Our Blood Supply Chain Paper is Now Published and Reflections on Dr. Bernadine P. Healy -- RIP

I was struck by the recent death of Dr. Bernadine P. Healy, who not only was the first female head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) but also was the second female (after Elizabeth Dole) to head the American Red Cross and did so during 9/11.

She recently passed away at the age of 67 and had an amazing career as a researcher (over 200 papers), educator, and top administrator both in academe, including Johns Hopkins University, as well as the above-noted major organizations.

She was also a wife and mother to two daughters.

The New York Times ran an obituary on her, as did many other leading newspapers and, despite some controversial decisions, she clearly brought attention to women's health care and the importance of teamwork in organizations.

Our first blood supply chain paper, in which discussions with the Red Cross were essential and are acknowledged, entitled,Supply Chain Network Operations Management of a Blood Banking System with Cost and Risk Minimization, has now been published by the journal Computational Management Science. With it, we honor her memory.

Dr. Frank Collins, the present Director of the NIH, in his moving tribute to Dr. Healy, acknowledged her words, which she made during an NIH exhibit on pioneering women doctors:

“All of us, I believe, in our hearts are humanitarian. And how wonderful to be in a career that in almost any dimension of it—whether you're the doctor at the bedside, or the scientist in the laboratory, or the public health doc tracking down the latest epidemic—that you are doing something that is pure in its fundamental purpose, which is helping another human being.”

Thank you, Dr. Healy, for your gutsy leadership and R.I.P.

We hope that, through research and education, we can also make a difference.

Lectures on Fragile Networks

Below you will find the links to the lectures that comprised the invited tutorial on Fragile Networks that I presented with Dr. Qiang "Patrick" Qiang at the 2010 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, & Prediction (SBP10), which took place at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD, in March, 2010. The tutorial was delivered in three modules/lectures:

Module I - Module II - Module III

These lectures are in pdf format and should be of interest to anyone concerned about disaster and emergency preparedness as well as network vulnerability ranging from applications to transportation networks and the Internet to electric power grids and supply chains as well as financial networks. This tutorial is based on our book, Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, published by John Wiley & Sons.

Photos from the Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling and Prediction Conference at NIH

I thought that I would share some photos taken at the 2010 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling & Prediction Conference that took place at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, March 30-31. I have written several posts about this great conference, which I took part in with Dr. Patrick Qiang, a former doctoral student of mine. We presented the tutorial, Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, at this venue on March 29, and also spoke on knowledge networks and collaboration across disciplines yesterday. The slides for our tutorial, conducted in three modules, are available on the Supernetworks website.

Advances in Social Computing

I am back from the International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction, SBP 2010, that took place at NIH (the National Institutes of Health) in Bethesda, Maryland. Although my shuttle van from Bethesda to the Baltimore airport had a flat tire on the busy highway, plus my hotel room had to be switched twice due to excessive noise and a group of strangers trying to enter my room late at night (what is travel without adventures), the conference was a great success. I have the best souvenir from the conference (in addition to the wonderful conversations that I had and great talks that I attended plus new people that I met) and that is the handsomely edited conference proceedings.

The conferees were given the proceedings volume, Advances in Social Computing, which was just released by Springer and was edited by Dr. Sun-Ki Chai, Dr. John Salerno, and Dr. Patricia Mabry of NIH, who was the conference chair. Dr. Patrick Qiang and I gave a tutorial on Fragile Networks immediately preceding the conference on Monday and today Dr. Qiang presented our paper, A Knowledge Collaboration Network Model Across Disciplines, which is published in the proceedings volume. We had excellent questions after the presentation (always a good sign), which we could answer (this is also a plus). We received a great compliment when one of the conferees (an academic from George Mason University) came up to us afterwards and said that he came to the conference explicitly to hear our talk.

The campus of NIH is gorgeous with a lot of trees and blooming flowers. Our conference took place in the Natcher Building, Room 45, and there were no parallel sessions, so there was a lot of community building.

What could be better than very smart people from many different disciplines getting together to talk about very important problems! The range of papers (on topics from childhood obesity to prevention of epidemics to inappropriate emergency department utilization to syndromic surveillance to information overload and viral marketing, to highlight just a few) in Advances in Social Computing certainly reflects this!

The Fragile Networks Tutorial at NIH

Today, Dr. Patrick Qiang and I gave our tutorial on Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, which is also the title of our book published by John Wiley & Sons. The tutorial took place at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has a lovely campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The trees are blooming here and the tutorial was one of four delivered today. These tutorials precede the 2010 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling & Prediction (SBP2010), which begins tomorrow and at which about 500 delegates are expected. You may find our tutorial, which consisted of three distinct modules here.

Dr. Qiang and I had a wonderful time at our tutorial and the audience consisted of academics, consultants, and government employees, as well as researchers, and represented disciplines from computer science and applied mathematics to computational economics, medicine, and physics. The questions were great and the conversations truly stimulating. We met some marvelous people and saw some old friends. I am enjoying the collegial atmosphere and discussions tremendously. After our tutorial we had a wonderful dinner with a brilliant researcher who is trained as a physicist and who is now working in computer science and is from Hungary.

We are very much looking forward to hearing talks at the conference and Dr. Qiang and I will be giving a paper on Wednesday on knowledge collaboration networks. This paper is published in the conference proceedings volume, which we picked up today.

We thank the organizers of SBP 2010 for the opportunity to present the tutorial and for organizing such an exciting composition of speakers and presentations!