Great Academic Experiences in London

I returned from London, which was extra busy in preparation for the Queen's 90th birthday celebrations this weekend,  to Oxford via train in the late afternoon today.

We had left for London on Wednesday afternoon since I was to give the presentation: Supply Chain Networks Against Time: From Food to Pharma, at the Centre for Transport Studies at Imperial College on Thursday afternoon. I was invited to speak by Dr Panagiotis Angeloudis, Senior Lecturer in Engineering Systems and Logistics and the Director, Port Operations Research & Technology Centre. Professor Angeloudis has done fascinating work on critical infrastructure resilience, construction logistics, as well as maritime transport, including a recent game theory model which was just published in Transportation Research B. He is supervising 9 PhD students and has 3 postdocs working for him - very impressive - and is a computer geek with a lot of skills in data visualization.

When I arrived in London, I checked my email messages, and found a message from a reporter from Waterloo, Canada, Jeff Outhit, requesting an interview with me on ransomware and cyberattacks. He needed a response quickly and we managed to correspond and the great article that he wrote was published. The title is: "Cyber ransoms are ‘fastest-growing threat,’ expert warns." Outhit had seen that I gave a keynote talk at the University of Waterloo on cybercrime and cybersecurity on April 15, 2016 on Analytics Day. That great conference was organized by my INFORMS colleague, Dr. Fatma Gzara, whom I thank in my presentation, which Outhit even linked to in his article.

Since the hotel I was staying at was close to Hyde Park the morning of my presentation I had to take a walk there since I just love the green spaces.

I was treated to a delicious lunch in a beautiful building before my talk with both Professor Angeloudis and Professor Washington Y. Ochieng, the Head of the Centre for Transport Studies, who is very dynamic and a great intellectual force and leader, whom I enjoyed speaking with very much. 

The audience for my talk, which was on June 9, 2016, consisted of students, postdocs, and also representatives from industry, including from data science, which was very neat. 

I also had a great surprise: Professor Ben Heydecker, a transportation professor from the University of College London, whom I had not seen for a long time, but with whom I have very pleasant memories, which included even conversations with my dissertation advisor at Brown University, Professor Stella Dafermos, at various conferences, came to my talk. 

Of course, we had to talk about the book by such dear colleagues as Professors David E, Boyce and Huw Williams,  Forecasting Urban Travel, whose book launch I was a panelist at last Fall at Northwestern University.

I enjoyed giving my presentation very much since the audience was very attentive and afterwards they also asked great questions. We continued the discussions for about an hour after my presentation, which was delightful.

The conversations with Professor Panagiotis Angeloudis were also much too short - from drones for disaster relief and delivery of medicines to ancient Roman supply chains - this is a must to explore  research and tools by an archeologist at Stanford, which I could very much relate to because, as a Visiting Fellow now at All Souls College at Oxford University, I interact not only with economists, mathematicians, and scientists but also with humanists and archeologists!

And, yesterday evening, after a very pleasant seminar and discussions - Professor Panagiotis' group reminds me of the United Nations - with students from different countries working so well together - my family and I were hosted by Dr. Stavros Siokos, a former doctoral student of mine, with whom I wrote the Financial Networks book. Dr. Siokos is a financier based in London and has a PhD in Industrial Engineering from UMass Amherst and I was his dissertation advisor. He is also a Center Associate of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management, which I founded almost 15 years ago!

Stavros took us to an exclusive club for dinner - the Royal Automobile Club (RAC), where the ambience was extraordinary as was the food and service, but, best of all, were the conversations with a former student of mine, who has achieved great success in industry. We discussed even the possibility of Brexit, that is, England leaving the European Union, with the vote taking place on June 23, 2016. This would be disastrous for numerous reasons, including for research and science, which is not even much written about.  The possibility of Brexit as well as Trump are major topics of conversation among the Fellows at All Souls College at Oxford University.

It is quite the experience living in England during this very historic time.

Below are some photos, including several of the desserts eaten at the exquisite dinner, last night.

Thanks to both Professor Panagiotis Andeloudis and to Dr. Stavros Siokos for such fabulous experiences in London!

We ended the evening with a walk to Stavros' office which had been Eisenhower's office when he planned D-Day, got to see the home of the richest man in England, and saw St. James Park, as well.

Green Spaces in Some Favorite Cities

After spending multiple weeks in Europe this past summer, as a Visiting Professor in Sweden, and also speaking and attending plus co-organizing conferences in various countries, I am enjoying being in very green Amherst, Massachusetts.

But,  before long, I will be heading out again, to give a plenary talk in Bogota, Colombia. I will be speaking on Sustainable Supply Chains for Sustainable Cities.

Reflecting back on the places that I had been recently what stood out in my mind is the importance of green spaces in cities.

The New York Times recently even had an article on a scientific study on the effects of walking in nature on people's brains.


I must admit that in traveling I always try to locate a hotel close to a park.

Below are photos of green spaces in some of my favorite cities. Take in the beauty and enjoy - it may even be good for your health.

Below are scenes from Gothenburg, Sweden

Below photos are from Hyde Park, London, England

StadtPark in Vienna, Austria

The Meadows in Edinburgh, Scotland

 Oxford, England

And, of course, Central Park in New York City!

Sir Alan Wilson, Regional Science, Operations Research, and the Future of Cities

I returned last night from Europe where I spent the last 3 weeks at 3 different conferences and transiting between them. During this period I was privy not only to major current events but also history in the making since I was in Greece during the financial crisis (and ultimate bailout)  and even in Vienna where US Secretary of State John Kerry helped in the successful Iran nuclear negotiations.

This past week, I had the pleasure of taking part in the EURO 2015 conference in Glasgow, Scotland, which I have blogged about, and, on Tuesday, I was privileged to hear Professor Alan Wilson  of the University College London deliver his keynote talk on the Future of Cities in the beautiful Barony Hall, which was packed. He is the Professor of Urban Regional Systems. His extensive, wide-ranging contributions are both in research as well as in administration.

Sir Wilson began his talk by stating that "he secretly thought that he always was an Operations Researcher," and then stated that he is an Operations Researcher.

Coincidentally,  I know of his work through Regional Science and both Sir Alan Wilson and I were elected Fellows of the RSAI (Regional Science Association International) in the same year - in 2007!

Sir Wilson's passion is cities, since he is concerned with the biggest of big problems.

I so much enjoyed his plenary talk in which in emphasized nonlinearities, complex systems, and the high level of interdependencies in cities (just think of population and infrastructure, for example). He also emphasized the importance of transportation and networks and how infrastructur ties issues of population with the economics of cities.

He stated that his view as a math modeler is "to explore different futures for cities."

In his plenary, he also mentioned the role of engineers in transportation planning in the US so I have to note again the recent book by Professors David Boyce (who is both an INFORMS Fellow and an RSAI Fellow) and Huw Williams, Forecasting Urban Travel, which I have written about on this blog.  You can view Professor Boyce's presentation on 60 years of travel demand forecasting in which he notes the work of Alan Wilson here. 

Those of you who were listening closely to Sir Alan Wilson's plenary lecture, may have heard him mention Professor Suzanne Evans. Back in 2003, at a Regional Science conference, Suzanne Evans, joined me, Professor David Boyce, and Hani S. Mahmassani (well-known in transportation science and OR ) on a panel to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of the network classic, Studies in the Economics of Transportation, by Beckmann (who was on my dissertation committee at Brown University), McGuire, and Winsten. You can see photos and presentation if you scroll down on this page.

Sir Wilson, in his ketnte, emphasized 6 challenges of cities in the United Kingdom, and stated that the challenges also apply to other cities and I agree. Specifically, he noted the challenges as being: people (demography), city economcs, the environment and sustainability, urban form (land use and green belts, which I am so passionate about), infrastructure, and governance.  He noted that the UK is very centralized and cities are pushing for more decentralization and autonomy.

As a math modeller, Wilson emphasized the high dimensionality of the problems associated with cities and discussed various scenarios for the future of London with powerful graphical displays. One scenario was what would happen if  "we killed off the car." Since I have done a lot of work on projected dynamical systems, I enjoyed hearing him speak about Lotka-Volterra dynamics (and relationships even to retail and hospitals), path dependence on initial conditions, forecasting challenges, and the importance of capturing uncertainty in dynamics.

And, since I had been in London, just a few days before travelinng to Edinburgh and then Glasgow, I have to include in this post one of my favorite green spaces in a city - Hyde Park in London.

Many thanks to the organizers of the great EURO conference in Glasgow for bringing to us such outstanding plenary speakers and many other presenters. It was an honor and delight to take part in it!