On Giving Plenary Talks - Off to Canada for Analytics Day!

Conferences are essential to scientific exchanges and also to networking. Plus, one gets to reconnect face-to-face with colleagues from around the globe and to make new contacts and even friends. Travel to new locations is always interesting and revisiting even places where you have been before can be quite informative and pleasant.

In most conferences there are usually special talks given by plenary (or keynote) speakers. Such speakers typically will have a longer time slot in which to present their work and the speakers are selected by conference organizers to draw interest to their events. I enjoy listening to plenary speakers and also enjoy being one.

Whenever I get a notice for a conference, I usually check whether there will be a female plenary speaker. Some may not notice such things, but I do, and it is important to have diversity represented even at the highest levels.

Tomorrow I will be flying to Toronto, Canada, since on Friday, April 15, I will be giving a plenary talk at Analytics Day at the University of Waterloo. This university is renowned for research in optimization and, coincidentally, I gave an invited seminar there in Management Sciences almost exactly 5 years ago!

Analytics Day was organized by Professor Fatma Gzara and it will bring together academics and practitioners as well as students. The program is online.

I presented Professor Gzara with several topics and she selected: Predictive and Prescriptive Models of  Cybercrime and Cybersecurity Investments Under Network Vulnerability.  Cybersecurity is a very hot topic and I have given recent talks on this theme at the MITRE Corporation and also at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University.

It will be exciting to be back in Canada, the country of my birth.

I have given plenary talks in some fabulous locations and thank the organizers of various conferences for these great opportunities. Last summer, for example, I traveled to Colombia, to speak at a conference in Bogota and had such a magical time that I had to blog about it.

One year ago, I was in Berlin, Germany, to address the largest physics conference in Europe.  Clearly, research on networks, which has always been my passion, has no disciplinary boundaries. It's also terrific to see operations researchers welcomed by different disciplines and, in a sense, at the highest levels.

I also very much enjoyed giving a plenary talk in Rome, Italy,  and even in Auckland, New Zealand. I posted some photos from the New Zealand experience here. I wrote a blogpost about my experiences in Rome which can be accessed here.   I remember fondly getting lost while taking a long walk in Rome and seeing quite a few nuns (I suspect it may have been the delicious but very spiked dessert I had consumed) and glorious architecture and sites. I also remember (not so fondly) almost getting run over by the vehicles (almost saw my life pass by) while trying to cross the streets.

I thoroughly loved speaking in Paris at the NetGCoop conference in 2011 in October. Professor Asu Ozdaglar of MIT was another female plenary speaker at this conference focusing on networks, which was extra special.

I do believe that female researchers should accept invitations to deliver plenary talks at conferences since it is important for  students (male and female)  and others to see the great opportunities that the academic life provides. 

And seeing is believing.

What is Hot at Computational Management Science

This is the third day of the Computational Management Science Conference, which is taking place in Montreal, Canada.

The weather has been warm and the sun is shining.

The talks have been great and we have been treated to 3 outstanding plenaries (I blogged about Dr. Yinyu Ye of Stanford University and his presentation in my previous post.). Yesterday, Professor von Stengel of the London School of Economics spoke about the Game Theory Explorer and aplications and today we were treated to Professor Michele Breton of GERAD and HEC (the venue for the conference) and highlights of her research with her PhD students on recursive methods for pricing financial derivatives.

This is my kind of conference -- wonderful lunches, coffee breaks, great discussions, with about 130 participants, very international, and, as is fairly typical for CMS, a female plenary speaker. I admit I gave one of the plenary talks at CMS in Vienna and was not even the only female plenary speaker at that conference.

The methodological sessions have included sessions on stochastic programming, dynamic games (and applications), robust optimization, and more.

I have very much enjoyed the energy application sessions which featured, among others, Professor Steve Gabriel of the U. of Maryland and Professor Warren Powell of Princeton, who noted that energy practitioners with whom he works call the delivery of electric power as `trucking`and putting electrons on wheels. This reminded me of the classic book by Beckmann, McGuire, and Winsten, Studies in the Economics of Transportation, in which they hypothesized that electric power generation and distribution networks behave like congested urban transportation networks. We have done research on the commonalities and have exploited these to formulate and solve the electric power supply chain for New England in a paper co-authored with Dr. Zugang Liu, which was published in Naval Research Logistics in 2009. Gabriel spoke on his model for the global gas market. He mentioned Ukraine several times and, since that is my heritage, he had me at the edge of my seat.

I also enjoyed energy talks by Professor David Fuller from the University of Waterloo, where I have spoken at on several occasions, and several speakers at our CMS conference talked about game theory models and complementarity approaches.

I spoke on Wednesday about our big NSF project on the Future Internet Architecture, which we call Choicenet, and on specific network economics and game theory modeling work that I did with Professor Tilman Wolf of UMass Amherst using variational inequality theory. My talk was in the first session of the conference, after the first plenary tallk, and I am also speaking in the last session today on our work with Professor Min Yu on time-based competition.

Yesterday, we had the editorial board meeting for the journal (of the same name as the conference), Computational Management Science, and it was great to hear of special issues that are coming out and are being planned. Professor Berc Rustem, of Imperial College, led the lunch board meeting and it was great to see many of our colleagues, including Professor Georg Pflug from Vienna, Austria, and Professor Daniel Kuhn of Imperial College.

My special issue on Financial Networks, which is a double issue, should be out within the next 3 months, I am told, which is very exciting.

Of course, there are also sessions on transportation and on vehicle routing since colleagues here in Canada have been long-time contributors to these application domains. No need to even mention the names of Professors Gilbert Laporte, Patrice Marcotte, and Michel Gendcreau, but I am and it was wonderful to see them all here in Montreal.

The finance sessions have also been great!

Thanks to the organizers for putting on such a rewarding conference intellectually, personally, socially, and professionally.

Kudos to Professor Georges Zaccour who has worked tirelessly to make this conference a big success!

And for those of you who are interested, the CMS conference will be in Portugal next year.