelf, which I always enjoy browsing through, and this year, 5 out of the 20 books featured are by Isenberg School of Management faculty! We have certainly been busy. It was great to see our book, "Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products," written with two of my former doctoral students, Professor Min Yu of the University of Portland and Professor Amir H. Masoumi of Manhattan College, and with Professor Ladimer S, Nagurney (the other Professor Nagurney).

And, just below our book, is the new book by our great new Provost, Dr. Katherine S. Newman!

 

Somehow the report made it to my Isenberg School mailbox although it was addressed to my husband who seems to be in the UMass database as a faculty member in my department (not true)!

Also, in the Annual Report is a feature on Incubating Innovation, in which the Isenberg Scholar Award recipients for 2014 are noted with an interview with my doctoral student, Sara Saberi and photo included. The online version appeared earlier on the ResearchNext website - thanks!

Congrats to all thirteen 2014 Isenberg Scholar Award recipients, an award which comes with a $10,000 fellowship! In addition to Sara, two other recipients are from my department and are doctoral students in Management Science - quite exceptional - David Agogo and Yueran Zhuo. I also mention Michael Prokle, from Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, since although he is not one of our grad students, he is the President of our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, so he is definitely part of the Isenberg School "family."

Last, but not least, there is a stunning article (I am a bit biased), Internext, which highlights two of the five NSF Future Internet Architecture (FIA) projects that are based at UMass Amherst. The article discusses MobilityFirst and our ChoiceNet project (which Sara has been working on and also my doctoral student Dong "Michelle" Li). The article can be read online here. I love the quote from our VCRE in it:

“The fact that our campus was selected to take a leadership role on two of the five FIA projects speaks volumes about our faculty expertise,” says Mike Malone, Vice Chancellor for Research and Engagement. “We take an interdisciplinary approach to science, which is critical to an initiative of this size.”

Future Internet Infrastructure Research at UMass Amherst and at the Isenberg School

I was delighted to hear this morning from Karen Hayes, the Director of Research Communications and Outreach, that the Feature Article, UMass Amherst experts are driving the future of Internet infrastructure, is now online on the ResearchNext website.

The faculty from Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Isenberg School of Management that appear in the article were interviewed last summer.

It is truly amazing that at UMass Amherst there are two (out of the five) funded National Science Foundation (NSF) Future Internet Architecture (FIA) projects.

As the article notes, my doctoral students and I are working with Professor Tilman Wolf of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering on the FIA project that we are calling ChoiceNet. Our collaborators include colleagues at the University of Kentucky (Professors Ken Calvert and Jim Griffioen), NCState (Professors Rudra Duuta and George Rouskas), and RENCI an UNC (Dr. Ilya Baldine). My doctoral students who have been funded on this NSF grant are: Sara Saberi, who is an Isenberg Scholar Award recipient, and Dong "Michelle" Li, who received the Outstanding Doctoral Student Researcher Award from the Isenberg School in 2014.  Both Sara and Michelle are PhD students in the Management Science track at the Isenberg School.

Just last week, I spoke at the INFORMS Computing Society conference on our latest research on ChoiceNet in the form of introducing duration-based contracts for Internet services so as to offer consumers more choices.  The paper, which is online, thanks to INFORMS and the great conference Proceedngs editors, is: A Game Theory Model for a Differentiated Service-Oriented Internet with Duration-Based Contracts,  Anna Nagurney, Sara Saberi, Tilman Wolf, and Ladimer S. Nagurney, Proceedings of ICS 2015: Operations Research and Computing: Algorithms and Software for Analytics, Brian Borchers, J. Paul Brooks, and Laura McLay, Editors, INFORMS (2015) pp 15-29. Our presentation can be viewed here.

The project page for ChoiceNet is here where you can find some of our papers.

I very much liked the quote from our Vice Chancellor in the article: “The fact that our campus was selected to take a leadership role on two of the five FIA projects speaks volumes about our faculty expertise,” says Mike Malone, vice chancellor for research and engagement. “We take an interdisciplinary approach to science, which is critical to an initiative of this size.”

In addition to ChoiceNet, the other FIA project that UMass Amherst researchers are involved in is MobilityFirst. Professors Jim  Kurose, Arun Venkataramani, and Michael Zink are working on that project.  And, for those who have not heard, Distinguished University Professor Jim Kurose of Computer Science is now the new Program Director of CISE (Computer & Information Science & Engineering)  Directorate at NSF!

Thanks to Professor Tilman Wolf for a Great Talk on An Economy Plane for the Internet

This week was the last week of the Fall 2014 Fall semester and yesterday we hosted two great events: a seminar by Professor Tilman Wolf, who flew back from a conference in Paris (he had left on Monday afternoon) to speak in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series followed by, shortly thereafter, our end of the semester party!

Professor Wolf is an Associate Dean at the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst and is a Professor in its Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering. He has received many awards for his research on networking.

I first treated Professor Wolf, along with a group of doctoral students,  to lunch at the University Club, and we had such a great time talking and laughing that we were late for the reception prior to his talk, which began at 2PM.

Tilman is the PI on our big NSF Future Internet Architecture project: Network Innovation Through Choice,  that I am a Co-PI on and that two of my doctoral students, Sara Saberi and Dong "Michelle" Li, have received support from.

We were all very much looking forward to his talk, "An Economy Plane for the Internet." Frankly, since I have hosted probably about 100 speakers in the series that the students of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter help me to organize,  I was a bit worried that he might not make it back in time from Europe so it was a big relief when I reached him yesterday morning.

His presentation attracted faculty, staff, as well as students from both the Isenberg School of Management and the College of Engineering as well as from the Office of Information Technologies at UMass. We had advertised the talk widely through our e-lists, the Isenberg School website as well as the UMass Amherst events webpage.

Michael Prokle, the President of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, assisting me with the Introduction

His talk  provided an outstanding motivation and overview of why ChoiceNet, which is the architecture that we are developing, will lead to greater innovation of the Internet in terms of network services. He presented multicasting and why multicasting has not been as successful as had been originally theorized that it would be. He described the principles of ChoiceNet, which I have blogged about. It was thrilling for the doctoral students who have worked with us to see their papers and names in his presentation!  He emphasized how ChoiceNet would offer more choices in terms of duration-based contracts and even, if desired by consumers, enhanced cybersecurity, which I am also very interested in.

His presentation generated many excellent questions, always the signature of a great talk!

 He has kindly provided us with his presentation, which has been posted here.

We thank Professor Wolf for taking time out of his exceptionally busy schedule for giving us such an outstanding seminar presentation!

Some of the audience members with Professor Wolf after his presentation

Offering More Choices on the Internet Through Duration-Based Contracts

We, as consumers, are locked into contracts with Internet Service Providers (ISPs)  over time durations that are too rigid,  over periods of yesrs, typically.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if consumers could be offered more choices, with choices including having contracts for Internet services for the time period that you actually want and need? Perhaps you just want to catch up on the news or view a video or movie.

This is one of the characteristics of a Future Internet Architecture (FIA) that we have been working on as part of our multiuniversity National Science Foundation (FIA) project: Network Innovation Through Choice. Specifically, we have been researching both theoretically and in terms of implementation an architecture which we are calling ChoiceNet with the goal being of introducing an Economy Plane for the Internet. The three principles of ChoiceNet are depicted graphically below.

In one of our fundamental conceptual papers, written by all the investigators on this project, we note that: These three principles interact in a cyclic process that results in increased competition, a faster pace of innovation, and better information for consumers, making it possible for users to make more informed decisions. We expect this “virtuous cycle” to be repeated over and over, on much smaller time scales than is possible in today’s Internet, where customers are locked into their local provider and rely on the latter for everything. Furthermore, we note that omitting any element of the cycle destroys the effectiveness of the others.

In order to investigate duration-based contracts for the Internet, we developed a game theory model for a differentiated service-oriented Internet with duration-based contracts. The model uses variational inequality theory for the formulation of the equilibrium in service usage rates, quality, and contract durations and projected dynamical systems theory for the underlying competitive dynamics. This paper we will be presenting at the 2015  INFORMS Computing Society Conference in Richmond,, VA in mid-January.   The paper will also be published in the conference proceedings. My co-authors on this paper are: Professor Tilman Wolf, who is the Lead PI on our NSF project, Sara Saberi, one of my doctoral students in Management Science at the Isenberg School, who this year received the prestigious 2014 Isenberg Scholar Award, and also Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney, whose university posted a writeup on our paper.

And for those of you who can make it, next Friday, Professor Tilman Wolf will be delivering a talk on ChoiceNet at the Isenberg School of Management in our great UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series. I hope that you can join us!

Congrats to the ChoiceNet Future Internet Architecture Team on the Success of their Tutorial at GEC 21!

Today, I held a review for the midterm exam for students in my Logistics & Transportation class  plus I had office hours, so I could not take part in the GEC21 Conference at the University of Indiana.at which, as I wrote in my blogpost yesterday, our ChoiceNet project team was presenting a two part tutorial.

ChoiceNet is our NSF Future Internet Architecture (FIA) project, which we have been working on for several years now. Our goal in ChoiceNet is to introduce an economy plane for the Internet.

The tutorial is now over with and Professor Tilman Wolf of UMass Amherst, with whom I and our colleagues at the University of Kentucky, NCState, and UNC, along with our doctoral students, have been working with, emailed the photos below from the tutorial. There were 53 in attendance.

The two-part tutorial, including the slides can be accessed here and here.

Those on our team who were present at the tutorial are featured below.

Below is the Acknowledgments page from the tutorial:
And for those of you who may be wondering where are the female faces, two of my doctoral students, who are working with me on the project, Sara Saberi and Dong "Michelle" Li are female, but they were busy at UMass Amherst so could not attend the tutorial sessions. We provided feedback on the second part over the summer since the focus there was on the network economics and payments. We have several models of competition in quality and in prices for the FIA, which have been pubslished in a series of our papers.

The Summer Edition of the Supernetwork Center Newsletter is Out

We are delighted to announce that the 2014 summer edition of The Supernetwork Sentinel, the newsletter of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst,  is now available.

As the Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, it is always a pleasure to produce this newsletter and to share it with our many center supporters, colleagues, and collaborators.

Its been a very exciting couple of months and, as I always say, it takes a great team to accomplish as much as we manage to do, and to have such an enjoyable time doing it whether it entails research on supply chains,  transportation systems, or the Future Internet Architecture, known as ChoiceNet that we have been researching with funding provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF), giving invited talks around the world, visiting various universities, and/or always mentoring and guiding our students!

The latest  summer edition as well as all of our previous newsletters can be found on the Supernetwork Center newsletter page. These newsletters are available for download in pdf format.

The next edition of The Supernetwork Sentinel will be in the Fall.

Thank you for your support!

Design and Analysis of a Content-oriented Internet

Yesterday,  I marched down the hill from the Isenberg School of Management with my three doctoral students to attend the Distinguished Faculty Lecture given by Professor James Kurose of the Computer Science Department at UMass Amherst.

The title of his lecture, which was given in the Massachusetts Room of the Mullins Center to a standing room audience, was "Design and Analysis of a Content-oriented Internet."

Professor Kurose was introduced by Provost James Staros and Dean Steven Goodwin and our Chancellor, Dr. Subbaswamy,  was in attendance as well as our VCRE Mike Malone.

Professor Kurose began his lecture by saying that he is "A Teacher" and provided us with an overview of the major developments in communications from the telephone to packet switching to the Internet. He emphasized that the Internet is a Network of Networks and, since I founded and direct the Supernetwork Center at UMass,  I liked hearing this very much. Supernetworks are networks of networks and our research at the center has advanced both methodologies and the modeling and solution of applications ranging from multimodal transportation networks to complex supply chains and to now envisioning a Future Internet Architecture (FIA), which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and which we are working on with Co-PIs at multiple universities.  Our FIA is known as ChoiceNet.

Professor Kurose emphasized that "Content is King" and stated that Cisco is predicting that, by 2017, 80-90% of the Internet traffic will be for videos, TV streaming, peer to peer, etc. He noted that consumers don't care where the content comes from as long as we get it.

Everything used to be wired but now there are more wireless devices than wired ones connected to the Internet. There are also millions of access networks - for example, at UMass we would first be connected to that network.

He also spoke about the challenges that Netflix faces and that researchers in the Computer Science Department are working on. Some of my students and I had had a preview of this topic just the day before in my Management Science doctoral seminar on Variational Inequalities, Networks, and Game Theory, since a Computer Science professor and one of his doctoral students have been sitting in this course of mine and it has been terrific to have them. We had heard the day before about how Netflix is unsure of where to position movies (store them) and makes multiple copies in multiple locations - this may reduce the speed of delivery and also add to network congestion plus storage costs - topics I have spoken about.

Afterwards there were great questions, even from our Chancellor - not surprising since he is a physicist!

I commented that the Netflix problem reminded me of a problem in humanitarian logistics (another course that I am teaching this semester) in terms of the positioninng of supplies and also mentioned our FIA project ChoiceNet, which will allow consumers to select not only content but the mode of delivery which could include less congested paths with consumers willing to pay for such enhanced services as we say  "pay with their wallets."

Indeed, in our ChoiceNet project, which we already have multiple papers on, we draw comparisons with supply chain networks and freight delivery systems and recognize the importance of network economics, game theory, and operations research. Professor Kurose, after my comments, did note that I was in OR and mentioned  "facility location." I have a good idea as to how to model the Netflix problem and solve it. He also mentioned that 2 out of the 5 NSF FIA [projects had UMass Amherst contributors, which is wonderful!

After his fabulous talk - clear why he has received multiple teaching awards research recognitions, I took the photo below of him with my doctoral students.

We essentially closed up the reception since there were so many interesting faculty and graduate students to talk to from Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and even Political Science!

Professor Kurose  has been at UMass Amherst for 30 years and over the next 30 we can continue to ask him many questions that his talk inspired.

I remember, back in 2005, sharing the stage with him at the Bowker Auditorium, when both of us were amongst the 12 faculty being recognized with a new award, which is now given annually - the Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity.

Great to have the opportunity for my doctoral students in Management Science to meet him yesterday!

For the Love of Networks

When the invitation came from Dr. Adilson Motter to speak at the 2013 Network Frontier Workshop that he was organizing at Northwestern University I was very intrigued, even though the workshop was to take place in early December. Since I live (most of the time) in Massachusetts, I have experience with cold weather but, for some reason, that cold on Lake Michigan is quite unique.

But, since I love researching networks and teaching about the subject and find it one of the most powerful of scientific topics in bridging disciplines, of course, I said "yes!"

This workshop, which was a huge success, and I am still savoring the talks and discussions as well as the people that I met, was a three-day event, that took place last week, December 4-6, highlighting leading-edge research on complex networks. According to the workshop website: Participants working on innovative aspects of complex systems will communicate recent results and ideas relevant to fields as diverse as brain, climate, and socio-technological research. Sessions will include theory and applications of nonlinear dynamics and statistical physics in the context of synchronization, cascades, transportation, control, and failure recovery in complex dynamical systems.

The program, which featured talks on applications ranging from climate science to brain physiology and envisioning the future Internet (my topic) can be downloaded here.  The list of invited speakers can be viewed here.  Invited speakers were from the US, Europe, and Asia, and one industrialist told me that he flew in from China just to hear me speak. I hope that I did not disappoint.

I loved the applications described as well as the methodologies, which included innovations in dynamical systems and control theory applied to networks.

Thanks to Dr. Motter  and his team at the Northwestern Institute for Complex Systems (NICO) for putting this great workshop together. You succeeded in bringing researchers, practitioners, and students together to Evanston in December for the love of networks!

Below are some photos that I managed to take even though, honestly, my digital camera seemed to freeze (although I had charged it before flying out to Chicago).

The lunches and refreshments were delicious!

And, today, UMass Amherst has delayed its opening until noon because of the inclement weather but since we are interviewing a candidate for a faculty position, I will be going in. This afternoon, we are having our annual Isenberg Reindeer Seminar in the Isenberg School of Management atrium, which is a holiday party but first there will be a Personnel Committee meeting to attend. Never a dull moment in academia!

Speaking on Future Internet Architecture at Network Frontier Workshop at Northwestern

First, I hope that all those celebrating had a very pleasant Thanksgiving and for all those who still have journeys ahead of you, I wish you safe and comfortable travels!

Next week, I will be speaking at the Network Frontier Workshop at Northwestern University. This should be a fascinating event and has been organized by Dr. Adilson E. Motter.

The workshop will bring scientists from different disciplines together who are passionate about networks and are contributing to their study and understanding in numerous ways.

The full list of invited speakers can be seen here.

The full program with all speakers' talk titles is available in pdf format here.

After the great TEDx UMass Amherst Professor Speaker Showcase event last Monday at which I spoke on The Traffic Circle of Life I started to prepare my presentation for Northwestern.

I will be speaking next Thursday on "Envisioning a Future Internet Architecture: The Network Economics of ChoiceNet." My presentation is based on our NSF multi-university project: Network Innovation Through Choice. Our great team already has several papers published or in press -- some of which are highlighted below:

A Network Economic Game Theory Model of a Service-Oriented Internet with Choices and Quality Competition, Anna Nagurney, Dong Li, Tilman Wolf, and Sara Saberi, Netnomics 14(1-2): (2013) pp 1-25.

ChoiceNet: Network Innovation Through Choice, George N. Rouskas, Ilia Baldine, Ken Calvert, Rudra Dutta, James Griffioen, Anna Nagurney, and Tilman Wolf, invited paper for the 17th Conference on Optical Network Design and Modeling (ONDM 2013).

Choice as a Principle in Network Architecture, Tilman Wolf, Jim Griffioen, Ken Calvert, Rudra Dutta, George Rouskas, Ilia Baldine, and Anna Nagurney, in the Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2012, Helsinki, Finland, August 13-17, 2012.

I will be focusing my presentation on one of our most recent papers: A Cournot-Nash–Bertrand Game Theory Model of a Service-Oriented Internet with Price and Quality Competition Among Network Transport Providers, Anna Nagurney and Tilman Wolf, in press in Computational Management Science.

I am very much looking forward to being back at Northwestern!

What an Amazing Week - It's All About Our Students!

Anyone who thinks that professors have a life of routine and their weeks are just punctuated by the classes that they teach are completely wrong.

If you like a predictable routine each day then being an academic is certainly not for you.

On the other hand, those of you who crave novelty, excitement, interactions with fascinating people, the exchange of new ideas as well as dynamism and being surrounded by energy and activity, then being an educator and a college professor is a dream job.

What makes being a college professor so special is the students and all that we do is really for the students!

This week is one of those weeks that highlights the span of activities that a fculty member is engaged in so let me tell you what we have been up to.

On Monday, I was videotaped by a UMass Amherst undergrad who is a member of the Isenberg School of Management Marketing Club for an Isenberg Youtube series that the club started on Meet the Professors. The students are editing my interview and it will be posted soon. I got to hear about the student's major and we reminisced about New Jersey, where he is from. The extracurricular activities that our students are engaged in are diverse and they acquire numerous skills through them.

Then,  after meetings with advisees and doctoral students, it was time to march across campus for a search committee meeting. I am serving, with my great colleagues in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, on a faculty search for an Assistant Professor in Systems Engineering. We went over the piles of applications and reached a consensus as to the top candidates, which was gratifying. There are fabulous PhD students out there. We will be very busy with their visits and interviews in the coming weeks. And if you want to see how in demand systems engineering expertise is just read about UTC's gift of $10 million to UConn to create an institute with faculty positions.

On Tuesday, I taught my OIM413 Logistics and Transportation class, which I love teaching and will soon be teaching a class today, as well. The students are now identifying the topics that they will be doing their project papers on. These will be individual projects, rather than team projects, due to the late Thanksgiving this year and only one week of classes afterwards. I worked on a rubric (never had one of these in my Brown University days) to help them with their papers. Then, after more meetings it was time for our "weekly" National Science Foundation (NSF) project teleconference. Our project: Network Innovation Through Choice is one of 5 Future Internet Architecture projects selected by NSF. Our project team, consisting of  Professor Tilman Wolf of the College of Engineering, me, and our doctoral students, with Professors Ken Calvert and Jim Griffoen of the U. of Kentucky, Professors Rudra Dutta and Georre Rouskas of NCState, and Dr. Ilia Baldine of the Renaissance Institute at UNC, and their students, is working on a new Internet. We discussed the recent Principal Investigators Meeting that took place in San Diego and you can view the presentations (ours was given by Dr. Dutta)  here.

Then it was time to complete my talk for the TEDx UMassAmherst Professor Speaker Showcase, which takes place next Monday, November 25, in ISOM's Flavin Room. Students had nominated me for this special event and I am so honored and excited to be part of it. On Tuesday, some students had made an elaborate colorful announcement in chalk in my classroom, which was such a surprise -- I was redder than the bright red jacket I wore that day!

On Wednesday, I received a wonderful message from the Founding Editor of the Goteborg Daily, which is an English language newspaper published in Sweden's second largest city, sometimes also spelled and pronounced as "Gothenburg." My interview was published with photos and it brought back so many memories. Many nice messages followed from colleagues and students in Sweden, Austria, and the U.S. (and even from a few thoughtful top administrators) who had seen the article -- Thanks for the support!

My TEDx talk "completed," I met with several of the organizers of this event -- the students are so creative and their attention to detail is impressive -- there will be a red carpet, a spotlight, and even music provided by a group from the Berklee College of Music in Boston! We went through my talk and discussed the background, etc. Plus, I was videotaped also for this event. As one of my doctoral students said, "You always have to look fresh, Professor!"

Then it was time to discuss another pending project with fellow faculty and when I arrived home, after also meeting with a student about her doctoral dissertation proposal, I found in my mailbox a new book that I will be blogging about -- will keep you in suspense as the TEDx folks are doing in announcing one professor speaker each day before next Monday's gala event!

Plus, I heard wonderful news from a student in Vienna, Austria, who had taken my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare intensive short course that I taught at the Vienna University of Economics and Business last March (while on sabbatical in Europe).  He had been accepted into its doctoral program to work under my former doctoral student, Tina Wakolbinger, who is now a Full Professor there -- I had written him a letter of recommendation -- so happy about this great outcome!

Today, Thursday, after teaching my class, I will be getting ready for two big events tomorrow. I am serving as a co-supervisor of a doctoral dissertation at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, and, tomorrow, Friday, the student, Niklas Arvidsson, will be defending his dissertation. I will be Skying in early in the morning for the defense. I have been very much enjoying reading his dissertation and attended his Kappa when I was in Gothenburg. The dissertation includes 5 papers that he has published on the overall theme of sustainable freight, which I am very interested in.

After Niklas' defense I will be off to support the students of the award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, since we are hosting Master Inventor Dr. Mary Helander of IBM with a reception at 10:30AM in the Isenberg School followed by a one hour Q&A. Then Mary and I will go out to lunch. She has a PhD from Sweden so her visit will be quite special for all of us!

NSF Grants Should Matter Even in Business Schools

Last Friday, I spoke at Texas A&M University and had a wonderful discussion at breakfast with several students from their  INFORMS Student Chapter who were wise beyond their years. Talking with speakers that they had brought to College Station every week had given them information and knowledge (and not just of the technical variety) as well as academic "street smarts."

So, they "picked my brain" about various topics and were especially interested in what I perceived as the differences between being a Professor at a business school versus an engineering school. These were doctoral students in engineering with a good background in Operations Research so they were trying to figure out, assuming that they would become academics, what kind of school would be a good "home" for them. Analytics talent is prized now in both business and engineering schools because of the demand in industry, government, and numerous other organizations, and this is great for all the quant types out there!

The students were aware that, in business schools, typically, the teaching load is higher, and that more emphasis is put on teaching. They noted a speaker (this surprised me) who told them  that the unhappiest 3 years of her life were those that she spent while a prof at a business school -- she is now at an engineering school. They also were aware (savvy, aren't they?!) that in business schools there is emphasis on publishing in what are referred to as "premier" journals whereas in engineering schools getting grants does matter and may be a necessary condition for promotion and tenure if not a sufficient one.  Let's admit it that starting salaries in business schools, which may be a bit discipline-dependent, are also higher, sometimes substantially higher, than those in engineering schools.

As a chaired professor at a business school (the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst) but one who also holds affiliated appointments in two different engineering departments at UMass Amherst, I clearly wear many "hats" and the interdisciplinary scope of my research and activities fuels my creativity and research. Also, since some of my support while a doctoral student at Brown University was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF), given to my dissertation advisor at Brown, Dr. Stella Dafermos, I have always felt that getting grants, which are peer-reviewed,  is important to one's scientific recognition, plus, it allows you to do the following (of course, this depends on the size and type of grant):

1. Support additional doctoral students, which I have done and am presently doing under our NSF grant: NetS: Large-Scale: Collaborative Research: Network Innovation Through Choice project, in which we are working on envisioning and constructing a Future Internet Architecture known as ChoiceNet. This is truly an exciting project involving a multidisciplinary, multiuniversity  team of engineers, computer scientists,  and my doctoral students and me. The lead PI is my colleague, Professor Tilman Wolf of the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst. This is only one of several NSF grants that I have been so lucky to have received over my professional career. Without NSF support, I would not have started the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at UMass Amherst, nor would I have graduated as many successful PhDs as I have had, nor had amazing opportunities through its International Programs, its earlier Faculty Awards for Women Program and its Visiting Professorship for Women Program, under which I spent a great year at MIT in Engineering.

Plus, I have supported quite a few undergraduates at the Isenberg School through the NSF's Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program.

2. Fund travel for students and others supported by the grant. Even though we may spend time in virtual worlds it is essential that we meet face to face at conferences, at workshops, and at other professional venues to exchange ideas. There is only so much $$$ in departmental travel budgets and chaired professor budgets for this activity so financial support from grants helps tremendously.

3. Supplies from the latest computers to even books can be purchased for students' and researchers' use as well as software and other materials.

4. Summer support can be acquired which allows sustained periods of time for focused research activity without distractions.

5. Recognition by one's peers that NSF support provides gives one confidence and, for a female, this is of tremendous value.  It never gets "easy" and there are always roadblocks put in your way and challenges and I say that as a chaired professor. I enjoyed the post on Nine Things Successful People Do Differently on the Harvard Business Review blog network, especially Point 6. Have grit. Grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty. Studies show that gritty people obtain more education in their lifetime, and earn higher college GPAs. Grit predicts which cadets will stick out their first grueling year at West Point. In fact, grit even predicts which round contestants will make it to at the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The good news is, if you aren’t particularly gritty now, there is something you can do about it. People who lack grit more often than not believe that they just don’t have the innate abilities successful people have. If that describes your own thinking …. well, there’s no way to put this nicely: you are wrong. As I mentioned earlier, effort, planning, persistence, and good strategies are what it really takes to succeed. Embracing this knowledge will not only help you see yourself and your goals more accurately, but also do wonders for your grit.

And let me celebrate that another colleague of mine in my Operations & Information Management Department at the Isenberg School, Professor Senay Solak, has also had an NSF grant with multiple universities since starting as an Assistant Professor just over 5 years ago. (Another colleague, Professor Ahmed Ghoniem, has been receiving funding from Qatar in terms of other grants, and, most recently, to work on the FIFA World Cup in Qatar for 2022 -- so cool!)

Plus, let us not forget that receipt of NSF grants enhances the stature, visibility, and reputation of your business school and your university!

Moreover, look at some of the fascinating projects that NSF has funded that were given to faculty at Business Schools: at the Eller School at the University of Arizona for ethics research (our Dean's alma mater), to a consortium, which includes Stanford and Haas at UC Berkeley for innovation, and even at Wharton for a workshop. Of course, the Sloan School at MIT has had many faculty receive NSF grants including the prestigious CAREER awards and even a PECASE award given to Professor Georgia Perkais, who is my academic sister, because her advisor at Brown was also Stella Dafermos, who, sadly, passed away while Georgia was her student and Professor Tom Magnanti, a good friend of Stella's, and of OR/MS renown,  took over as her advisor.

Network Economics and the Internet

In 1993, my first book, Network Economics: A Variational Inequality Approach, was published as the first volume of  the ACE series: Advances in Computational Economics. The second and revised edition of this book came out in 1999.  My 10th book, Networks Against Time, was just published by Springer.


Since the publication of my Network Economics book, there have been many synergies associated with the modeling of the Internet and other network systems, including decentralized transportation networks, with even the Braess paradox, which was identified in 1968,  being relevant also to the Internet.

What I find amazing, and actually quite exciting,  is that some of the language associated with the Internet is similar to that which we are encountering and using in supply chain networks -- from service providers to transport network providers, to start.

I have been involved, since last year, in a truly innovative and challenging project: funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled Collaborative Research: Network Innovation Through Choice. The investigators on this project are: Dr. Tilman Wolf (lead PI) and Dr. Anna Nagurney (Co-PI) - UMass Amherst; Dr. Jim Griffioen and Dr. Ken Calvert - University of Kentucky; Dr. Ilia Baldine - RENCI at UNC, and Dr. Rudra Dutta and Dr. George Rouskas - NCSU.

We have regular teleconferences during which we discuss our research and brainstorm and it is fascinating to be working with such top electrical and computer engineers and computer scientists. Together, we generate many good ideas and the discussions are always very stimulating. There are several doctoral students also involved in this multiyear project. I am supporting, through this grant, one doctoral student in Management Science at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass.

The project that we are working on we are calling ChoiceNet and we have two papers with all 7 of us as co-authors: our SIGCOMM paper, "Choice as a Principle in Network Architecture," and an invited paper, "ChoiceNet: Network Innovation Through Choice," that Dr. George Rouskas will be presenting in France next month at the Optical Network Design & Modeling Conference.

As we note in the latter paper, The Internet has been amazingly robust to changes in both technology and usage over the past three decades. A large reason for this success has been the fact that users are able to create and deploy a wide range of applications, devices, and services on end-systems around the edge of the network. In addition to enabling the Internet to support new uses that were not envisioned by its creators, this has also led to a vibrant economic environment for innovation at the application layer.
 
The many successful Internet companies that have arisen in the last two decades testify to the ability of a platform on which novel ideas can be developed, tested, and adopted to lead to value creation. Ironically, the same paradigm (i.e., the ability to create new functionality and let users choose winners and losers) is not presently supported inside the network. It is widely agreed that the current Internet architecture inadequately supports adaptation in the data and control planes. 

In the early days of the Internet, innovations were deployed in the core by consensus among a small community of researchers and operators. With today’s dramatically larger community, consensus is more difficult to achieve and innovation is for the most part limited to the edge. This limitation inhibits the development and deployment of new networking services, protocols, security designs, management frameworks, and other components that are essential to support the increasingly diverse systems, applications, and communication paradigms of the next-generation Internet.

We are hoping through a vision for the Internet to offer more choices and this entails the crucial economy plane. Users should not be stuck with contracts over extended time horizons and should be able to dynamically select service and transport network providers.

The underlying network economics issues from contracts to game theory models of competition from Cournot and Nash to Bertrand are very intriguing and we have been developing computable game theory models using variational inequality theory and projected dynamical systems theory. Drawing on some results in my first book we are also designing and constructing extensions and pushing the methodological foundations forward.

For more information on the NSF Future Internet Architecture (FIA) projects click here.

The Future of the Internet is a la Carte -- Our NSF Project Featured in ACM Tech News

In a recent post, I wrote about our paper on our National Science Foundation (NSF) project on a new architecture for the Internet, called Choicenet. Professor Tilman Wolf of UMass Amherst is presenting our paper "Choice as a Principle in Network Architecture" today at the ACM SIGCOMM conference in Helsinki, Finland.

One of the Co-PIs on our project just informed me that our project is featured in the latest ACM Tech News, in an article with the  catchy title, "The Future of the Internet is ... a la Carte."
 
This NSF project is a collaboration of UMass Amherst with the University of Kentucky, NCState, and the Renaissance Institute, RENCI.

NCState did the latest press release on our project and I now have two doctoral students working on it with us. Our group is also one of five selected for the Future Internet Architecture initiative by NSF, which is very cool.

There is also some coverage of our project and paper by Kurzweil.

Presentation at the 2012 ACM SIGCOMM Conference in Helsinki, Finland

One of the best aspects of our National Science Foundation (NSF) project "Collaborative Research: Network Innovation Through Choice," is the numerous discussions that the investigators have been having. We (UMass Amherst, NCState, the University of Kentucky, and RENCI) have regular teleconferences and groups of us have met face to face at our respective institutions and at NSF events.

The discussions that we have had on our project are always stimulating and it is interesting to see how well we can communicate even though we represent different disciplines. I must admit I get a special thrill when I hear terms that I often use in my network and supply chain research being used by computer scientists and engineers such as: perishable to robustness to network vulnerability to most efficient routing to, of course, a lot of network economics terms. I have been working with two doctoral students on modeling the behavior of the interactions among the decision-makers on what we are calling the economy plane.


Next week is the 2012 ACM SIGCOMM Conference, which will be taking place in Helsinki, Finland.

SIGCOMM is the flagship annual conference of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM) on the applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication.

My colleague from UMass Amherst, Professor Tilman Wolf of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will be presenting our joint poster paper,  Choice as a Principle of Network Architecture at this conference.

Professor Wolf is the PI on this project and I am the Co-PI (for the UMass Amherst contingent).

Our project, which is called Choicenet is one of the five NSF Future Internet Architecture projects, which is very cool and fascinating.