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!

So Energized and Relieved -- Second Term for President Obama

My daughter is a college freshman who just voted in her first US Presidential Election.

The enthusiasm and energy and interest of college students and beyond in this election was immense and intense.

People stood for hours, even those who had been left homeless by Hurricane Sandy, some of whom had to make do with makeshift polling stations.

In my previous post,  I wrote that I am off to Canada -- to a conference this week.

Now, given the outcome, I am also eager to return with new hope for more positive change and to have us continue to move forward.

Yes, President Obama, as you said: "We've Got More Work to Do," and through inclusiveness, valuing diversity, recognizing that we must work together to mitigate the effects of climate change for this and future generations, caring for the less fortunate, and investing in science for discoveries and economic growth and our our future, we can, again, make the US the land of wonderful opportunities for all those who work so hard.

We can also be a world leader and example in terms of excellence in all dimensions -- from education to infrastructure to innovation and creativity and rewarding jobs and to peace on earth.

It is truly a great day for our nation.

I continue to get congratulations from other countries on the results of this election.

I am breathing a huge sigh of relief and am smiling from renewed energy and hope for our generation and for our children.

Going to Canada and a Letter from Japan

Today is  election day for the President of the US and I am already getting many emails from Europe from colleagues there who are anxious about the outcome -- will it be President Obama for another four years or President Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts?

Needless, to say, I am very anxious about the outcome as well.

The New York Times, last Sunday, had a rather tongue-in-cheek article: At  a Loss? There's Always Canada by Joh Ortved that was commented on in the British press.

I was born in Canada, in Windsor, across the border from Detroit and travel regularly to Canada to give invited seminars and to present papers at conferences. Every time that I cross the border I feel a sense of comfort and recognition.

This week, after the voting is over, and the winner is finalized, I will be off to Ottawa, the capital of Canada.

I will be taking part in the 59th Annual North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International. and will be delivering the presentation,  "A Dynamic Network Oligopoly Model with Transportation Costs, Product Differentiation, and Quality Competition,"   based on the paper co-authored with a doctoral student of mine, Dong "Michelle" Li. The research behind this paper is funded, in part, by our National Science Foundation (NSF) grant CISE #1111276, for the NeTS: Large: Collaborative Research: Network Innovation Through Choice project awarded to the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

I am a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI) and always look forward to this conference, which has a discussant for each paper, and takes place in interesting locations. Last year the conference was in Miami, immediately before the INFORMS conference in Charlotte, which worked out very well. The North American RSAI conference always has very nice social activities, including an RSAI Fellows lunch,  and interesting plenary talks and special sessions. Plus. I enjoy seeing many colleagues from around the globe!

This year, and I hope that the forecasted nor'easter blows through before I board the plane to Canada in which everyone gets an aisle and a window seat simultaneously, we will also be celebrating  Professor David E. Boyce's recent award. Professor Boyce is both an RSAI Fellow and an INFORMS Fellow and a very special colleague.  Dave and I wrote the preface, published in the INFORMS journal, Transportation Science,  to the translation of the Braess paradox (1968) paper that I did with Braess and with my former doctoral student, Tina Wakolbinger (who is now a Full Professor in Austria). I have collaborated on other papers with Professor Boyce, as well.

The Japan RSAI, which celebrated her 50th Anniversary this year,  has awarded Professor Dr. David Boyce a Special Award.   Professor Yoshiro Higano of Tsukuba University shared with me this wonderful news when I was in Gothenburg, Sweden last month. He will be representing Japan RSAI  to present the award to Professor Boyce during a dinner scheduled for Friday evening, 9th November, 2012, in Ottawa.   


I received the lovely invitation letter below, which I very much appreciate.

I am very much looking forward to going to Canada!

Sustaining Supply Chains in Disasters and Post Hurricane Sandy

One week after Hurricane Sandy made landfall in the mid-Atlantic states of the United States there are still over a million electric power outages.

With cold temperatures, shortages of fuel for both vehicles and generators, and now a shelter crisis, due to so many homes being destroyed in parts of  New York and New Jersey, and major impacts on transportation infrastructure from bridges to subways, plus a nor'easter storm forecast for mid-week, I am wondering why more was not done and is not being done to help those in the recovery process.

Our relatives in New Jersey are still without power one week after losing it and friends have had to seek shelter since they are now homeless.

Clearly,  there are issues of serious resource misallocations as well as information shortages, among other shortages. Trained personnel are needed to restore power where it is needed and fuel needs to be transported and people informed as to where they can obtain it. Information needs to be provided to those who have lost their abilities to receive news and to receive communications electronically.

There are also questions, in certain communities,  surrounding how, if any, prioritization was done, in terms of restoring electric power, delivering fuel and other resources.

Commercial supply chains are different from humanitarian ones  and  we need to learn from previous disasters.

Different organizations can accomplish much more through synergistic teaming.  and it is good to see the military, including the National Guard, making extraordinary efforts to assist after this extraordinary disaster.

I was interviewed by Mr. Michael Breen for an AMS podcast on Sustaining the Supply Chain and the podcast can be accessed here.

There was also a recent special issue of the journal Transportation Research A on Network Vulnerability of Large-Scale Transport Networks in which Patrick Qiang and I published the paper, A bi-criteria indicator to assess supply chain network performance for critical needs under capacity and demand disruptions.

In this paper,  we constructed  a performance indicator in the case that demands for critical needs products (water, food, medicines, etc.) can be satis fied. We then considered the case when not all the demands can be satis fied and de fined another performance indicator. In order to assist cognizant organizations, such as governments, relevant corporations, and NGOs, to better manage critical needs supply chains, a bi-criteria performance indicator was, subsequently, proposed in this paper. This indicator synthesizes the preceding two in that it considers the following factors:

• Supply chain capacities may be a ffected by disruptions;
• Demands may be a ffected by disruptions; and
• Disruption scenarios are categorized into two types.

We also showed how our supply chain performance indicators could be applied in practice and now we are seeing yet another disaster. More severe scenarios can be expected, given climate change, which is upon us and our communities. 

Time to harness all of our energies and expertise to minimize the damages, the pain, and the suffering.

So Good to See that Colleges Will Resume Classes Tomorrow Post Hurricane Sandy

What a relief that the majority of colleges and universities in the mid-Atlantic states,  in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, that lost power due to Hurricane Sandy,  and cancelled classes last  week,  have had their electric power restored and have completed their cleanup operations so that classes will be resuming tomorrow.

My daughter has returned to her college and was "rescued" by relatives who live in New Jersey but who have, yet, to have power restored to their homes and .have been sharing a generator,  which they purchased at a Home Depot two days after they lost power. Their neighbors have been cooking on grills and having potluck suppers together and making the most of candlelight.

Now, the temperatures are dropping, so I hope that the electric power gets restored to the hundreds of thousands still without power, and have suffered immensely for six days and nights since the outages, coupled with devastated infrastructure from roads to distribution centers,  have  resulted in gas shortages with our relatives having to drive daily to Pennsylvania to fuel up a pickup truck and to obtain fuel for the generator.

Now, to add more pain and misery to the affected areas, there is a nor'easter forecast to arrive in the middle of this coming week as is being reported on weather.com

I would like to thank all our friends and colleagues as well as relatives who reached out to us during this time -- even from as far as Europe!

As for all those left homeless because of Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath from the flooding to the fires, know that you are in our prayers and we hope that the donations will help you to rebuild and to recover.

UMass to Celebrate 150 Years and President Caret's Great OpEd on Its Mission

One needs to write and to communicate by speaking out.

As a professor and educator, I try to do my part by writing journal articles, books, and even OpEd pieces to reach a broader audience.

I also blog because many students and colleagues urged me to do so over three years ago.

And when the opportunity presents itself, and,  I am available, I enjoy talking with the media.

It is important to recognize what is going well, what needs improvement, and to celebrate when there are achievements and to propose solutions and take actions, where and when these are needed.

Books, as we know, can change the world, and will live longer than any of us -- the same holds for great discoveries and works of art and music.

Dr. Robert Caret, the relatively new President of the UMass system, wrote a wonderful OpEd,

 Viewpoint: UMass remains on mission 150 years later,  in which he states: Here in Massachusetts, the passage of the Morrill Land Grant Act led to the founding of the Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1863. The college, established on the principle that science and research could be used to improve the overall quality of life, was built around a curriculum of farming, science, technical courses and liberal arts.

Robert L. Caret (masslive.com)

What would become the University of Massachusetts has grown, but its original mission of transformation remains unchanged.

He goes on to note some of our recent successes, 150 years after,  with the Permaculture Garden, which was recognized even by President Obama,  to our Green High-Performance Computing Center.

He also  emphasized accessibility and affordability and, given the international competition of college admissions today and the student debt crisis, I could not agree more!

President Caret has traveled on a bus throughout our state of Massachusetts, meeting with many stakeholders.

Recently, I was interviewed by our new Vice Chancellor for University Relations, John Kennedy, about my experiences as a UMass Amherst chaired professor, the John F. Smith Memorial Professor. The videographers traveled from Boston for the videotaping and one of them was a UMass Amherst grad.  I must admit, though, that I thought it  rather funny when one of them kept on powdering my face, which I had never had happen in either TV shoots or other videotaping sessions. I guess that day I glowed too much (or was it because I had just flown back from Sweden 2 days prior where I had spent a month as part of my sabbatical). I was excited to talk about UMass Amherst and my experiences. I spoke about how many multiple generations of UMass graduates there are and how many of my students tell me that they were happiest when they were students at UMass Amherst -- and, amongst these I include, several top-level executives.

Of course, I also talked about what makes the Isenberg School of Management great.

I also noted Jack Smith, a former CEO of General Motors, who had endowed the chaired professorship that I hold in honor of his father who was also a UMass Amherst alum, from the Stockbridge School of Agriculture. Jack Smith Jr. had received a degree in Operations Management from my business school and is an outstanding example of the difference that UMass Amherst grads have made in the corporate arena.

Thank you, President Caret,  for speaking out about the heritage of UMass, which is alive today, and noting that: One hundred fifty years ago, during the darkest days of the Civil War, a single piece of legislation forever changed the landscape of higher education in the United States. Introduced by Vermont Congressman Justin Smith Morrill, it sought to create a national system of public higher education to ensure that a college degree would be available to many and not just be the province of a few.

Here in Massachusetts, the passage of the Morrill Land Grant Act led to the founding of the Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1863. 

And, indeed,  science and research should be used and is being used to improve the overall quality of life!





 

Photos from Dr. Benneyan's Talk Today and Our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Magna Cum Laude Award Celebration

I would like to, first, thank INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences)  for its great Speakers Program (but, then again, I am a bit biased since I have been Chair of the Speakers Program for the past two years).

Today, we had the honor of hearing Dr. James Benneyan speak on Healthcare Systems Engineering and the talk focused on many of the problems with the healthcare system in the US and the associated costs and possible remedies, from the micro to the macro scale.

Dr. Benneyan is a speaker in the INFORMS Speaker Program.

He emphasized the importance of systems and systems engineering and in working on problems in the real world. He also spoke about what such well-known OR/MS methodologies as queuing, inventory theory, location theory, optimization and simulation as well as supply chain management can contribute to helping to solve the many problems.

Dr. Benneyan is a UMass Amherst PhD alum and is an award-winning researcher and faculty member at Northeastern University who runs major research programs in healthcare systems which combine research, applications, as well as education.

I took pages of notes.

Below are photos taken from the lunch through the discussion, which continued long after his presentation. The audience consisted of undergrad, MBA students, Master's students, PhD students from the Isenberg School of Management and from Engineering as well as faculty.

We also celebrated the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter receipt of the magna cum laude award at the recent INFORMS Phoenix conference. This is the 6th national award that our chapter has received in the past 6 years. As the chapter's Faculty Advisor, I could not be happier! The students and the chapter officers do an outstanding job of planning activities, including Dr. Benneyan's talk today.