Alan L. Leshner, the Chief Executive Officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), wrote an excellent commentary in the latest issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled: "We Need to Reward Those Who Nurture a Diversity of Ideas in Science."
In his commentary, he argues that, by increasing the diversity of the scientific human-resource pool, we will inevitably enhance the diversity of scientific ideas, since, by definition, innovation requires the ability to think in new and transformative ways. Moreover, many of the best new ideas come from new participants in science and engineering enterprises, from those who have been less influenced by traditional scientific paradigms, thinking, and theories than those who have always been a part of the established community.
I completely agree with Mr. Leshner that we need to enhance diversity in terms of the inclusion of women and minorities, and reading his thoughtful piece truly brightened my day since it shows that others recognize the need. I would, however, add that we also need to break up disciplinary silos and to work on creating diversity across disciplines, and only then, will we be able to, as President Obama stated in his State of the Union address (coincidentally, I was in DC then for the Transportation Research Board (TRB) meeting), "out-innovate, out-educate, and outbuild the rest of the world."
Indeed, creativity is found everywhere and needs to be nurtured.
Finally, as Leshner so well elucidates, universities need to recognize faculty that work on increasing participation in science and engineering and even notes that universities should also pay tribute to such faculty through public acknowledgment of such successes through press releases, articles in university publications, etc., to send a clear message of support. Personally, working with a diverse body of students is the greatest reward since we all learn so much from one another -- how boring the world would be if there was perfect homogeneity!
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Three Fabulous Plenary Speakers Confirmed for the Northeast Regional INFORMS Conference!
I can hardly contain my excitement.
We have three outstanding plenary speakers confirmed for the Northeast Regional INFORMS Conference that will take place at UMass Amherst, May 6-7, 2011, and they are:
Dr. Brenda Dietrich of IBM, who will speak on a Smarter Planet.
Dr. Alex "Sandy" Pentland of the Media Lab at MIT, who will give the plenary talk: Building A Nervous System for Humanity: Making Health, Financial, Logistics, and Transportation Networks Work, and
Dr. David Simchi-Levi of MIT, who is also the Editor of the flagship journal, Operations Research, who will be speak on Flexibility--From Practice to Theory.
The panels for this conference are also confirmed and I am delighted that there will be an all student panel.
Please check out the conference website, since it is regularly getting updated.
Both Dr. Brenda Dietrich and Dr. Sandy Pentland spoke earlier in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series, so it will be terrific to welcome them back. I will be seeing Dr. Pentland even before then, since he is giving a tutorial at the SBP 2011 conference that will take place at the University of Maryland College Park at the end of this month. I am serving as the Tutorial Chair at this conference.
And, as for a confirmed tutorial at our UMass Amherst conference, I am absolutely delighted that Mr. Greg H. Parlier, a retired colonel, will give the tutorial: Transforming U.S. Army Supply Chains: Management Innovation in DoD for Improved Efficiency, Productivity, and Cost-Effective Global Operations.
This will certainly be a Spring with some wonderful conferences, which I will be blogging about, of course!
Thanks to all the conference organizers and program committee members who devote so much time and effort to the organization of these important venues for researchers, practitioners, and students alike!
Hope to see you at UMass Amherst in the beautiful month of May and even at the SBP 2011 conference before then, if your schedules permit!
We have three outstanding plenary speakers confirmed for the Northeast Regional INFORMS Conference that will take place at UMass Amherst, May 6-7, 2011, and they are:
Dr. Brenda Dietrich of IBM, who will speak on a Smarter Planet.
Dr. Alex "Sandy" Pentland of the Media Lab at MIT, who will give the plenary talk: Building A Nervous System for Humanity: Making Health, Financial, Logistics, and Transportation Networks Work, and
Dr. David Simchi-Levi of MIT, who is also the Editor of the flagship journal, Operations Research, who will be speak on Flexibility--From Practice to Theory.
The panels for this conference are also confirmed and I am delighted that there will be an all student panel.
Please check out the conference website, since it is regularly getting updated.
Both Dr. Brenda Dietrich and Dr. Sandy Pentland spoke earlier in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series, so it will be terrific to welcome them back. I will be seeing Dr. Pentland even before then, since he is giving a tutorial at the SBP 2011 conference that will take place at the University of Maryland College Park at the end of this month. I am serving as the Tutorial Chair at this conference.
And, as for a confirmed tutorial at our UMass Amherst conference, I am absolutely delighted that Mr. Greg H. Parlier, a retired colonel, will give the tutorial: Transforming U.S. Army Supply Chains: Management Innovation in DoD for Improved Efficiency, Productivity, and Cost-Effective Global Operations.
This will certainly be a Spring with some wonderful conferences, which I will be blogging about, of course!
Thanks to all the conference organizers and program committee members who devote so much time and effort to the organization of these important venues for researchers, practitioners, and students alike!
Hope to see you at UMass Amherst in the beautiful month of May and even at the SBP 2011 conference before then, if your schedules permit!
Sunday, March 6, 2011
My Interview on Italian Radio
I never thought that I would be on an Italian radio program.
Thanks to our session on Mathematics and Collective Behavior at the recent AAAS meeting in Washington DC, I was interviewed by a science journalist, Mr. Federico Pedrocchi, of Milan, Italy, who also taped our session. Mr. Pedrocchi has his own radio program in Italy that focuses on scientific subjects.
His report on my presentation about User-optimized and System-optimized Travel Behavior and the Braess paradox aired last week and you can listen to it online. The segment on traffic is the second one in his report and it begins at about 3:55 minutes and runs until about 7 minutes. In the meantime, you can enjoy the Italian spoken. Of course, there are excerpts in English from my interview.
More information on Mr. Pedrocchi and his science radio program is available here.
Listening to the program made me miss Italy so I looked back at some photos I took in Rome on my last trip there and I reminisced also about the traffic experiences I had there!
Luckily, both my husband and I have Italian colleagues so what we could not figure out will be translated for us soon.
Ciao!
Thanks to our session on Mathematics and Collective Behavior at the recent AAAS meeting in Washington DC, I was interviewed by a science journalist, Mr. Federico Pedrocchi, of Milan, Italy, who also taped our session. Mr. Pedrocchi has his own radio program in Italy that focuses on scientific subjects.
His report on my presentation about User-optimized and System-optimized Travel Behavior and the Braess paradox aired last week and you can listen to it online. The segment on traffic is the second one in his report and it begins at about 3:55 minutes and runs until about 7 minutes. In the meantime, you can enjoy the Italian spoken. Of course, there are excerpts in English from my interview.
More information on Mr. Pedrocchi and his science radio program is available here.
Listening to the program made me miss Italy so I looked back at some photos I took in Rome on my last trip there and I reminisced also about the traffic experiences I had there!
Luckily, both my husband and I have Italian colleagues so what we could not figure out will be translated for us soon.
Ciao!
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Legal Insights Gained from Computer Science
The New York Times has an intriguing article, "Armies of Expensive Lawyers Replaced by Cheaper Software," which quotes one of my colleagues in the Computer Science Department at UMass Amherst, Professor Andrew McCallum. The article states that thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.
What I find intriguing is the use of software to identify such issues as "sentiment" and even "emotion" or strength of an individual's feelings about issues based on language in email messages.
McCallum is recognized in this article for making available the database behind the millions of emails in the Enron prosecution case to researchers. We had invited McCallum to speak on his research in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series and just look at the amazing lineup we had that semester. His talk title and abstract:
TITLE: Bayesian Models of Social Networks and Text
Abstract: The field of social network analysis studies mathematical models of patterns in the interactions between people or other entities. In this talk I will present several recent advances in generative, probabilistic modeling of networks and their per-edge attributes. The Author-Recipient-Topic model discovers role-similarity between entities by examining not only network connectivity, but also the words communicated on on those edges; I'll demonstrate this method on a large corpus of email data subpoenaed as part of the Enron investigation. The Group-Topic model discovers groups of entities and the "topical" conditions under which different groupings arise; I'll demonstrate this on coalition discovery from many years worth of voting records in the U.S. Senate and the U.N. I'll conclude with further examples of Bayesian networks successfully applied to relational data, as well as discussion of their applicability to trend analysis, expert-finding and bibliometrics.
Joint work with colleagues at UMass and Google: Xuerui Wang, Natasha Mohanty, and Andres Corrada.
Coincidentally, yesterday, I marched over across the UMass Amherst campus with one of my doctoral students to attend a talk in the Computational Social Science Speaker Series, which is a new initiative here at UMass Amherst. The speaker was Dr. James Kitts of the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University and he spoke on "Group Processes and Local Network Dynamics." He brought up some fascinating issues, which would be challenging, but intriguing, to model.
I very much appreciate how analytics and computer science are making an impact on so many different disciplines.
What I find intriguing is the use of software to identify such issues as "sentiment" and even "emotion" or strength of an individual's feelings about issues based on language in email messages.
McCallum is recognized in this article for making available the database behind the millions of emails in the Enron prosecution case to researchers. We had invited McCallum to speak on his research in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series and just look at the amazing lineup we had that semester. His talk title and abstract:
TITLE: Bayesian Models of Social Networks and Text
Abstract: The field of social network analysis studies mathematical models of patterns in the interactions between people or other entities. In this talk I will present several recent advances in generative, probabilistic modeling of networks and their per-edge attributes. The Author-Recipient-Topic model discovers role-similarity between entities by examining not only network connectivity, but also the words communicated on on those edges; I'll demonstrate this method on a large corpus of email data subpoenaed as part of the Enron investigation. The Group-Topic model discovers groups of entities and the "topical" conditions under which different groupings arise; I'll demonstrate this on coalition discovery from many years worth of voting records in the U.S. Senate and the U.N. I'll conclude with further examples of Bayesian networks successfully applied to relational data, as well as discussion of their applicability to trend analysis, expert-finding and bibliometrics.
Joint work with colleagues at UMass and Google: Xuerui Wang, Natasha Mohanty, and Andres Corrada.
Coincidentally, yesterday, I marched over across the UMass Amherst campus with one of my doctoral students to attend a talk in the Computational Social Science Speaker Series, which is a new initiative here at UMass Amherst. The speaker was Dr. James Kitts of the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University and he spoke on "Group Processes and Local Network Dynamics." He brought up some fascinating issues, which would be challenging, but intriguing, to model.
I very much appreciate how analytics and computer science are making an impact on so many different disciplines.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
What if Noone Showed Up to Your Talk!
Academics harbor different fears, a topic, which of itself, would merit a series of blogposts.
As we are often called up to speak in public, whether in front of our classes, at conferences, or at seminars, public speaking is, typically, not one of our fears, although, honestly, I know of several faculty who, literally, are so frightened of speaking in public that they vomit before classes and giving talks. (I would recommend teaching online to these folks.)
When an academic gives a seminar or speaks at a conference and has spent a lot of time not only doing the research that she is to speak on, not to mention all the time it takes to prepare a well-thought out and engaging presentation, she would welcome a good audience. By a "good" audience, I mean an attentive one, and one of a decent size.
John L. Jackson Jr., writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, has a most vivid rendition of a talk that he gave 10 years ago to which noone showed up except for the speaker (John, that is) and the person that invited him. And there were fliers posted up that he could even see. The article made my heart bleed for him. In the article, he argues whether we have simply too many seminars (and, perhaps, folks are too busy) to attract a good-sized audience.
He does note, however, that student-organized events, including talks and seminars, tend to draw a large audience. Indeed, this is the strategy that we have been using for the past seven years or so, when we organize seminars as part of the activities of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. As this chapter's Faculty Advisor, I have over the years only missed about two out of seventy plus seminars (I even traveled back from Harvard during my sabbatical in 2005-2006 while I was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study to support the students and the speakers).
In an earlier post, I wrote about how to organize a great speaker series and related issues (and, clearly, part of it is to attract a terrific audience, since, otherwise it is insulting to the speaker).
Folks regularly tell me how wonderful our speakers are and that their talks on Fridays are the highlights of both students' and faculty members' weeks!
We've even had TV news crews show up to interview some speakers, but we strategize well and disseminate the talks really well. The students do an outstanding job in hosting and following up with thank yous.
We have now started a "Meet the Executive" series, which is attracting students (grad and undergrads), faculty, and others from throughout campus.
I remember, on a related matter, a New Year's Eve party that my husband and I were invited to back in our Brown University days. It was organized by two physicists and my husband ended up being the only invited guest to show up.
As we are often called up to speak in public, whether in front of our classes, at conferences, or at seminars, public speaking is, typically, not one of our fears, although, honestly, I know of several faculty who, literally, are so frightened of speaking in public that they vomit before classes and giving talks. (I would recommend teaching online to these folks.)
When an academic gives a seminar or speaks at a conference and has spent a lot of time not only doing the research that she is to speak on, not to mention all the time it takes to prepare a well-thought out and engaging presentation, she would welcome a good audience. By a "good" audience, I mean an attentive one, and one of a decent size.
John L. Jackson Jr., writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, has a most vivid rendition of a talk that he gave 10 years ago to which noone showed up except for the speaker (John, that is) and the person that invited him. And there were fliers posted up that he could even see. The article made my heart bleed for him. In the article, he argues whether we have simply too many seminars (and, perhaps, folks are too busy) to attract a good-sized audience.
He does note, however, that student-organized events, including talks and seminars, tend to draw a large audience. Indeed, this is the strategy that we have been using for the past seven years or so, when we organize seminars as part of the activities of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. As this chapter's Faculty Advisor, I have over the years only missed about two out of seventy plus seminars (I even traveled back from Harvard during my sabbatical in 2005-2006 while I was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study to support the students and the speakers).
In an earlier post, I wrote about how to organize a great speaker series and related issues (and, clearly, part of it is to attract a terrific audience, since, otherwise it is insulting to the speaker).
Folks regularly tell me how wonderful our speakers are and that their talks on Fridays are the highlights of both students' and faculty members' weeks!
We've even had TV news crews show up to interview some speakers, but we strategize well and disseminate the talks really well. The students do an outstanding job in hosting and following up with thank yous.
We have now started a "Meet the Executive" series, which is attracting students (grad and undergrads), faculty, and others from throughout campus.
I remember, on a related matter, a New Year's Eve party that my husband and I were invited to back in our Brown University days. It was organized by two physicists and my husband ended up being the only invited guest to show up.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Analytics Research from Sports to Supply Chains at the Isenberg School
Today's Boston Globe has a wonderful article on analytics and the role that quantitative modeling and data analysis are playing in sports. The article quotes Professor Steven Graves (well-known to us in operations research / management sciences) of the Sloan School at MIT. The article also notes that women are playing an increasing role in analytics in sports and, according to Patriots VP Jessica Gelman, analytics has helped level the field for women in pro sports.
As you may (or may not) be aware, the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst this year named its sports management department the Mark H. McCormack Department of Sport Management, after the founder of IMG, and we inherited his volumes of correspondence, and a sports historical legacy that is unparalleled. The media coverage of this fantastic news continues to this day.
Analytics is capturing the imagination of students, researchers, and business practitioners and at the Isenberg School, research is conducted on a wide spectrum of areas and I find the interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity nature of it fascinating and intellectually invigorating. The Isenberg School is now home to 7 departments, from the "classical" ones such as the Accounting, Marketing, and Management Departments, to my Department of Finance and Operations Management, and the more recently added, Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management and the Resource Economics Department, in addition to our named Sports Management Department.
There is terrific research taking place with analytics at its underlying core and you can view a summary of our scholarly publications, books, and grants received on our website. From research on supply chain network design to transportation operations to efficiency in hotels to a variety of sustainability issues and sports team performance as well as hedge fund failure and risk measures, it is clear that research at business schools is going deeper and broader through analytics, and is transforming practice!
As you may (or may not) be aware, the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst this year named its sports management department the Mark H. McCormack Department of Sport Management, after the founder of IMG, and we inherited his volumes of correspondence, and a sports historical legacy that is unparalleled. The media coverage of this fantastic news continues to this day.
Analytics is capturing the imagination of students, researchers, and business practitioners and at the Isenberg School, research is conducted on a wide spectrum of areas and I find the interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity nature of it fascinating and intellectually invigorating. The Isenberg School is now home to 7 departments, from the "classical" ones such as the Accounting, Marketing, and Management Departments, to my Department of Finance and Operations Management, and the more recently added, Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management and the Resource Economics Department, in addition to our named Sports Management Department.
There is terrific research taking place with analytics at its underlying core and you can view a summary of our scholarly publications, books, and grants received on our website. From research on supply chain network design to transportation operations to efficiency in hotels to a variety of sustainability issues and sports team performance as well as hedge fund failure and risk measures, it is clear that research at business schools is going deeper and broader through analytics, and is transforming practice!
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain Management and Being Ahead of the Curve in Research
The New York Times is reporting on the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, which is planning to announce its formation in a press release today. The article, Clothes Makers Join to Set 'Green Score,' describes how this new coalition, consisting of apparel companies and even a university, is developing a comprehensive database of the environmental impact of every manufacturer, component and process in apparel production, with the aim of using that information to eventually give every garment a sustainability score.
According to The New York Times article: Americans spent roughly $340 billion on clothing and shoes last year, which is about 25 percent of the global market, and virtually all of it — 99 percent for footwear and 98 percent for clothes — came from somewhere else, according to the American Apparel and Footwear Association. And the various pieces and parts of any single garment — a jacket, say, or pair of pants — often come from such a diverse multinational chain of fabric mills, dye operations and assembly plants that quantifying the environmental impact of a single item is nearly impossible.
Interestingly, fashion and apparel supply chain management and even sustainable fashion supply chain management, have been the topic of some exciting recent research and publications. For example, the book, edited by Professor T.-M. Choi, entitled,
Fashion Supply Chain Management: Business and Industry Analysis, will be published next month by IGI Global, and our paper, "Fashion Supply Chain Management Through Cost and Risk Minimization from a Network Perspective," is the lead chapter in this volume, which I am sure will be a much sought after reference.
Also, the International Journal of Production Economics has a special issue now in press with a focus on Green Manufacturing and Distribution in the Fashion and Apparel Industries, and my doctoral student, Min Yu, and I also have a paper in press for that special issue, entitled, "Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain Management Under Oligopolistic Competition and Brand Differentiation."
Interestingly, The Times article mentions such companies as Patagonia and Timberland and, propitiously, our inaugural speaker in our "Meet the Executive" series at the Isenberg School was Mr. Marc Schneider of PVH, who had been an executive previously at Timberland.
Let's say we are ahead of the curve and it is very exciting for students to see their research being relevant in practice and so timely!
According to The New York Times article: Americans spent roughly $340 billion on clothing and shoes last year, which is about 25 percent of the global market, and virtually all of it — 99 percent for footwear and 98 percent for clothes — came from somewhere else, according to the American Apparel and Footwear Association. And the various pieces and parts of any single garment — a jacket, say, or pair of pants — often come from such a diverse multinational chain of fabric mills, dye operations and assembly plants that quantifying the environmental impact of a single item is nearly impossible.
Interestingly, fashion and apparel supply chain management and even sustainable fashion supply chain management, have been the topic of some exciting recent research and publications. For example, the book, edited by Professor T.-M. Choi, entitled,
Fashion Supply Chain Management: Business and Industry Analysis, will be published next month by IGI Global, and our paper, "Fashion Supply Chain Management Through Cost and Risk Minimization from a Network Perspective," is the lead chapter in this volume, which I am sure will be a much sought after reference.
Also, the International Journal of Production Economics has a special issue now in press with a focus on Green Manufacturing and Distribution in the Fashion and Apparel Industries, and my doctoral student, Min Yu, and I also have a paper in press for that special issue, entitled, "Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain Management Under Oligopolistic Competition and Brand Differentiation."
Interestingly, The Times article mentions such companies as Patagonia and Timberland and, propitiously, our inaugural speaker in our "Meet the Executive" series at the Isenberg School was Mr. Marc Schneider of PVH, who had been an executive previously at Timberland.
Let's say we are ahead of the curve and it is very exciting for students to see their research being relevant in practice and so timely!
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