The Brian Lehrer Show and the New Isenberg School of Management Dean

Today I had the pleasure of joining Iain Couzin of Princeton University for the Traffic Jam interview segment of the Brian Lehrer Show in New York City. I especially appreciated how Lehrer interwove our expertise into the interview and conversation. Couzin is a mathematical biologist who researches animal behavior, including herding. He has also studied human pedestrians. The segment was motivated by Mayor Bloomberg's closure of Broadway from 42nd to 47st Streets. Yesterday, we checked out this part of Broadway, which was filled with happy pedestrians.

First, I was picked up by a black vehicle in front of my hotel and then driven to the WNYC Studio on Varick Street where the Brian Lehrer Show is broadcast from. I had to present a photo ID to get in and was then escorted to a waiting area. I got to meet another guest that Lehrer was interviewing that morning (about student loans), whose mother, coincidentally, went to the same high school as I did -- Yonkers High!

Tomorrow morning we will be rehearsing the Traffic segment for the World Science Festival. It is terrific to see so many banners and posted around NYU publicizing this 5 day festival, which began yesterday evening with a magnificent gala at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center. Our Traffic panel will be at the Kimmel Center at NYU. There is seating for 500 with 100 seats available on the balcony.

Today is a very important day for another reason as well. After, literally, months of searching, conducting interviews with finalists, and negotiations, UMass Amherst made the official announcement. Dr. Mark Fuller of Washington State University will be the new Dean of the Isenberg School of Management. He will be holding an endowed chair in honor of our former dean, Dr. Tom O'Brien, who served as our dean for an amazing 19 years! Given the amount of time that the search committee and the UMass Amherst administration spent on this critically important search, we are delighted to have it come to a positive ending.

As a member of the ISOM Dean search committee, I thank my wonderful colleagues and fellow search committee members, as well as those who applied for and interviewed for this position.

Opening Night Gala Performance at Lincoln Center, World Science Festival, and More Information

Tonight the World Science Festival in New York City begins with the opening night gala at the newly refurbished/redesigned Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center. The gala is to celebrate the opening of the 2009 World Science Festival and to honor Edward O. Wilson, the world-renowned scientist and professor at Harvard University, on his 80th birthday. The lineup for tonight's sold out performance, which I will be attending, includes: Alan Alda, Glenn Close, Marin Alsop, Joshua Bell, Danny Burstein, Christine Baranski, Yo-Yo Ma, Anna Deavere Smith, the National Dance Institute, and the Inspirational Voices of Abyssinian Baptist Church. The gala is directed and produced by Damian Woetzel.

The evening will include the New York premiere of Frans Lanting's: "LIFE: A Journey Through Time," a multimedia performance, especially adapted for the World Science Festival.

Tomorrow I will be doing a live interview on the Brian Lehrer Show in NYC as part of the Traffic segment, along with Iain Couzin of Princeton University. We are scheduled for 11:25-11:40AM. The interview will be streamed live.

Robert Krulwich of ABC News and NPR, a renowned science journalist and reporter, will be moderating the Traffic panel on Friday evening that I am on with Couzin and Mitchell Joachim.

The producers of the World Science Festival are also trying to schedule me for another interview during the WSF. Given all the associated special events and programs at this year's festival, we will see if there is sufficient slack to fit another interview in!

World Science Festival, New York City, Traffic

I am getting ready for the World Science Festival, which takes place in New York City, June 10-14, 2009. There will be a gala to open up the festival this coming Wednesday night and to also honor the 80th birthday of E. O. Wilson, the scientist from Harvard, who needs no introductions. I will be a panelist on the "Traffic" segment that will take place on Friday evening. My co-panelists are Iain Couzin of Princeton University and Mitchell Joachim of Columbia University and the Parsons School of Design. The excitement surrounding the 2009 World Science Festival is palpable! It is an incredible venue in which to celebrate science, creativity, and the world around us!

The Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, where I teach and conduct research on networks, is also publicizing the event and has issued a press release. The Traffic segment is especially timely, given Mayor Bloomberg's initiative in closing Broadway from 47th to 42th Street to create pedestrian plazas!

The Bement School, Graduation, Reflections, and General Motors

Graduations mark milestones in not only the graduating students' lives but also serve as testaments to the families, teachers, friends, and neighbors, who have supported the students. We live in Amherst, Massachusetts, which has been recently selected to be the best college town in North America (beating out such great locations as Berkeley, Cambridge, Washington, DC, and even Montreal)! The beauty in our town is breath-taking and each of the four seasons brings its own uniqueness. Since we are a college town with UMass Amherst, Amherst College, and Hampshire College as the focal educational institutions, and with Smith College and Mount Holyoke College in neighboring towns, education is always valued here (indeed, this sector is the biggest employer). During the glorious months of May and June many graduations take place and it is always a joy to participate in them. I have written recently about the UMass Amherst graduations and festivities at the Isenberg School. Today I am writing about another, truly special, school, The Bement School, from which my daughter graduated yesterday.

The Bement School, located in Deerfield, MA, is a K-9 grade school and includes accommodations for boarders in the higher grades. Day students come from several different states and the boarders, who live at the school, which is in historic Deerfield, hail from South Korea, China, Mexico, Singapore, and from across the United States. There have been boarders, in the past, from European countries, as well. The school is a truly special place in which students are nurtured, teachers are respected, individuality is supported, arts and music treasured, and doing one's best and working hard in a community of kindness, recognized.

My daughter, along with her 21 9th grade classmates, graduated from Bement yesterday, on a picture perfect day in ceremonies conducted outside. She, with 5 of her classmates, has been at Bement since kindergarten, so yesterday marked a decade of association with this incredible educational institution. I had been appointed the John F. Smith Memorial Professor at the Isenberg School of Management, just before her matriculation at Bement, and purchased a GM Chevy Venture when she started kindergarten ten years ago. This was only appropriate since my chaired professorship was endowed by John "Jack" F. Smith, Jr., a UMass Amherst alum, who was then CEO and Chairman of the Board of General Motors. Well, I am pleased to report, that my Chevy venture is still running great and my daughter is now a Bement graduate. GM has been in the news a lot lately and with its reconfiguration and support by the Obama administration, I hope that it becomes reinvented and a new US manufacturing icon.

As for my daughter's classmates, I can only thank them and their parents for their outstanding support, for their unique and special personalities, and for their work ethic and wonderful talents. This class has experienced so much together -- from numerous sports events and musical and theatrical performances, to community service, to dances, to lasting friendships that have been made through shared adventures and trips. The landmark experience, which I wrote about early on in this blog was their trip to the Dominican Republic in January 2009 to help out in "La Suiza," a boy's orphanage. All returned transformed and with a deepened appreciation of their values and the importance of community service, kindness and love. This group of Bementers has been through deaths of parents of several of their classmates and illnesses of their classmates. They have stood together, laughed and cried together, and have become more resilient together. Yesterday, at graduation, they sang together and marched together, while everyone applauded their receipt of their diplomas.

I also thank Ms. Shelley Borror Jackson, the Head of Bement, who arrived as head the same time as the 2009 graduating class of Bement. Under her outstanding leadership, Bement has marked a decade of growth with the building of the new Upper School and library, memorable experiences (children learning how to swim, skate, and ski, and to climb mountains), and wonderful education (children learning new languages, world history, advanced math, science, and the love of reading and writing), that we will treasure in our hearts always. Most importantly, Bement lets children grow up at their own pace.

Thank you, Bement, for your outstanding teachers, coaches, and staff! If only every child could receive the type of education that you provide!

I share some photos with you of Bement Graduation Day, June 5, 2009.

Plane Crash on the Same Day I was Flying (Deja Vu)

Our sincerest sympathies go out to the families and friends of the victims of the Air France plane disaster this past Sunday. The plane was flying from Rio to Paris and all perished in the Atlantic. A 3 mile area in the ocean has now been identified with the plane debris. It will take a long time to identify the cause of the crash.

Strangely, this is the second time in 2009 that I have been flying on the same day as a plane crash. Last February, I blogged about my trip to Dallas to give a talk at the INFORMS Chapter. I flew the same day as the plane crash in Buffalo and last Sunday I was flying back from Rome, Italy. The flight back from Rome was very comfortable except that the female in front of me was seriously ill during the landing and the food critic who was seated behind me also was suffering and told me that she is terrified of takeoffs and landings.

I remember flying back to Boston from Erice via Milan the morning after the Italians beat the French in the World Cup in soccer in 2006. The festivities following the win in Italy were spectacular with fireworks and much partying. I did not expect the Alitalia crew to be able to fly but fly back to the US we did. However, while taking the shuttle back to Amherst from Logan I had an uneasy feeling and asked the driver whether the tunnel we were going through (a product of the Big Dig) was in good shape. The next morning I read in the paper how only a few hours after my query part of the tunnel roof collapsed and a young woman who was in a car died. The suit was just recently settled.

Dr. Arnie Barnett, who is an expert on risk and airplane disasters and is a faculty member at MIT spoke in our INFORMS Speaker Series at UMass Amherst in the Fall 2007. The title of his presentation was "Is it Really Safe to Fly?" I could use a conversation with him now but, luckily, my upcoming speaking engagements I can reach by car and train.

Photos of Rome, Italy

This past week I was blogging about the NET2009 conference in Rome, Italy and my travel/transportation experiences. Since, sometimes, a picture may be worth one thousand words, I am posting some photos of Rome, with the proviso that I was not on a Roman holiday but at a conference.

Planes, Trains, Automobiles, and Bicycles

I returned yesterday from the NET2009 conference in Rome, Italy. Taking a taxi at 7:00AM on a Sunday to the Rome airport allowed me to experience free flow traffic in that usually very congested city. Rather than an hour trip between these two points as was my experience the previous Tuesday morning during rush hour traffic, the trip took only 20 minutes. There was congestion, however, in the Rome airport where the queues even at that time were sizable due to many departing international flights. Serendipitously, while standing in the line for security I started a conversation with a gentleman next to me who works for American Airlines and had received a PhD in industrial engineering from Purdue University several years back. So, of course, we talked about faculty and students that we both knew.

Our Air One flight (Alitalia and Air One have, in effect, merged) left an hour late but we still somehow managed to arrive on time at Logan in Boston. The food was terrific on the flight and the air crew and staff very gracious and friendly. The flight allowed me to reminisce about the experiences in Rome for the past several days, which included (over and above the conference experiences):

being asked by a nun in Italian for directions (for some reason, almost any place I have traveled to I have been asked for directions in the native tongue, including in Japan),

seeing the effects of a multi-hour transportation worker stoppage on a Saturday in Rome (busses, taxis, trains did not operate, with a consequence that some tourists were left to walk for miles since the tour busses that had deposited them would not move),

after consuming wonderful pastries, which, I suspect, had too much rum in them, ending up wandering "lost" in Rome, trying to find my hotel (luckily, the train and huge police stations are good central locations),

getting to know the staff at the Casa dell'Aviatore (the home for aviators) quite well since I had spent 5 nights there,

watching Italian news and television in the wee hours due to disco/rock bands playing "outside" my bedroom window and, hence, my inability to get to sleep (Italian TV can merit pages of blogging but it is incredibly entertaining from the news shows to the extravaganza song and dance shows with nuns usually getting front row seating),

finding a huge, simply magnificent cemetery next to La Sapienza where I walked in tranquility admiring the incredible mausoleums and memorials with mosaics and even photos of the deceased in ceramic and tile and decorated with flowers and plantings (another side benefit was that, while walking there, I came up with an interesting angle with which to tackle/unify two research problems on supply chains that I had been working on),

eating delicious meals at which people linger and enjoy the food, each other, and the conversations,

navigating the traffic as a pedestrian,

trying to decipher the graffiti (a huge problem and an eyesore in contrast to the glorious architecture),

and enjoying the elegance and charm of the people.

Thank you, Rome, for an experience unlike any other!

PS As for those of you who follow sports, yesterday, the Giro bicycle competition ended in Rome with Menchov the victor.