Celebrating Two Amazing Female Operations Researchers, Both 93 Years Old, for Their Contributions to Algorithms

Since this blogpost was published, sadly, Professor Ailsa Land passed away on May 16, 2021. Please refer to this obituary posted on the London School of Economics website. It was truly extraordinary that she and her husband could view virtually the panel in her honor on February 25, 2021,  that I wrote about below. Also, Dr. Land will be honored next month with the posthumous receipt of the EURO Gold Medal at the EURO Conference in Athens, Greece, which will have a flexible format. Rest in Peace, Dr. Ailsa Land, and thank you for all you contributions to OR and to making herstory!

This month is Women's History Month and also the month in which we celebrate International Women's Day.

I am writing this blogpost in order to recognize and to celebrate two amazing females, both born in 1927, whose algorithmic contributions and impacts continue to this day. Specifically, this post is about Dr. Ailsa Land and Dr. Marguerite Frank. Both are now 93 years old and I have had the pleasure of recently being involved in supporting tributes to them.

Dr. Ailsa Land is an Emeritus Professor of the London School of Economics (LSE) and the first female recipient of the Beale Medal.  She is renowned for her contributions to the development of branch and bound, an algorithm for discrete and combinatorial optimization problems. A nice biography of her can be found on the INFORMS website. An outstanding interview by Professor László Végh of LSE, along with the transcript, can be found on the INFORMS oral history page. Many thanks to the INFORMS History and Traditions Committee (I served on this committee for many years and regularly argued for the importance of having interviews done and posted of female luminaries) for making this possible. 

A few months ago, several of us were approached by Professor Emeritus Doug Shier of Clemson University to take part in a special panel honoring Professor Land's receipt of the Beale Medal, and organized by The OR Society of Great Britain. Professor Shier was a PhD student of Land's at LSE. The truly remarkable and very moving panel took place on February 25, 2021, and The OR Society has now made the video available for all to view. Joining me on the panel were: Professors Jeffrey Camm, Karla Hoffman, Ivana Ljubic, and Susara van den Heever of IBM, with Professor Shier as moderator. 

The video of the panel can be accessed here.

We heard from Dr. Land and her husband, Dr. Frank Land, that they very much enjoyed the special tribute.

I have posted my presentation from the panel on the Supernetwork Center site. I used direct quotes from the interview with Dr. Ailsa Land as the construct for my presentation.

After the panel,  Professor Karla Hoffman wrote that this was the best webinar experience that she has ever had! 

And, how remarkable, or should I say "serendipitous,"that  recently I was contacted to a top scholar from a major university in a lovely European capital asking whether I knew how to contact Dr. Marguerite Frank. Dr. Frank is the "Frank" in the Frank-Wolfe (1956) algorithm for convex optimization. I always enjoy asking my students about who they think the algorithm is named after - I have yet to receive an answer that the first one is a female (but maybe this post and other accolades will help). Some nice, fairly recent coverage of this algorithm, with input and reflections by Dr. Frank can be found in the Optima newsletter. I had coded the algorithm and even used it in my PhD dissertation at Brown University for computational comparisons with other algorithms for the solution of user-optimized traffic network equilibrium problems with separable user link cost functions. I have known Dr. Frank for many years - she and I share a passion for the Braess paradox and both of us have published a series of papers on this paradox. I even hosted Dr. Frank at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a visit I remember very fondly. Dr. Frank's PhD is in Mathematics from Harvard University.

In 2014, Dr. Frank took part in a special interview panel in honor of her contributions to the Frank-Wolfe algorithm. 

I very much like this article in which Dr. Marguerite Frank also mentions my dissertation advisor, Dr. Stella Dafermos, and the spelling of my surname has now been corrected from "Nagourney" to "Nagurney."

It is quite remarkable that the Frank-Wolfe algorithm is even being used now for machine learning.

What struck me so much about these two amazing women, who are also mothers, is their humility. They truly, until fairly recently, did not realize the impact of their research! 

And, as for an honor recognizing Dr. Marguerite Frank, I will let you know as soon as it becomes official. Through LinkedIn, I managed to connect with both of her daughters, who put me in touch with Dr. Frank, who had moved from New Jersey, where she had been a Professor at Rider University, to Palo Alto, when her husband moved from Princeton University to Stanford University. He had been a renowned scholar on Dostoevsky (one of my favorite authors of all time)! Marguerite is delighted by the forthcoming honor and I am thrilled that this initiative was taken by a male scholar, who had reached out to me. I am stubborn and I was determined to (re)connect with her and what a delight that has been.

Terrific Talk on Location Equilibria and Networks by Basilio Gentile of ETH in Switzerland

This past Friday, we were delighted to be able to host Mr. Basilio Gentile of ETH in Zurich, Switzerland in our INFORMS Speaker Series.

His talk was on: Distributed Dynamics to Achieve Location Equilibrium.

He had come to Massachusetts for about one month and had spoken at Harvard and will be speaking at MIT at LIDS tomorrow. He had reached out to me in mid March asking whether he could visit my research group. I was delighted that we could arrange for him to give a talk. His doctoral dissertation supervisor at ETH is Professor John Lygeros, who was educated at Imperial College in London and also UC Berkeley.

His presentation was on recent work that he has done with with Dario Paccagnan, Bolutife Ogunsola, and Professor John Lygeros.  That work was inspired by my work on migration equilibrium and variational inequalities, which is gratifying. I had blogged about migration equilibrium because of the refugee crises. 

Basilio described an elegant framework for what he is calling location equilibrium, consisting of a model and a novel algorithm, supported by theory. The framework has potentially a wide range of exciting potential applications. Location equilibrium can be viewed as a type of migration equilibrium in which the costs of migration between locations are not flow-dependent, as in my work with collaborators, but are fixed. One is interested in determining, given a fixed population in the economy or network, the equilibrium population distributions at the nodes. He mentioned some very nonobvious interesting applications from taxi distributions in Hong Kong to computer server allocations.

The audience benefited greatly from the clarity of his presentation on a fascinating subject, with an excellent overview also of variational inequalities, and nice network visuals. We were especially grateful that he was able to inform the audience, consisting of researchers from the College of Engineering and the Isenberg School of Management, also on the relationships of some of the most
important equilibrium concepts from Wardrop to Nash and their linkages to location and migration equilibrium! It was terrific that some of the graduate students who had taken my variational inequalities, game theory, and networks seminar got to hear more on the subject and from a speaker from Switzerland.  Basilio is originally from Italy and has met my wonderful collaborator and Supernetwork Center Associate, Professor Patrizia Daniele.

After the talk, joining us for lunch at the University Club were: Professor Eric Gonzales, one of my colleagues in Transportation at UMass Amherst, who is a UC Berkeley PhD, and two UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Officers: Pritha Dutta, who is the President, and Ekin Koker, who is the Vice President and Webmaster.

Then I had a chance to speak more with Basilio in my office and to show him my Supernetworks Lab.

Time flew by very quickly and he caught the bus back to Boston from UMass Amherst.

We thank Basilio Gentile for coming to speak at the University of Massachusetts Amherst!

Fabulous Talk by Professor Ozlem Ergun on Restoration of Network Connectivity In Large-Scale Disaster Response Problems

The weather forecast for today was dire (and it is March 31) with many area schools in Massachusetts even closing early.

Luckily, the day was just gray with some cold drizzle, and our speaker, Dr. Ozlem Ergun from Northeastern University, made it from Boston to Amherst. We had invited her to speak as part of our great UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series, which the Student Chapter helps me to organize. The chapter does a terrific job advertising the talks, handling much of the logistics, including a reception prior to the talk, and providing information on its website as well as a newsletter through an e-list. Special thanks to officers: Pritha Dutta, Deniz Besik, Ekin Koker, Destenie Nock, and Amro El-Adle, for their hard work before and after the event today!

Dr. Ergun's presentation was on a topic of great interest to me - Restoration of Network Connectivity in Large-Scale Disaster Response Problems. The Chapter President, Pritha Dutta, had prepared the nice poster below announcing the talk, which also made the UMass Amherst homepage under events and was advertised at the Isenberg School on our fancy electronic displays.

Professor Ergun has been involved in humanitarian logistics and disaster relief research for a long time and joined the faculty at Northeastern University after being on the faculty of Georgia Tech. She is especially known for her work on debris removal post disasters. Her talk today focused on the restoration of network connectivity, specifically, critical infrastructure, such as transportation networks, in order to enable service networks to become, again, operational. For example, think of the destruction of roads and bridges post a disaster such as an earthquake and one wishes to deliver relief supplies and personnel from points of supply to points of demand under such conditions. Which roads should be repaired in the sense of removing debris so that they become passable and network connectivity in order to accomplish desired emergency response tasks is restored? She noted that multiperiod models are needed since in a given time period one may have only a certain amount of resources available.  She emphasized that if you can't get rid of debris you can't recover (just think of Haiti post the earthquake). Emergency agencies provide guidelines but not how to do it!

She emphasized the importance of integrating operations research and network science, which I fully concur with. Her talk especially resonated since I teach and do research on humanitarian operations and disaster relief and have also co-authored the Fragile Networks book with my former Isenberg School doctoral student and now tenured Associate Professor, Dr. Patrick Qiang.

And, coincidentally, I was just teaching the Nagurney-Qiang network performance measure and importance indicator for both nodes and links in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class last week!

I very much like how Professor Ergun emphasized that it is not just the topology of a network (or graph) that matters, before and after destruction/deterioration, but also what services are provided on the network! Since operations researchers care about  a variety of activities on networks from transportation and logistical flows to even financial and informational flows, this is quite "natural" for us. I also would put this in the area of "supernetworks."

She shared with us a network betweenness measure which she had extended with her doctoral students and then took us on a fascinating journey of a case study of resiliency of Boston versus Manhattan (two of my favorite locations on the planet)! She also presented an optimization problem, which one would need to solve in seconds consisting of the maximization of the benefit of making the connections over the time periods, given supply and demand points, and a variety of constraints.

Professor Ergun brought several of her PhD students and members of Northeastern's INFORMS Student Chapter to UMass Amherst, which made her visit extra special since our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter members could interact with their "sister" chapter in (eastern) Massachusetts.

I hosted the lunch at the University Club and the service and food were fantastic. Although it is a Friday, I suspect that many others had cancelled because of the weather forecast, which did not come to fruition! We enjoyed the clam chowder and the salad with crab cakes and we shared the chocolate torte, lemon mascarpone cake, and the cheesecake, which we had with tea and coffee.

Professor Ergun made it back safely with her students to Boston.

Tomorrow is April Fool's Day and there is snow, again, in the forecast! Operations researchers are resilient and we are so grateful to Professor Ergun for coming to UMass Amherst to speak and for also bringing some of her students and chapter officers of the INFORMS Student Chapter at Northeastern University!

Remembering Herbert E. Scarf of Yale, Great Economist and Operations Researcher - Rest in Peace

This past Tuesday, while teaching my Transportation and Logistics class at the Isenberg School of Management, a class that I love to teach, we were discussing the importance of identifying conditions that guarantee uniqueness of equilibria. I had presented an extended model of transportation network equilibria and we were analyzing it qualitatively.

In order to emphasize to the students  the importance of uniqueness (I was focusing on link flows),  I related to the students a wonderful workshop that I had spoken at, which took place at Stanford University.  The workshop was entitled: Applied General Equilibrium Workshop and it took place March 11-12, 1988. My presentation was  (I checked on my cv): "Variational inequalities and the computation of large-scale equilibria."

I mentioned to my students how exciting it was for me to see George Dantzig there, Curtis Eaves, the Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, and also Herbert Scarf.  My dissertation advisor at Brown University, Stella Dafermos, was also there and we were the only two females that had been invited to take part. Strangely enough, I even recall now, although the workshop took place back in 1988,  what Kenneth Arrow was wearing (one of his favorite plaid shirts),  and Herb Scarf's shoes, which, for some reason, impressed me because they were stylish and looked so comfortable. I recall them as being beige Rockport shoes.  The audience, when I spoke about Wardrop's two principles of travel behavior, thought I had said "Wardrobe equilibrium", which Stella and I thought was very funny.

At the workshop we also discussed conditions for uniqueness, which was judged to be a very important property for policy makers when it came to equilibrium problems and a Harvard economics professor was especially avid on this point. The workshop was an intellectual delight and one of the last times that I was with my advisor at a conference since she passed away in 1990.

On Tuesday, when I was reminiscing and sharing the above in my class, I had no idea until I got back to my office and then saw the news, that Professor Herbert E. Scarf had passed away and only two days ago! 

INFORMS produced a fine tribute to Scarf  and the INFORMS President, Ed Kaplan of Yale, recently shared the sad news with all of us. I told my students today of Scarf's passing.

Scarf I remember as being very stately, pleasant, and elegant and had a very warm and welcoming way about him. I was in awe of him because of his book, "Computation of Economic Equilibria," with T. Hansen, which was published by Yale University Press in 1973. Scarf was an economist and also a great contributor to operations research.

In my first book, "Network Economics: A Variational Inequality Approach", which was published in 1993 as the first book in the series: Advances in Computational Economics, I cite Scarf's book in chapter 7, which is on Walrasian Price Equilibrium.  That book is my most highly cited publication according to Google Scholar.

Scarf was a true visionary and realized the importance of algorithmic tools to solve complex equilibrium problems. We have much to thank him for and he will be missed.

The Frank in the Frank-Wolfe Algorithm of Convex Programming is Female

About 2 weeks ago I was contacted by Martin Jaggi and Zaid Harchaoni who were writing an article on the history of the Frank-Wolfe (1956) algorithm for Optima, which is the newsletter of the Mathematical Optimization Society (formerly the Mathematical Programming Society).  The algorithm was proposed in the paper, "An algorithm for quadratic programming," and published in the journal Naval Research Logistics Quarterly.

They provided me with a text by Frank and stated that Any help towards an more accurate & complete description of that interesting history would be very appreciated.

In reading over the text I was so pleased to see my dissertation advisor's name at Brown University, Stella Dafermos,  mentioned and even my name. I was flooded with nostalgia.

I actually implemented the Frank-Wolfe algorithm as part of my dissertation since part of it entailed conducting computational experiments associated with solving traffic network equilibrium problems, both symmetric ones, which could be reformulated as optimization problems, or asymmetric ones, which were formulated and solved as variational inequality problems. The symmetry condition had to do with the user link cost functions which capture congestion.  

And, yes, the Frank in the Frank-Wolfe algorithm is a female, named Marguerite Frank.

I often mention this to my students when I teach Transportation & Logistics or advanced game theory and network and variational inequality courses. Of course, most suspect that the "Frank" in "Frank-Wolfe" must be a male. Marguerite and Wolfe (Philip) wrote this paper during their time at Princeton and Wolfe went on to IBM. Marguerite spent many years as a professor at Rider University in New Jersey. While at Princeton, they interacted with both Al Tucker and Harold Kuhn, who recently passed away, of Kuhn-Tucker conditions renown.

Marguerite and I had mutual interests also associated with the Braess paradox and in the Annals of Operations Research special volume that I edited in 1993, entitled  Advances in Equilibrium Modeling, Analysis and Computation, she contributed one of the 14 papers, co-authored with
Regina Mladineo, "Computer generation of network cost from one link's equilibrium data.:

Marguerite visited me at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and we had a marvelous conversation on what success means and how to define it.

Marguerite Frank was born in 1927, so she is 87 years young.  Martin Jaggi and Zaid Harchaoni brought to my attention a recent video of Marguerite that was made last December at Lake Tahoe and was posted on Youtube in which she reflects on the algorithm and her contributions. Nice that she is finally getting the attention that she deserves. Exciting to see also that convex programming is garnering renewed interest - we have been doing nonlinear programming throughout because of our research on congested networks from transportation to electric power ones to the Internet.

Both Stella Dafermos and Marguerite Frank represent truly inspiring female STEM pioneers.We owe them a tremendous amount. Sadly, Stella passed away in 1990 at age 49.

Great Talks at the Isenberg School of Management

Great speakers provoke and inspire and we can learn so much from them. Students, faculty, staff, and guests from the community benefit immensely from invited speakers plus there is nothing like face to face time in which to exchange stories, share laughter, and, perhaps, even start new friendships.

This week has been an especially busy one at the Isenberg School of Management with many departments hosting speakers including two speakers that were hosted by my department -- Operations & Information Management. The poster above was prepared by the Isenberg School Communications office for a talk that took place last evening and was organized by the Management Department. Dr. Anita M. McGahan of the Rotman School at the University of Toronto spoke on "The Business of Creating Social Value."  She is the President of the Academy of Management, which has 18,000 members. The President of INFORMS, which now has 11,000 members, is also a female, Dr. Anne Robinson of Verizon. Great to see such wonderful leadership at the top of such professional societies!

Dr. McGahan's talk took place at the Integrated Sciences new building and the takeaways were:

1. Work on important problems (think of what you want to leave behind).

2. Create social value through your work.

3. We need new business models -- I liked hearing about innovating in reverse -- rather than having more complicated neonatal incubators use the kangaroo approach (baby on the parent).

4. We should care not just about shareholder value but about sustainable outcomes (rather than organizations).

She spoke about meeting Dr. Paul Farmer, a co-founder of Partners in Health, on a shuttle flight from DC to Boston and also about various new industries and products from wind energy to the Tata Nano car. She is very dynamic and interacted very well with the audience -- I estimated over 400 in attendance, including many undergrads including many students.

Dr. Detmar Straub, A Regent's Professor of the University System of Georgia and the J. Mack Robinson Distinguished Professor of Information Systems at Georgia State University, spoke this afternoon as part of the Dean's Lecture series. His talk was on "Why Top Journals Accept Your Paper." He completed two terms as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal MIS Quarterly. I had the pleasure of joining several of my IS faculty colleagues and one of our doctoral students for lunch with Dr. Straub at the University Club, which is in a building dating to 1728. The food was very good and the conversation fabulous  -- we laughed over so many great stories -- I especially enjoyed his reminiscences about various conferences.

 Dr. Robert Shumsky of Dartmouth was our previous speaker in the Dean's Lecture series. He is well-known in INFORMS and OM circles.

Also, today, the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter had the pleasure of hosting Professor Michael C. Fu of the Snith School at the University of Maryland College Park. He has degrees from MIT and a PhD from Harvard and he was fabulous. His talk began at 2:00 at the Isenberg School and we ended our conversations at 4:00PM. His talk focused on stochastic methodologies with applications ranging from financial engineering to supply chains. Specifically, he spoke on  stochastic gradient estimation techniques, which are methodologies for deriving computationally efficient estimators used in simulation optimization and sensitivity analysis of complex stochastic systems that require simulation to estimate their performance. His presentation was so clear and I loved such phrases as the "mathematically disadvantaged" and "statistically unconscious."

The photo below I took (apologies that it was not my best) after Professor Fu's presentation. My colleague from engineering, Professor Weibo Gong, also a Harvard PhD and a former doctoral student of Professor Ho's, helped in the hosting.

On November 1, we will be hosting, through the efforts of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, Dr. Les Servi of Mitre, who, coincidentally, had the same PhD advisor at Harvard, Dr. Ho, as did Dr. Fu and Dr. Gong. I have known Les since we overlapped at Brown University. Both Les and Michael are INFORMS Fellows and outstanding scholars. Dr. Servi will be speaking on social media and sports, with a focus on his work in soccer -- it should be a fascinating talk, Last time that he spoke in our series, his topic was on pirates off the coast of Africa! And he gets paid to work on such interesting projects.

Mathematics of Planet Earth -- Special Issue of Computational Management Science

According to the website for Mathematics of Planet Earth MPE2013: More than a hundred scientific societies, universities, research institutes, and organizations all over the world have banded together to dedicate 2013 as a special year for the Mathematics of Planet Earth.

 The theme “Mathematics of Planet Earth” is interpreted as broadly as possible. In addition to climate change and sustainability, it includes geophysics, ecology and epidemiology, biodiversity, as well as the global organization of the planet by humans. The different topics have been classified into four themes.

The four themes of MPE2013:
* A PLANET TO DISCOVER: oceans; meteorology and climate; mantle processes, natural resources, solar systems
* A PLANET SUPPORTING LIFE: ecology, biodiversity, evolution
* A PLANET ORGANIZED BY HUMANS: political, economic, social and financial systems; organization of transport and communications networks; management of resources; energy
* A PLANET AT RISK: climate change, sustainable development, epidemics; invasive species, natural disasters.

I became aware of this great initiative last May when I spoke at the Computational Management Science conference in Montreal, Canada,  and heard from Professor Georges Zaccour that he, and Professor Michele Breton, were guest editing a special issue of the journal Computational Management Science on this theme.  Since last year I was on sabbatical and spending a lot of time at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, sustainability continues to be a major theme in my research. Plus, the emphasis on the environment in Gothenburg and in Sweden, overall, made for a perfect venue in which to work on a paper for this special issue. Our paper, Supply Chain Network Sustainability Under Competition and Frequencies of Activities from Production to Distribution, Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, and Jonas Floden, is now in press in this special issue  of Computational Management Science.

I was delighted to see the Preface to this special issue online on the journal website  The special issue, according to the Guest Editors Breton and Zaccour,  has 7 papers written by scholars having an extensive expertise in mathematical modeling and in environmental issues.The objective of this issue is to report on recent advances in modeling and in the development of computational methods for environmental issues such as global warming, pollution control, adaptation, sustainable exploitation of resources (forests, fisheries, etc(, sustainable supply chains, and more!

I expect that the hardcopy of the full issue will be produced soon since the contributions are online -- I am so looking forward to receiving my copy.

Congrats to the Guest Editors and thank you for your hard work which made this special volume possible! Also, thanks to the long-serving Editor of CMS, Professor Berc Rustem, for being a visionary.

Computer Programming is Good for the Brain and the Soul

Being creative is part of our DNA.

Some of us are artists, musicians, scientists, writers, educators, technologists and engineers, leaders of corporations, doctors and nurses, and/or entrepreneurs.

Being creative requires focus to accomplish the task and in this world of increasing distractions and interruptions (some of it caused by advances in computer technology) I argue that computer programming is good for the brain and for the soul.

Computer programming requires precision, attention to detail, creativity in terms of identifying the appropriate data structures and the design of the software, and knowledge of the underlying algorithm(s), whether developed by you or by someone else. You need to have patience and stamina and having curiosity also helps. I am always eager to see how the software programs that I develop will work. We strive for correctness of our codes and of the algorithms that we implement, with the realization that, even if initially developed as research, they may eventually be applied to solve problems ranging from those in transportation, energy, and infrastructure, to healthcare, supply chains, financial analysis, and even disaster planning and management.

In writing a computer program you are creating something that is useful and something that may be quite novel and original.

I have written previously about the importance of including computer programming in curricula and hope that every child before graduating from high school gets a chance to explore the power (and joy) of computer programming. Such experiences would add to a deeper understanding of technology and the underlying algorithms and would create, I believe, a richer appreciation of mathematics and its role in our world today.


Recently, I have been working on different computer programs (software codes) for game theory problems in applications ranging from the redesign of the Internet, on a project funded by NSF,  to competition in supply chain networks with outsourcing. There is great satisfaction in seeing the mathematical models that one develops and implements algorithms for actually being solved with code that you have programmed yourself. It is very rewarding to see your focus and efforts resulting in what is a type of product. One can then also address and answer so many interesting questions through simulations!

Hence, computer programming is good for the soul, too!

A College President Who Is Improving the Computing Climate

Dr. Maria Klawe, the President of Harvey Mudd College in California, has created initiatives for enhancing the climate for computing.

She is a native Canadian (like I am) and holds a PhD in Mathematics and was also working on her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, when she was offered a faculty position there. In 2002, she moved to become Dean at Princeton University of its school of engineering and applied sciences (coincidentally, Harvard has a similar school and its present dean is also a female, Cherry Murray). This time, her husband followed her and, before long, her administrative skills were recognized and she was regularly recruited. The opening of the Presidency of Harvey Mudd College caught her attention -- she applied and in three years has made major inroads, both in terms of financial fund raising as well as academic and intellectual leadership.

Partially, through her efforts, the introductory course in computer science at Harvey Mudd has now been redesigned to make it more welcoming and "fun." In addition, she has secured funding for about 100 female students to attend the Grace Murray Hopper annual conference, named after the legendary female and computer programmer.

According to an article, published in yesterday's New York Times:  “Most of the female students were unwilling to go on in computer science because of the stereotypes they had grown up with,” said Zachary Dodds, a computer scientist at Mudd. “We realized we were helping perpetuate that by teaching such a standard course.” 

To reduce the intimidation factor, the course was divided into two sections — “gold,” for those with no prior experience, and “black” for everyone else. Java, a notoriously opaque programming language, was replaced by a more accessible language called Python. And the focus of the course changed to computational approaches to solving problems across science. 

“We realized that we needed to show students computer science is not all about programming,” said Ran Libeskind-Hadas, chairman of the department. “It has intellectual depth and connections to other disciplines.”

The article in The New York Times also discusses whether such ideas are scalable to other universities and colleges.

We need to nurture the intellects of all, and to create opportunities and support for all, especially in our technology-driven society. Without mathematics, operations research, computer science, engineering, and, of course, algorithms, implemented in software, coupled with the best of the social and behavioral sciences, the many problems that we are faced with today will not be solved.

You can read more about Dr. Maria Klawe, my exploits at the World Science Festival in NYC, and activities of female mathematicians in this edition of the  Association for Women in Mathematics  Newsletter.

Networks and Operations Research, Patterns and Big Data -- So How Does Money and Traffic Flow?

We've heard about the new geography -- now we are hearing about the new mathematics and at the prestigious Goldman Sachs technology conference that took place recently in San Francisco.

There, as noted by Quentin Hardy, writing for The New York Times, Steve Mills, IBM's senior vice president for software and systems was quoted as saying that when it comes to algorithms, "If I can do a power grid, I can do water supply..." Even traffic, which like water and electricity has value when it flows effectively. Moreover, Mills is quoted as saying in terms of cross-pollination and finding commonalities and patterns with the help of big data and algorithms that we are now: "leveraging the cost structure of new mathematics."

When I read about flows and especially in the context of transportation, electric power grids, natural resources, and finance, of course, networks and operations research and even economics immediately come to my mind since I have been researching and writing about the topic for many years.

I have always been fascinated by the commonality among problems and find that networks and the associated methodologies, such as optimization theory, game theory, variational inequality theory, and projected dynamical systems, provide a captivating medium for visualization, analysis, and computation and a way of bridging disciplines.

In our research and publications, we were able to answer several open questions, raised over a half a century ago:

1. How does money flow -- does it flow like water or electricity (raised by Cohen in 1952).

2. How are electric power generations and distribution networks like transportation networks (raised by Beckmann, McGuire, and Winsten in their classic 1956 book, Studies in the Economics of Transportation).

You can see the answers to the above questions in our papers in Computational Management Science and Naval Research Logistics, respectively.

In addition, we established, through a supernetwork formalism, how supply chain network equilibrium problems could be reformulated and solved as transportation network equilibrium problems -- thereby, constructing a common conceptual, modeling, and algorithmic framework for these two important classes of problems. That paper, On the Relationship Between Supply Chain and Transportation Network Equilibria: A Supernetwork Equivalence with Computations, was published in Transportation Research E 42: (2006) pp 293-316.

I also have a synthesis of the above equivalences in my Supply Chain Network Economic: Dynamics of Prices, Flows, and Profits book, which was published in 2006 and written that glorious year when I was a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

For those of you who are interested in the history of networks, with a focus on financial networks, and which includes a reference to Cohen above, please see my presentation on Financial Networks delivered at the Workshop on Measuring Systemic Risk, courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the University of Chicago in December 2010.

What seems like new mathematics (as was the case also with the new geography) to some is that now a wider circle is coming to realize the importance of research that has been going on for quite a long time, with major innovations over decades (frankly, centuries). Yes, I think it is really cool when an algorithm I implemented for predicting urban traffic flows can also be used to predict product flows on supply chain networks or financial transactions. Even major corporations are starting to notice.

And the Winners Are!

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of attending the sixth annual Innovation Challenge at UMass Amherst in which 11 teams competed during this first phase in the 2010-2011 challenge. These 11 teams were the finalists out of 25.

I highlighted this competition in an earlier blogspost. What impressed me was the number of teams with green / social entrepreneurship themes.

In my humble opinion, ALL of the TEAMS are winners -- they delivered their 2 minute elevator pitches to a large audience and a panel of judges and were subject to intense questioning from the judges about their startup company ideas and business plans. There was at least one case of stage fright when the speaker could not go on. Another team-mate stepped in to save the team.

The event took place on the tenth floor of the UMass Campus Center with gorgeous views, even of the sun setting.

The teams that were selected to receive financial funding (all from private donations) for this phase are:

o 3D Therapeutics - $2,500
o Aha! Productions - $1,000
o Bacteriotix - $2,500
o Flexolyte - $2,500
o Posytive - $1,500.

Both the first and third teams above had ideas dealing with drug delivery (and testing) mechanisms as service providers. Flexolyte proposed a battery for electric cars that would not be sensitive to exploding (as lithium batteries can be). Posytive has developed software to assist in engineering design and Aha! Productions competed last year and also has potential engineering apps.

Note that out of all the "green" teams only Flexolyte received funding, at this stage.

I was impressed by GreenAgency with its potential to "jump over" the smart grid, and with GreenNav's thrust into determining optimal routes of travel using different criteria (but as someone who researches this topic I hope that a distinction is made between system-optimization and user-optimization). Climate Risk Planning has a potential partner already with an insurance company. I am interested in finding out which peer-reviewed climate models that group would actually be using at a high level of disagreggation. Safety Through Green proposed specially-treated bamboo and house designs so that cement would not be used in production and these structures would be more resilient to earthquakes (and their production more environmentally-friendly, apparently).

I also enjoyed listening to Last Mile Wireless with potential to bring broadband to parts of western MA which lack it now.

The last team, SHM, may give Groupon a run for the money, some day.

What also impressed me was that several teams mentioned the importance of algorithms to their proposed companies.

All can still compete in the second phase with the date of April 28, 2011.

Congrats to all the teams for their passion and ideas and best of luck!

Thanks to VCRE Dr. Mike Malone and to Ms. Heather Demers for a truly thrilling event!

It was an honor to serve as a Faculty Advisor for this competition.