A Night to Remember -- Japan RSAI Honors Professor David E. Boyce for his Transportation Research

I am back from Ottawa, Canada where I took part in the 59th Annual North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International, November 7-10, 2012.

On Friday, November 9th, 2012, I attended a truly special dinner honoring the contributions of Professor David E. Boyce. I had blogged earlier about the conference as well as a special dinner invitation that I received from Professor Yoshiro Higano, the President of the Japan Section of the RSAI (Regional Science Association International).

The dinner took place at the Sterling restaurant outside of Ottawa.

Professor Boyce was honored with a special award on the 50th anniversary of the Japan Section of the RSAI for his paper, "Predicting Road Traffic Route Flows Uniquely for Urban Transportation Planning, " published in the  Studies in Regional Science, vol.42, no.1, The 50th Anniversary Special Issue.

In his statement, Professor Higano noted that Professor David Boyce is an expert in transportation planning. He has been engaged for many years in practical urban transportation planning in large urban areas including Chicago in the US and has actively participated in international scholarly meetings of regional science, transportation planning, urban and regional planning, and so on.

In fact, Professor David E. Boyce  has attended 49 North American meetings of the Regional Science Association International in the past 49 years!    What an amazing scientific feat and, as he told me, also luck!

Professor Higano noted that the traffic assignment model, which was developed by Professor Boyce and his heirs in the field of Transportation Engineering, has had  a great impact on practice and theory in the field of urban transportation planning in Japan in 1970’s. The methodology was based on stochastic probability theory.

I can personally attest to Professor David E. Boyce's scholarship and will always value his mentorship and friendship as research in traffic network equilibrium has evolved over the decades!

He remembers the first time that he met me and that was at the regional science conference in Denver, Colorado, shortly after I had received my PhD from Brown University. My dissertation advisor, Professor Stella Dafermos, who passed away in 1990, and I had traveled to the conference.

Below, I have posted some photos of the exceptional meal and ceremony in Ottawa, hosted by Professor Higano in honor of Professor Boyce -- the conversation, stories, and laughter we will always treasure.

Congratulations to Professor David E. Boyce, who, among his many other notable recognitions, is also an INFORMS Fellow and an RSAI Fellow!

Traffic Assignment and the UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series

Today we will be hosting Dr. Hillel Bar-Gera of Israel in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Spring 2009 Speaker Series. He will be speaking on a new algorithm for traffic assignment. His talk will take place at the Isenberg School of Management in Room 112 at 11AM. There is a lot of excitement surrounding his visit and presentation. Dr. Bar-Gera's dissertation advisor at the University of Illinois at Chicago was Professor David E. Boyce, who received the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award from the Transportation Science Section of INFORMS (the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). Professor Boyce is now a Professor Emeritus and is affiliated with Northwestern University. He is also a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International and renowned for his work in transportation and regional planning. Dr. Bar-Gera is spending this year in the US and has been based both at Arizona and at Purdue.

Effective and efficient algorithms for large-scale congested networks, including transportation, are critical in evaluating traffic flows on networks, and associated costs and travel times; where new roads should be built (or not); how to determine optimal tolls (a big topic now even in developing countries and especially in China); how to determine optimal and equilibrium product flows in supply chains, and even how to predict flows and prices in electric power generation and distribution networks. In today's competitive economies, one needs to be able to not only conceptualize difficult problems and to model them but also to solve them! Hence, algorithms and good implementation of them are essential to practice. I have been conducting research in large-scale network models, analysis, algorithms, and applications since receiving my PhD at Brown and teaching and researching in this area is always exciting and fun. Plus it is very rewarding to see one's publications not only cited but results in them applied.

This semester is the 10th semester that I have been advising and helping the award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter organize its Speaker Series, which has brought about 70 speakers to the Isenberg School. Students have heard talks this year by Tom Vanderbilt, the author of the book, "Traffic," by Professor Daron Acemoglu of MIT, who is a recipient of the Bates Medal, by Dr. Grace Lin, of Global Solutions at IBM, by Dr. Alex Pentland, the author of the book, "Honest Signals." The series also gave a platform to two of our newest faculty members at the Isenberg School, Professors Ahmed Ghoniem and Senay Solak, to speak on their fascinating and highly original research. Professor Kevin Fu of the Computer Science department at UMass Amherst spoke on implantable medical devices and security issues. This semester, we hosted Professor Ellis Johnson, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, who is from Georgia Tech. Professor Hari Balasubramanian of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at UMass Amherst regaled the audience with his experiences of working and researching healthcare at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Professor June Dong of SUNY Oswego informed the audience of the unexpected and wide-ranging impact of supply chain disruptions.

On May 8, 2009, we will be hearing the last speaker in this year's series, Professor Robert Pollin, speak about "green jobs."

I believe that education takes place both in and out of the classroom. Organizing, running, advertising, etc., such a series requires a lot of hard work as well as financing, which we manage to stitch together creatively. The other day an undergrad (a junior) wandered into my office and we ended up talking for an hour about the speaker series, research on networks, and even PhD programs. This undergrad told me that on Fridays when there is no speaker he is disappointed. Hence, even with the economic and financial crisis affecting endowments in a major way, how can one turn off/shut down such a series?! Yesterday, another undergrad (a graduating senior) came to my office to chat. We talked about the transportation & logistics class that I taught last semester and that he took; we talked about how terrific the Operations Management major is at the Isenberg School; we talked about future opportunities and some contacts that I had had recently with companies interested in advancing their supply chains, and, yes, we talked about today's speaker, Dr. Bar-Gera, and his upcoming presentation on traffic assignment algorithms. One story that this undergrad shared with me that I really enjoyed was that his parents told him that even as a 5 year old he was absolutely fascinated by traffic!

So with renewed energy and enthusiasm, we are now in the process of starting to plan next year's UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series. Many thanks for the support that we receive for doing this series. In the end, seeing the audience listening and interacting with the speakers and then continuing the discussions days and weeks afterwards is a priceless dimension of this addition to the educational/intellectual enterprise. I/we can't thank the speakers enough for their brilliance and generosity in sharing their work with us! You have opened the eyes and the world to many!