Professors and the World Cup

Being a professor means that one has students, colleagues, and friends from around the world.

During the 2010 World Cup that is taking place now in South Africa there has been a lot of drama, unexpected victories, and unexpected losses.

I have heard recently from friends who are from Chile, The Netherlands, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Italy, China, Cape Verde, Ukraine, and other countries, all of whom are intently following the various games and upsets (as well as dubious calls by the refs, the incidents of good sportsmanship and the opposite, and all the various trials and tribulations and the associated drama).

As I had mentioned in an earlier blogpost, the 2010 World Cup began while I was at a conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

At the finals of the previous World Cup, in 2006, I was at a conference in glorious Erice in Italy and we watched Italy beat France and then this entire town, which is on the island of Sicily, erupted in celebrations and fireworks. Amazingly, the morning after, I flew back to Boston safely on Alitalia from Naples without incident and enjoyed a delicious meal on the plane.

During the World Cup in 2002, my family and I were living in Innsbruck, Austria, while I was on a Fulbright.

Above are photos taken in Erice during the finals back in 2006.

What a difference 4 years make in terms of World Cup play!

WORMS Award Call for Nominations

A former Operations Management student of mine, who had just received his degree from UMass Amherst in May 2010, contacted me recently that he had nominated me for an award for promoting diversity. I was very touched that he took the time to do this and told him so. Recognition from one's former students is one of the most appreciated of accolades that a professor can receive.

In the meantime, the following Call for Nominations has been sent out regarding the 2010 WORMS Award. The list of previous recipients of this award can be found here.

Professor Candi Yano of UC Berkeley is chairing this year's award committee. I had the honor and pleasure of chairing last year's committee. The information is below.


CALL FOR NOMINATIONS

The Award for the Advancement of Women in OR/MS celebrates and recognizes a person who has contributed significantly to the advancement and recognition of women in the field of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (OR/MS). Each nominee will be considered based on his or her history of successfully promoting the professional development, success, and recognition of women in OR/MS. Nominees can have made contributions in multiple ways, such as primarily at their own institutions, through involvement in professional organizations, etc.

Examples of activities to be considered include, but are not limited to, the following: personal commitment and/or leadership with respect to increased hiring, retention, advancement, and recognition of women (students and faculty) in academia, industry, or government; leadership in encouraging, sponsoring, and/or developing professional training/development programs for women in OR/MS; creating an environment that supports womens' full participation and advancement in the field of OR/MS, possibly through mentoring, leadership, financial support, and/or personal investment of time.

Application process:

Nominations should include:

* Nominee's name, affiliation, address, telephone, fax, e-mail;

* A short (250-500 words) description of the nominee's overall contribution to the advancement of the careers of women in OR/MS;

* Description(s) of specific activities, programs, leadership;

* Statements of support from women in OR/MS and/or from organizations which observed or benefited from the nominee's activities;

* The nominee's resume and other items as appropriate.

All nominations must be submitted via e-mail to the Award Committee Chair, Candi Yano, by August 1, 2010.

One award (in the form of a plaque) will be given, if there is a suitable candidate. The award will be presented to the winner during the 2010 INFORMS National Meeting in Austin, Texas.

For questions, please contact the 2010 Award Committee Chair: Candace A. Yano Professor, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and The Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley.

Postal Address:

IEOR Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1777
Phones: 510-643-9994 / 510-642-4992
Fax: 510-642-1403
Email: yano@ieor.berkeley.edu

A Thank You to Sweden

International conferences serve as a venue for scientific exchanges, reconnecting with colleagues from around the globe, and often bring back a flood of memories. I have written several posts on this blog about the ALIO-INFORMS conference, which took place recently in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The intensity of professional conferences, coupled with their fascinating locations, enrich one's professional and social networking experiences greatly.

At the Buenos Aires conference, one of my many highpoints was the international collaborations panel, sponsored by WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences), and organized by Professor Sadan Kulturel of Penn State Berks.

In preparing my presentation, it became clear how important it has been to my career to not only take active part in international conferences, but to also live abroad. Sweden, in particular, is a very special country to me since while living there I wrote two books, Financial Networks: Statics and Dynamics with Stavros Siokos, and Supernetworks: Decision-Making for the Information Age with June Dong.

The former book I wrote while I held a Distinguished Chaired Professorship at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden and the latter while I was a Visiting Professor there several years after. During the writing of both of these books, my family and I lived at the Wenner Gren Center on Sveavagen in Stockholm.

The Wenner Gren Center is an apartment complex for a community of 150 families from around the globe, consisting of researchers, scholars, and medical professionals. It borders the gorgeous Haga Park. While I worked at KTH, my husband held an appointment at the Department of Electrical Systems Construction in Kista, which is also part of KTH.

Our daughter was only 2 years old the first time we lived in Stockholm and we enrolled her in the local daycare. In her daycare group there were children from her age until 7 and the care that she received there was outstanding. The children spend tons of time outside (remember that the Swedes have a saying that there is no bad weather, only bad dress for the weather). They climb rocks and trees in neighboring parks (believe me this raised my anxiety level a bit, but I guess these are useful life skills), go on excursions, including to musems, play, and just thrive. The daycare cooks prepared meals that included salmon, carrots, and dilled potatoes; Swedish meatballs, and delicious soups, and every child's birthday was celebrated in a lavish way with ice cream and lit candles. (Coming back to the US and the local preschool was a bit of a shock to my almost 3 year old at the time, when she had to brown bag her lunch).

Several of the daycare providers spoke English and there was one child from Japan who also was living at the Wenner Gren Center in my daughter's group. A boy of 7 named Sebastian, who originally was from Colombia, took special care of my daughter and also would often greet me at the door when I would come to pick her up and would motion to me as to her whereabouts. We would run into the parents and children in Stockholm outside of daycare hours and that helped us to feel part of a larger community. We were even invited to the homes of several of our daughter's fellow "classmates" years afterwards.

Above I have posted photos of the Wenner Gren Center, Stockholm, and my daughter's former daycare in Sweden.

The New York Times recently had coverage about the excellent parental leave policies in Sweden (which we observed while living there) and fathers taking advantage of them in an article entitled, "In Sweden, Men Can Have it All." This blogpost was partially inspired by that terrific article (plus who could have missed the publicity surrounding Princess Victoria's wedding that took place in Stockholm yesterday).

Sweden, I thank you for creating a society and system in which those who live there (even if only for a few months) can better balance work and family!

Happy Father's Day!

This Sunday, June 20, we honor fathers.

I would like to take a moment to thank all the fathers who are still with us and to remember also those fathers who are long gone for their numerous roles in support of their families and for all their sacrifices.

To those who have become fathers for the first time this year, a very special Happy Father's Day to you! The same to our servicemen who cannot be with their families on Father's Day.

As for a truly special father, please read about Mr. Jim Brozina.

Free iphone app for the Gulf rescue of oiled birds and animals

After listening to the President's speech on the biggest oil disaster in US history with immense negative environmental and economic consequences and even psychological ones, I was heartened to hear that even thousands of miles away positive, constructive action was being taken through an iphone app that was developed by my colleagues in computer science, public policy, ecology and biology at UMass Amherst. The app enables the rescue of those most helpless and unfortunate and that is the birds and animals that are being covered in the oil spreading in the Gulf of Mexico.

The UMass Amherst researchers hope that the app, called MoGO, will draw on the large network of “citizen scientists” who are as heartbroken as they are to witness the disaster for marine life and who are actively looking for ways to help save wildlife along the 14,000 miles of northern Gulf coastline.

The new app allows anyone who finds an oiled animal to be linked automatically by the phone to the Wildlife Hotline and to provide photos of the stranded animal and its GPS location coordinates to a database here on campus.

Whether the project succeeds rests on how well the word gets out to the public in the Gulf region, the researchers note, so I am trying to do my part to disseminate this simple but powerful technical innovation to harness citizen scientists in saving the affected fauna. Any person, on land or at sea, wishing to use the free app for their iPhone can go to www.savegulfwildlife.org for more information.

According to the UMass press release:

The app takes advantage of “mobile crowdsourcing,” that is, the power of smart personal mobile devices to provide thousands of eyes and ears on the ground. Professor Ganesan who is a computer scientist at UMass Amherst and his research group designed a software framework called “mCrowd,” which simplifies the usual weeks- to months-long process of developing a new mobile crowdsourcing app. “It provides easy-to-use templates that can be tailored to a new application,” Ganesan explains. His mCrowd technology allowed the UMass Amherst team to create the MoGO app and infrastructure in a little more than a week.

Even Hillary Clinton was in Argentina

In honor of the great World Cup win by Argentina today against South Korea to the score of 4-1, I have posted the above photos that I took in Buenos Aires last week where I attended the ALIO-INFORMS conference.

In the top photo above is a nice note from Hillary Clinton who dined at the Cafe Tortoni in Buenos Aires, a cafe that we also had the pleasure of eating at last week. I also recommend La Biela in La Recoleta, a very historic part of Buenos Aires, whose charming waiters gave us many extra pieces of exquisite dark chocolate.

If you'd like to see more photos of Buenos Aires, please see my earlier blogposts. The New York Times has front page coverage today about the Argentine soccer coach, Maradona, and his team's star player, Messi. Maradona, who is considered one of the top former soccer players ever, has promised to run naked through the streets of Buenos Aires should Argentina win the World Cup. He continues to coach his team at the World Cup matches dressed in a gray suit, which, as many have noticed (and despite the elegance of the people of Buenos Aires) does not fit him well.

Also, Professor Peter Lohmander of Umea, Sweden has kindly posted gorgeous photos that he took while at the same operations research conference in Buenos Aires . His photos may be accessed here.

Operations and the Emergency Room

Who would have thought that I would be "listening" to the Celtics vs. Lakers 6th game of the NBA finals in an emergency room. As they say, most accidents happen close to home. After thousands of miles of travel recently to give talks in Hawaii and then in Argentina, with no injuries or illnesses, I tripped last night while taking an evening stroll and landed sidewise on the asphalt road with blood gushing out of my face.

My husband rushed me to UMass Amherst Health Services where no doctor was available and I was told to go to the emergency room (ER) at Cooley Dickinson hospital in Northampton, MA, despite my appeals to be at least looked at locally, but to no avail.

As anyone who has been to an ER can tell you, the experiences in such a setting are not exactly pleasant memories. As one who researches and teaches operations management and operations research / management science and specializes in network flows in systems, I am a stickler for efficiency and for improving processes from those in business and transportation and logistical systems to those in healthcare.

We arrived in the ER shortly before 9(cr)PM (and the TV in the waiting area was set to the Celtics vs. Lakers game). The folks in the waiting area looked pleasant enough and I thought that within an hour I would be "served" and released. After a while my vital stats were taken, I was given an ice pack to apply to my head, which soon got spotted with the red stuff. Then a new patient joined me in the waiting game who had just been in a barroom brawl and his friend had brought him in for treatment. His facial injures resembled mine, but, then again, his arms were covered with tattoos. He also got an ice pack to apply to his head.

I told my husband, who is the pinnacle of patience, that if I was not seen by a doctor by 11:30PM that I would just self-treat myself back at home and live with any scars that materialized.

At 11:25 PM, I was called in to the area where the patients are placed on beds. I was treated to a nicely warmed set of sheets, since I was freezing, and marveled at the activity there, so I asked where did all these patients come from? I was told that they arrived by ambulance and that (as we were waiting for hours in the waiting room) several of the cases, according to the doctors, were very complicated. (I had been asked earlier as to how severe my pain was, and believe that if I had been less of a martyr and had emphasized the acuity, I may have been treated earlier. Perhaps better service is also achieved by arriving in style via ambulance).

There is a "happy" ending to this experience. The doctor that treated me is Dr. Khama Ennis, who not only is a fellow alum of Brown University, but she trained in emergency room medicine under Dr. John Nagurney, at Mass General Hospital. This Dr. Nagurney is a relative of my husband's and is also an instructor at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Ennis treated my daughter several years back on her only trip to the ER and we found all of these wonderful connections. Dr. Ennis' young daughter shares my birthday so talking and being treated by her this time around made the benefits almost outweigh all of the costs. One of her best friends lives in LA and is a big Lakers fan so she was awaiting a teasing text message on the Celtics loss.

Several years back, a group of my undergrad students in Operations Management in my FOMGT 341 class, Transportation & Logistics, did a project on patient flow in this specific hospital and on how to improve operational efficiencies. One of the students, Selena Kaplan, was a nurse, and another one, Maxfield Raynolds, had worked for me at the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School (and went on to receive a 21st Century Leaders Award from UMass Amherst). Their project, along with Bria Gottschalck, can be accessed here.

Interestingly, my colleague, Professor Jim Orlin of the Sloan School at MIT, has written several posts on healthcare issues, from a personal perspective, including his experience with the ER at Mass General Hospital and has also highlighted the work of Professor Litvak of Boston University on hospital patient flow, whose work has been featured in The Boston Globe.

Hospitals are processing flow networks, with congestion, and patients as well as caretakers and medical professionals can all greatly benefit from optimization. This my undergrads figured out back in 2004 and, hopefully, optimization will be the paradigm for hospital networks. As patients, we care about user-optimization (just as drivers do in transportation networks) since we want to be processed from our arrival until discharge as promptly as possible. Healthcare and hospital administrators, on the other hand, may be focusing on system-optimization, that is, routing the flow so that the total cost in the system is minimized (in transport parlance, think of a controller routing the freight flows in an optimal manner from origins to destinations).

And, yes, to add insult to injury, as my previous updated blogspot stated, the Celtics lost to the Lakers last night.