Dynamics of Disasters - A Conference Not to be Missed

The number of disasters is growing as well as the number of people affected by them from the Ebola epidemic in western Africa to the floods in Kashmir to humanitarian crises in war-torn Syria, Iraq, and eastern Ukraine. 

The challenges faced by citizens, humanitarian organizations, governments, and even businesses in dealing with disasters are immense and the research questions have never been more timely.

Together, with Professors Panos M. Pardalos and Ilias Kotsireas, we are organizing a conference that will take place in Greece this summer that should not be missed.

The conference is on the theme Dynamics of Disasters and the topics that we are seeking papers and presentations on are below:

• Disaster communications and social networks
• Healthcare issues and disaster relief
• Disaster team coordination, integration, and synergies
• Humanitarian logistics and relief supply chains
• Advances in methodological tools for emergency preparedness, response, and risk mitigation
• Performance metrics for disaster response
• Critical infrastructure protection and resiliency
• Financial funding for disaster relief
• Learning from disasters and response
• Cooperative game theory
• Dynamical systems
• Decision-making under risk and uncertainty
• Spread of diseases and contagion
• Modelling and mathematics of disasters.

The Program Committee is nearly complete and we are thrilled to have such a knowledgable and international group:

1. Irene Abi-Zeid (Universite Laval, Quebec, Canada)
2. Bradley Adame (Arizona State University, USA)
3. Fuad Aleskerov (Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia)
4. Ashwin Arulselvan (Technische Universitaet Berlin, Germany)
5. Burcu Balcik (Ozyegin University, Industrial Engineering Department, Istanbul, Turkey)
6. Dirk Brockmann (Institute for Theoretical Biology, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany)
7. Sergiy Butenko (Texas A&M, USA)
8. Patrizia Daniele (University of Catania, Italy)
9. Stanislaw Grzeda (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, USA)
10. Jose Holguin-Veras (RPI, USA)
11. Jacquleen Joseph (Jamsetji Tata Centre for Disaster Management, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India)
12. Joo-Young Jung (International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan)
13. Athanasia Karakitsiou (Industrial Logistics, ETS Institute, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden)
14. Rob Kevlihan (Kimmage Development Studies Centre, Dublin, Ireland)
15. Evangelos Kranakis (Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada)
16. Bishawjit Mallick (Karlsruhe, Germany)
17. Claude Miller (The University of Oklahoma, USA)
18. Athanasios Migdalas (Industrial Logistics, ETS Institute, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden)
19. Oleg Prokopyev (Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA)
20. Olivier Rubin (Department of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University, Denmark)
21. Karen Smilowitz (Northwestern University, USA)
22. Fuminori Toyasaki (Logistics and Disaster and Emergency Management, York University, Toronto, Canada)
23. Chrysafis Vogiatzis (University of Florida, USA)
24. Tina Wakolbinger (Institute for Transport and Logistics Management, Vienna, Austria)
25. Francesco Zirilli (Universita di Roma La Sapienza, Italy).

Information on the conference, including the venue and the deadline for paper submissions is at:
 http://www.caopt.com/DOD2015/index.html

I hope that you can join us - we need the best minds to tackle the problems that we are facing.

How to Build a Great Model -- Insights from Hal Varian

I have chaired 16 doctoral dissertation committees and tomorrow my 17th doctoral student will be defending his dissertation. In academia, we sometimes refer to the chair of a student's doctoral dissertation committee as his/her "advisor."

So, necessarily, a conscientious advisor offers advice to students during his/her doctoral studies especially when it comes time to doing research for the dissertation. Here one may help in selecting the topic, suggesting related problems, assisting a student in getting papers out for publication in journals, listening to a student give a talk/seminar, etc.

It is rewarding, as a faculty member, to see a student's progress and the greatest moment comes after the dissertation is successfully defended and the student receives the diploma wearing the cap and gown. Having a student get a really nice job is also important (to the student and his family and also to the advisor who has also invested a lot of time).

I regularly offer my students advice -- even what publications they should read and send them links to interesting articles -- these can be in newspapers or magazines or journals or even working papers.

Of course, it also is very helpful to read articles on how to do great research and to write papers.

Hal R. Varian who needs no introduction to many and is now the Chief Economist of Google and an emeritus professor at UC Berkeley, having been the founding Dean of the School of Information there, wrote a piece, "How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time," which is very useful not only to economists, but to operations researchers, and mathematical modelers, in general. An aside, my first book, "Network Economics: A Variational Inequality Approach," appeared  in 1993 was the first volume in the Advances in Computational Economics series by Kluwer (now Springer), and then appeared in revised form in 1999. And, Hal Varian was on the editorial board as was Dan McFadden, who has since received the Nobel Prize. Plus, Hal will be giving a plenary talk at EURO -- INFORMS, in Rome, Italy, July 1-4, 2013.; the link to the conference website is here.

His advice:

• Look for ideas in the world, not in the journals. (especially The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist -- all personal favorites of mine, as well)
• First make your model as simple as possible, then generalize it and you may go back and forth. (Try out simple examples.)
• Look at the literature later, not sooner.
• Model your paper after your seminar. (Here he emphasizes the importance of presenting your work to an audience. He also suggests setting your paper aside for awhile and then going back to it.)
• Stop when you've made your point.

I loved how he compared developing a model and the associated creative process to sculpting. I take great pleasure in my research and do get a thrill like when I paint or look at art when the model makes sense, is elegant, and also abstracts something relevant and interesting in the real world.

According to Hal Varian: This back-and-forth iteration in building a model is like sculpting: you are chipping away a little bit here, and a little bit there, hoping to find what's really inside that stubborn block of marble. I choose the analogy with sculpting purposely: like sculpture most of the work in building a model doesn't consist of adding things, it consists of subtracting them. This is the most fun part of modeling, and it can be very exciting when the form of the idea really begins to take shape. I normally walk around in a bit of a daze at this stage; and I try not to get too far away from a yellow pad. Eventually, if you're lucky, the inner workings of your model will reveal itself: you'll see the simple core of what's going on and you'll also understand how general the phenomenon really is.