Looking Forward to Speaking at Texas A&M in its INFORMS Student Chapter and Dow Chemical Speaker Series

I am very much looking forward to being at Texas A&M to speak this coming Friday!

Last week, one of my colleagues at the Isenberg School, Dr. John D. Wells, who is the Associate Dean for Professional Programs, and has both a Master's and PhD from Texas A&M, told me to practice saying "Howdy!" when he heard that I would be speaking there.

I was invited by the award-winning Texas A&M INFORMS Student Chapter, and since I am a big proponent of such chapters, and have also served as the Faculty Advisor to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter for almost a decade, this was an invitation that I could not refuse.

My talk in the series is also sponsored by Dow Chemical and by the great INFORMS Speakers Program (I may be a bit biased since I served on the committee for this program and also chaired it), which I am a big fan of. At the Isenberg School, we have also invited speakers under the INFORMS Speakers Program (Dr. John Birge of the University of Chicago and Dr. Sheldon Jacobson of the University of Illinois, to name two). INFORMS pays, upon approval,  the travel expenses of the speaker, and the host institution pays for the on-site costs. Given the distance between Amherst and College Station and a two-legged flight, I will be overnighting there. Since I have never been to Texas A&M and have quite a few wonderful colleagues there, I am very much looking forward to visiting! I also am very excited about seeing the students there.

I have starting working on my presentation, which is entitled: "Networks Against Time: From Food to Pharma."

 

 It will be interesting to see the terrain there -- the last time that I was in Texas was at the INFORMS conference in Austin.  Prior to that Texas trip, I spoke in Dallas at SMU, courtesy of the Dallas / Forth Worth INFORMS chapter, and that experience was quite the adventure!

Head of the Charles Regatta -- The Largest Regatta in the World

Boston is a great sports town and yesterday was an amazing day for sports fans -- not only did the Red Sox win their baseball game and made it into the World Series, so many of my students will be very happy this week, but it was also the first day of the two-day Head of the Charles Regatta, which brought an estimated 300,000 rowers, friends, and spectators to the Cambridge/Boston area.

Competitors came from 19 different countries and there were so many colleges and universities represented. This was my second Head of the Charles regatta -- when I was on sabbatical at Harvard in 2005-2006 as a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, I watched from the Cambridge side.

But, yesterday, we watched from the Allston bank of the Charles River and the competitors ranged in age from 14 - 85 years of age. Interestingly, at the INFORMS Conference in Minneapolis, October 6-9, 2013, I attended many business meetings and other events and at a Fora breakfast meeting, a faculty member from Drexel University sat next to me. I took one look at him and asked him whether he had been a rower. Amazingly, he had started rowing while in high school, and had gone to the Head of The Charles -- his boat beat Princeton and Harvard and everyone in his boat got recruited by the Ivy League. He rowed for Princeton and majored in architecture -- so he was learning about operations research and analytics.

My college room-mate at Brown University was on the women's crew (and an Applied Math major, no less) and now my daughter is on a crew team so that was why we were in Cambridge yesterday,

It was fabulous to see so many competitors and colleges represented from across the US!

I even saw several members of the UMass Amherst women's crew team and several of my daughter's friends from her elementary school, The Bement School, and high school, Deerfield Academy, who are on various college crew teams, were also there. Other friends came to watch from various vantage points.

Given what happened at our Boston Marathon  last April 15, there was a lot of police presence and I spoke to several officials about the heightened security.

We even saw the men's Olympic Gold medalist from Auckland, New Zealand, in an event after the Women's Collegiate 4s zip by several boats.

I love the team aspect of this sport from the rowers working in unison to the  coxswains, who are the "persons in charge of the boat, particularly its navigation and steering." They are those with the loud voices and more compact sizes. It is great to see female coxswains directing males in boats. Future, CEOs. I suspect.

We stood with fans supporting many different colleges and universities and saw boats from Bowdoin, Trinity, West Point, Clemson University, the Coast Guard Academy, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, University of Florida, Bryant University, Lafayette College, Vanderbilt, Washington University, Texas A&M, University of Chicago, Vassar, McGill University, Wheaton College, Hamilton College, Wesleyan University, Amherst College, Barry University (which won), and many other schools compete. Several course records were broken.

It was great to see the smiles on the rowers' faces after they competed in a truly special sporting event.

The logistics behind the organization of this event were incredible and the rowers had to row about 3 miles from their launches before starting their 3 mile races. Crew members are super physically fit.

The souvenir stands were fun, too.

Congrats to the organizers of The Head of the Charles for a great event and to all the competitors and coaches, of course!

All the results can be found here.

And for those who were selected to be volunteers (it seems that IT skills were in demand), for 3 hours of work, you got the gorgeous Brooks Brothers jacket, valued at $250 (one of my daughter's friends received one).

 

Walter Isard Memorial Volume, Disaster Relief, and Humanitarian Logistics

Who has influenced you in your research and has had an impact on your academic and professional success?

Through membership in professional societies we get to meet luminaries in our fields and, have you noticed that, many of the "giants" are actually also super nice people. In order to build a field or discipline you need followers and charisma and kindness as well as vision are just some of the attributes that make great leaders.

And two scholarly giants that I had the privilege of meeting and interacting with who, sadly, are now deceased, but lived to over the age of ninety, are Professor George Dantzig, the operations research megastar, and Professor Walter Isard, the founder of regional science.  Coincidentally, they were both, more or less, physically, my height. Of course, my doctoral dissertation advisor, Professor Stella Dafermos, the second female PhD in operations research in the world, who also introduced me to regional science through the literature and conferences, was the third immense influence on me. She passed away at age 49.

And, speaking of operations research and regional science, my most recent conference was the INFORMS Conference in Minneapolis (I posted many photos here) and my next one will be the 60th Annual North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International conference in Atlanta next month.  For the latter, I have organized a special session in honor of Professor David E. Boyce, another amazing scholar and gentleman,  to mark his 50th consecutive such conference -- incredible  and the conference program with my session can be viewed here.


I will also be presenting a paper in one of the special memorial sessions in honor of Professor Walter Isard. The paper is entitled, "An Integrated Disaster Relief Supply Chain Network Model with Time Targets and Demand Uncertainty,"  Anna Nagurney, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts; Amir H. Masoumi, Manhattan College; Min Yu, University of Portland, and it is also an invited paper for a special memorial volume in honor of Walter Isard.   Our motivation for this research stems from the fact that the number of natural disasters and their impacts are increasing across the globe, so there is a great  need for effective preparedness against such events. Also, we all remember Superstorm Sandy whose first anniversary we will sadly be marking later this month.

Manhattan without electric power October 30, 2012 as a result of the devastation wrought by Superstorm Sandy.

In our paper, we construct a supply chain network optimization model for a disaster relief organization in charge of obtaining, storing, transporting, and distributing relief goods to certain disaster-prone regions. The system-optimization approach minimizes the total operational costs on the links of the supply chain network subject to the uncertain demand for aid at the demand points being satisfied as closely as possible. A goal programming approach is utilized to enforce the timely delivery of relief items with respect to the pre-specified time targets at the demand points. Aspectrum  of numerical examples illustrates the modeling and computational framework, which integrates the two policies of pre-positioning relief supplies as well as their procurement once the disaster has occurred.

And, would you believe, the Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences and proponent of economic geography and renowned scholar and OpEd writer, Paul Krugman, wrote a piece in The New York Times, while many of us were at the INFORMS conference, that  I just had a chance to catch up with. The OpEd is entitled: Trends in Interregional and International Trade. Krugman  begins it with: Well, I’ve just paid my first personal price for the shutdown; I’m trying to finish a paper for the Walter Isard memorial volume, and discovered that the International Trade Commission’s invaluable Dataweb is shut down. I know, people are missing essential medical care and more, and I’m complaining about a slight academic inconvenience. But it’s a symptom. 

What a small world and how cool is this?! I assume that Krugman is contibuting to the same Isard memorial volume as I am.

Also, speaking of disaster relief and humanitarian logistics, my former doctoral student, Tina Wakolbinger, who is now a Full Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria, and who took part with me in the AAAS Symposium on Dynamics of Disasters, along with Professors Panos M. Pardalos, Laura McLay, Jose Holguin-Veras, and David McLaughlin last February in Boston shared with me her recent great news: She is the recipient of a 180,000 euro grant from the Austrian Fund for the project: "Optimal Pricing Policies and Contracts of Outsourcing Humanitarian Logistics Activities."

I last saw Tina this past March when I taught a course at her university in Vienna on Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare.  I think that I made an impact since one of the students in my course is now interested in applying for a PhD in this area and I will be writing him a letter of recommendation.

Great Talks at the Isenberg School of Management

Great speakers provoke and inspire and we can learn so much from them. Students, faculty, staff, and guests from the community benefit immensely from invited speakers plus there is nothing like face to face time in which to exchange stories, share laughter, and, perhaps, even start new friendships.

This week has been an especially busy one at the Isenberg School of Management with many departments hosting speakers including two speakers that were hosted by my department -- Operations & Information Management. The poster above was prepared by the Isenberg School Communications office for a talk that took place last evening and was organized by the Management Department. Dr. Anita M. McGahan of the Rotman School at the University of Toronto spoke on "The Business of Creating Social Value."  She is the President of the Academy of Management, which has 18,000 members. The President of INFORMS, which now has 11,000 members, is also a female, Dr. Anne Robinson of Verizon. Great to see such wonderful leadership at the top of such professional societies!

Dr. McGahan's talk took place at the Integrated Sciences new building and the takeaways were:

1. Work on important problems (think of what you want to leave behind).

2. Create social value through your work.

3. We need new business models -- I liked hearing about innovating in reverse -- rather than having more complicated neonatal incubators use the kangaroo approach (baby on the parent).

4. We should care not just about shareholder value but about sustainable outcomes (rather than organizations).

She spoke about meeting Dr. Paul Farmer, a co-founder of Partners in Health, on a shuttle flight from DC to Boston and also about various new industries and products from wind energy to the Tata Nano car. She is very dynamic and interacted very well with the audience -- I estimated over 400 in attendance, including many undergrads including many students.

Dr. Detmar Straub, A Regent's Professor of the University System of Georgia and the J. Mack Robinson Distinguished Professor of Information Systems at Georgia State University, spoke this afternoon as part of the Dean's Lecture series. His talk was on "Why Top Journals Accept Your Paper." He completed two terms as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal MIS Quarterly. I had the pleasure of joining several of my IS faculty colleagues and one of our doctoral students for lunch with Dr. Straub at the University Club, which is in a building dating to 1728. The food was very good and the conversation fabulous  -- we laughed over so many great stories -- I especially enjoyed his reminiscences about various conferences.

 Dr. Robert Shumsky of Dartmouth was our previous speaker in the Dean's Lecture series. He is well-known in INFORMS and OM circles.

Also, today, the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter had the pleasure of hosting Professor Michael C. Fu of the Snith School at the University of Maryland College Park. He has degrees from MIT and a PhD from Harvard and he was fabulous. His talk began at 2:00 at the Isenberg School and we ended our conversations at 4:00PM. His talk focused on stochastic methodologies with applications ranging from financial engineering to supply chains. Specifically, he spoke on  stochastic gradient estimation techniques, which are methodologies for deriving computationally efficient estimators used in simulation optimization and sensitivity analysis of complex stochastic systems that require simulation to estimate their performance. His presentation was so clear and I loved such phrases as the "mathematically disadvantaged" and "statistically unconscious."

The photo below I took (apologies that it was not my best) after Professor Fu's presentation. My colleague from engineering, Professor Weibo Gong, also a Harvard PhD and a former doctoral student of Professor Ho's, helped in the hosting.

On November 1, we will be hosting, through the efforts of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, Dr. Les Servi of Mitre, who, coincidentally, had the same PhD advisor at Harvard, Dr. Ho, as did Dr. Fu and Dr. Gong. I have known Les since we overlapped at Brown University. Both Les and Michael are INFORMS Fellows and outstanding scholars. Dr. Servi will be speaking on social media and sports, with a focus on his work in soccer -- it should be a fascinating talk, Last time that he spoke in our series, his topic was on pirates off the coast of Africa! And he gets paid to work on such interesting projects.

Information Asymmetry, Nobel Prize in Economics, and Favorite Chidlren's Books

In a recent post I wrote about the 2013 Nobel laureates in Economic Sciences and connections to and  reflections on Operations Research.

In parallel, I have been doing research, when not conferencing and teaching, on supply chains and information asymmetry.

Of course, George A. Akerlof's paper, "The Market for "lemons": Quality Uncertainty with the Market Mechanism," published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1970 is the classic in information asymmetry. And, you may recall that I wrote about believing in your work, since this paper was rejected by journals 3 times, and then was published and earned Akerlof the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001.

Akerlof is married to Janet Yellen, who has been in the news a lot lately since  President Obama has selected her to be the next chair of the Federal Reserve Bank, succeeding Ben Bernanke. She and I share the same undergraduate alma mater, Brown University, although we did not overlap in our studies. She then went on to receive her PhD at Yale in economics.

Also, the most recent paper that my team at the Supernetworks Center wrote was inspired by Akerlof's lemon paper. The paper is Spatial Price Equilibrium with Information Asymmetry in Quality, Anna Nagurney, Dong Li, and Ladimer S. Nagurney. We are completing another paper on this general theme and have authored several papers on quality and supply chains as well as quality and the future Internet.

Coincidentally, in preparing my blogpost on the 2013 Nobel laureates, I came across George Akerlof's Nobel Prize acceptance speech and I have been smiling ever since.

He begins his Nobel speech Behavioral Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Behavior (the text is here) with: Think about Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. Think about what that book would have looked like in sequential decades of the last century had Richard Scarry been alive in each of them to delight and amuse children and parents. Each subsequent decade has seen the development of ever more specialized vehicles. We started with the model-T Ford. We now have more models of backhoe loaders than even the most precocious four- year old can identify.

Can you believe it -- starting a Nobel prize speech by acknowledging a children's book and in a series which was one of my daughter's favorites as a child. When we traveled and lived n Europe we would see Richard Scarry's books in bookstores and libraries with such favorite characters as Huckle Cat and Lowly Worm in different languages. The humor, lessons, and imagination in these books we treasured and we have kept many in our collection.

Below, I feature a photo taken yesterday of some of our favorite Richard Scarry books in honor of Akerlof and his work and his wife, whom he acknowledged in his speech.

Never lose your sense of wonder and never give up! And when life gives you lemons, make lemonade!

Akerlof mentioned Robert Shiller's work in his Nobel speech and Shiller is sharing the 2013 Prize with Fama and Hansen -- small world!

Since Akerlof and Yellen have a son, who has a PhD in economics, and is also a professor,  I suspect that they read Richard Scarry books to him when he was a child.

Mathematics of Planet Earth -- Special Issue of Computational Management Science

According to the website for Mathematics of Planet Earth MPE2013: More than a hundred scientific societies, universities, research institutes, and organizations all over the world have banded together to dedicate 2013 as a special year for the Mathematics of Planet Earth.

 The theme “Mathematics of Planet Earth” is interpreted as broadly as possible. In addition to climate change and sustainability, it includes geophysics, ecology and epidemiology, biodiversity, as well as the global organization of the planet by humans. The different topics have been classified into four themes.

The four themes of MPE2013:
* A PLANET TO DISCOVER: oceans; meteorology and climate; mantle processes, natural resources, solar systems
* A PLANET SUPPORTING LIFE: ecology, biodiversity, evolution
* A PLANET ORGANIZED BY HUMANS: political, economic, social and financial systems; organization of transport and communications networks; management of resources; energy
* A PLANET AT RISK: climate change, sustainable development, epidemics; invasive species, natural disasters.

I became aware of this great initiative last May when I spoke at the Computational Management Science conference in Montreal, Canada,  and heard from Professor Georges Zaccour that he, and Professor Michele Breton, were guest editing a special issue of the journal Computational Management Science on this theme.  Since last year I was on sabbatical and spending a lot of time at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, sustainability continues to be a major theme in my research. Plus, the emphasis on the environment in Gothenburg and in Sweden, overall, made for a perfect venue in which to work on a paper for this special issue. Our paper, Supply Chain Network Sustainability Under Competition and Frequencies of Activities from Production to Distribution, Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, and Jonas Floden, is now in press in this special issue  of Computational Management Science.

I was delighted to see the Preface to this special issue online on the journal website  The special issue, according to the Guest Editors Breton and Zaccour,  has 7 papers written by scholars having an extensive expertise in mathematical modeling and in environmental issues.The objective of this issue is to report on recent advances in modeling and in the development of computational methods for environmental issues such as global warming, pollution control, adaptation, sustainable exploitation of resources (forests, fisheries, etc(, sustainable supply chains, and more!

I expect that the hardcopy of the full issue will be produced soon since the contributions are online -- I am so looking forward to receiving my copy.

Congrats to the Guest Editors and thank you for your hard work which made this special volume possible! Also, thanks to the long-serving Editor of CMS, Professor Berc Rustem, for being a visionary.

2013 Nobel Laureates in Economic Sciences -- Reflections and Connections

This time of the year is when the Nobel Prizes get announced (and it is also the time of the year when several of our major conferences take place including the INFORMS one) so there is a lot of anticipation, drama, and excitement.

The 2013 recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences are: Professors Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen of the University of Chicago and Professor Robert Shiller of Yale. They are receiving the Nobel prize "for their empirical analysis of asset prices."

Photo courtesy of TT/Claudio Bresciani/AP Bloomberg.com

What continues to amaze me is the connections between economic sciences, including computational economics,  and operations research and the management sciences, over the span of Nobel Prize recipients  in Economic Sciences. The first Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was given back in 1969 and the full list of recipients (one female to-date, Elinor Ostrom) can be found here on the official Nobel site.

For example, Eugene Fama has published in Management Science: "Three Asset Cash Balance and Dynamic Portfolio Problems." Gary D. Eppen and Eugene F. Fama; Management Science, 1971, 17(5, Theory Series), pp. 311-19.http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0025-1909%28197101%2917%3A5%3C311%3ATACBAD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y

Also I cited Fama's work in my Financial Networks book, co-authored with a former doctoral student of mine, Stavros Siokos, who actually received his PhD from UMass Amherst in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and is an extremely successful financier, based in London. We cite Fama's work in the ninth chapter.

As for Lars Peter Hansen, I crossed paths with him back in 2010, when he, Professor Andrew Lo of MIT, and David Marshall organized the Measuring Systemic Risk Conference, which took place in December in Chicago. I spoke on Financial Networks and I acknowledged Hansen on the second page of my talk. Joining me was my wonderful colleague in Finance, who was Professor Lo's doctoral student at MIT, Mila Getmansky Sherman.

Professor Shiller I have never met but I have met his colleague, Karl Case, and have written about their joint work and about NSF and entrepreneurship on this blog.

As for the only female Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences, I will never forget meeting Dr. Elinor Ostrom, when she spoke at UMass Amherst and I brought one of my PhD students with me, who is now Dr. Min Yu. Elinor would visit and work closely with my colleagues at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden where I have held  a Visiting Professorship.

Along with Professor Hans Amman, I have coedited the Advances in Computational Economics book series (started with Kluwer and now with Springer) and the Nobel laureate, Daniel McFadden, was on our editorial board even before he received the Nobel Prize and I have dined with him at one of our Computational Economics conferences. Chris Sims and Tom Sargent I also met at a Computational Economics conference.  My first book, Network Economics: A Variational Inequality Approach, was the first book in the Advances in Computational Economics book series and it continues to be my most highly-cited work. Its second edition came out in 1999.

And, of course, who can ever forget meeting Paul Samuelson, whose work I have cited since I was a doctoral student at Brown University. As for the Nobel laureate Harry Markowitz, whose work in portfolio optimization I have cited numerous times, I met him at an INFORMS conference in an elevator -- he is over a foot taller than I am!

My INFORMS colleague and fellow blogger. Professor Mike Trick of CMU, wrote last year on Shapley and Roth receiving the Nobel in Economic Sciences and connections to operations research and the management sciences.