We Got the Grant and the Exciting Research Begins!

Writing proposals is a very time-consuming and challenging endeavor.

And, once a proposal is submitted to an organization or funding agency for peer review, ultimately getting funding to conduct the research described in the proposal, is far from guaranteed. In many competitive calls for proposals less that 15% of the proposals will get funded.

So why bother to take the time out of one's busy schedule to engage in such an activity, which does not guarantee a positive pay-off?

Moreover, why should faculty in business schools, who could be spending their time consulting, teaching in Executive Ed, etc., even bother to write proposals?

I write proposals because I truly believe in the research underlying the projects and much frontier research today is multidisciplinary, which means bringing teams together. This may be costly in the sense that there may be travel involved, a new cadre of students to engage in the research and to educate, plus equipment (at the very least, computers) to purchase. Plus, one must scope out the time to be able to do the collaborative research. Hence, to do multidisciplinary research, which crosses boundaries, often requires financial backing and funding.

Of course, one can just go with one's comfortable status quo but I refuse to not be growing and challenging myself, as well as my students and collaborators. Hence, I continue to write proposals and to plant my seeds wherever I can, and to see which ones germinate.

The receipt of a research grant, that has been subject to peer review (I am not talking about earmarked projects which I have never been the beneficiary of), provides a type of validation that is important both professionally and, to me, at least, personally. It means that the community of scholars believes in one's ideas and creativity. This type of recognition gives one an added push to do one's best to excel.

Moreover, it provides a type of freedom to conduct the research because one has attained both the backing of one's peers (who are always anonymous in reviewing the proposals) and the financial support to pursue new, challenging research topics. It also opens up new opportunities -- one may get invited to present the new research at workshops and conferences and to attend special meetings at the funding agency, etc., which can provide venues for additional intellectual exchanges and idea generation.

Plus, when the efforts of writing a proposal result in positive reviews (even after multiple setbacks, and I have had my share of those but I never give up or stop trying) and the funding agency decides to award the grant, one, literally, with all the project co-investigators, glows with happiness and with renewed energy.

We heard the wonderful news this week (and it came after the onslaught of Hurricane Irene). Our multidisciplinary research project consisting of a team of engineers, computer scientists, and me (I will be providing the management science and network economics perspective to the project) has been funded and it is a three year project. It involves multiple institutions and a colleague of mine in the College of Engineering and I at the Isenberg School of Management will be leading the UMass Amherst effort.

A brief abstract of our project, which is being funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is below.

Computer networks, in particular the Internet, represent essential infrastructure for business, government, military, and personal communication. Several recent trends in technology and network use have pushed the capabilities required of the Internet beyond what can be provided by the currently deployed infrastructure. This project develops a transformative shift in the design of networks that enables sustained innovation in the core of the network using economic principles. The core idea is that supporting choice is the key aspect of a network architecture that can adapt to emerging solutions for current and future challenges.

The network architecture designed and prototyped in this work aims to:

(1) encourage alternatives to allow users to choose among a range of services,

(2) let users vote with their wallet to reward superior and innovative services,

(3) provides the mechanisms to stay informed on available alternatives and their performances.

Solutions are approached from different directions reflecting the team’s multidisciplinary expertise in computer networking, network systems, management science, and network economics.

The broader impact of this project contributes to enhancing the functionality and usability of the next-generation Internet, which is expected to become an important piece of infrastructure. The project also integrates research and education of graduate and undergraduate students at the participating organizations, where current efforts to integrate underrepresented minorities are continued. Results from this work are disseminated in the form of an open-source prototype and publications.

Now the exciting research begins.

What wonderful news to receive just in time for the new academic 2011-2012 year!

A Once in 500 Years Flood -- Hurricane Irene and Photos of Deerfield

It seems that Manhattan managed quite well during and after Hurricane or "Tropical Storm" Irene. My 92 year old uncle, who lives in mid-Manhattan, and who has survived two World Wars and saw the towers crumble on 9/11, called me today to check on us in western MA. He said that the subways are running in NYC and he has been back to work (what an amazing generation his is) and was disappointed that Lincoln Center canceled its performances this past weekend because of Hurricane Irene.

Western Massachusetts and Vermont continue to feel the impact of Irene with many towns in the latter completely isolated due to flooded roads and downtowns. Power is still out in parts and bridges have been closed and await inspection, if they are not destroyed.

Amherst made it through relatively unscathed. We lost two trees in our front yard and so did some neighbors but the flooding in neighboring towns has been horrendous.

Yesterday, after taking detours to get to work at Deerfield Academy, where my daughter is working as a tour guide this summer, the scenes of flooding were horrific.

Above I have posted some photos of areas of Deerfield Academy in Old Deerfield one day after Irene hit this past Sunday.

Amazingly, there was even a group of National Guardsmen with a Humvee guarding a road off of Old Deerfield, which leads to farmland. Disaster recovery experts were at work plus even families at the Bement School had to be evacuated as well as several ones at Deerfield Academy (even by boat).

A UMass Amherst geoscientist, Professor David F. Boutt, who is an expert on this part of very historic Massachusetts, said that what happened is a once in hundreds of years event.

Tough to see so much of the beautiful landscape under water as well as the farms with corn and potatoes and pumpkins.

We wish all those affected by Irene a timely recovery.

In addition, even the Deerfield Inn suffered flooding and will be closed for several weeks (and this is a busy time with the schools in the area opening up and with the leaf-peepers soon to arrive).

More photos of Deerfield under water can be accessed here.

This morning we received the press release below from Historic Deerfield.

Flooding from Hurricane Irene Causes Museum, Inn Closings

Historic Deerfield Plans to Reopen on Thursday, Sept. 1;

Deerfield Inn and Champney's Restaurant & Tavern Closed
Indefinitely

Due to extreme flooding from Hurrricane Irene, Historic Deerfield is closed to the public through Wednesday, August 31, 2011. The museum plans to reopen on Thursday, Sept. 1, 2011 at 9:30 a.m.-although three historic houses at the flooded north end will likely remain closed. The Deerfield Inn and Champney's Restaurant & Tavern will be closed indefinitely.

"This kind of severe flooding is rare in Deerfield," said Philip Zea, President of Historic Deerfield. "Luckily our advance preparations on Friday and Saturday helped ensure that the museum houses and collections remained safe."

Not so fortunate was the Deerfield Inn, which sustained major flood damage to the first floor of its annex and to the basement of the main building. It may be several days before the waters recede enough to allow investigators to gain access to these spaces to assess the damage and begin the process of rebuilding. In the meantime, guests have been relocated and reservations are being cancelled for the next two
weeks.

"Our goal is to reopen the Inn as quickly as possible," said Susan Martinelli, Vice President for Busiess Affairs at Historic Deerfield. "We will not know the full extent of the project until the investigation is completed."

"Aside from the Deerfield Inn, we had water fill the cellars of three buildings," added Zea. "But rivers keep old habits and the Deerfield River has flooded for ten thousand years when the Connecticut refuses to take her water. That's why these fields are so fertile."

Historic Deerfield (www.historic-deerfield.org) plans to reopen on Thursday, Sept. 1, for tours from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. For more information about Historic Deerfield please call 413-775-7214. For more information on the Deerfield Inn and Champney's Restaurant & Tavern, please call 413-774-5587.

Click here for some helpful hints, from scientists, on how to deal with flooded homes!

Analytics for Trucking Featuring Warren Powell in Forbes

Before I even had a chance to glance at our most recent issue of Forbes, my husband called out to me saying that there was an interesting article in it on Calculus for Truckers. As soon as he noted the title, I responded that I bet that the article was featuring research by Professor Warren Powell of Princeton University, and I was right!

The feature article arrived with perfect timing for my Transportation & Logistics course that I will start teaching next week and it is a great read.

As Warren (I will use his first name since he has been a fellow colleague through INFORMS and various Society of Transportation & Logistics activities for a long time) notes in the article, the research of his that Schneider National has been using, dates back to the 1980s. He has also worked with yellow Freight and other major logistics providers.

According to the Forbes article:

What interested Schneider, a full-truckload carrier, was Powell's work in the field of approximate dynamic programming, which is a way to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty. Schneider needed a model that could take into account the nonobvious and sometimes random variables that affect the efficiency of thousands of drivers over weeks of time and at a high level of detail.

It is fantastic that more and more industries are realizing the importance of analytics, coupled with algorithms and simulation, to enable the exploration of policy changes on the entire system.

"The thing that's so powerful is that when someone presses us on the impact of different policy changes, we have the facts, we have the data. We can produce reports and analysis so that if someone else brought in their scientists, they would have to agree," said Ted Gifford of Schneider. "The value is to be able to take these complex business opportunities and give them a good, solid analysis."

It is certainly a fantastic time to be working in analytics and operations research!

Thanks also to Forbes for such great coverage of research that is making such a difference in practice!

Hopefully, the success of such research will enable additional applications of analytics / operations research to various industries at a quickened pace.

Risk-Taking, Innovation, and Steve Jobs

The sun has not yet risen, the power has not failed, and we are awaiting Hurricane Irene, which is to hit landfall in our part of the Northeast sometime today. Hurricane Irene and emergency preparedness have been the center of attention with mass transit shutdowns in Philadelphia, NYC, New Jersey, and Boston, and thousands of flights cancelled and even airports closed as the hurricane barrels up the northeast corridor. Manhattan was eerily quiet yesterday as my uncle, who is in his 90s, related to us, after his walk to Lincoln Center and back to his apartment.

During this period of preparing for Hurricane Irene, and, unlike when the tornadoes hit Massachusetts on Jun 1, 2011, there was sufficient warning, the announcement was made, in case you missed it, that Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple Inc. had stepped down, but had asked to remain on the Apple board as its chairman. He had been fighting pancreatic cancer for two years and had had a liver transplant and the best wishes and accolades streamed from around the globe from leaders, executives, and consumers of Apple's products from the iPod to the iPhone and iPad. Jobs' attention to detail and sense of aesthetics are legendary. He is also the holder of 313 patents according to The New York Times.

Jobs is the consummate innovator and innovation is an elusive talent and quality that has generated much interest in both industry and academia and is essential for economic growth and prosperity. In fact, presently, we at the Isenberg School, are looking to fill a chaired faculty position as the Isenberg Professor, who is to focus on innovation. Innovation has even attracted the attention of nations and, according to John Kao, an innovation expert, and as reported in The Times, the raw materials for innovation, which other nations may be surpassing the US in, include:

• government financing for scientific research,
• national policies to support emerging industries,
• educational achievement, engineers and scientists graduated, and
• even the speeds of Internet broadband service.

What the US does have, however, and what other countries may lack, and which is essential for a climate for innovation, Mr. Kao notes, is a social environment that encourages diversity, experimentation, risk-taking, and combining skills from many fields into products that he calls “recombinant mash-ups,” like the iPhone, which redefined the smartphone category.

To learn how to become a great innovator, we need look no further than Steve Jobs and, as academics have pointed out: the five traits that are common to the disruptive innovators or what makes up The Innovator's DNA: questioning, experimenting, observing, associating, and networking to search for new ideas. Ceaseless curiosity and willingness to take risks make up their genetic code.

Thank you, Steve Jobs, for showing us how it should be done -- even after your firing from Apple, you rose to lead the company to new heights.

Evacuation Networks and Hurricane Irene -- When Selfish Travel is Actually Unselfish

For the past few weeks I have been busy working on my Transportation & Logistics lectures for the course that I am teaching this Fall at the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst.

In the course, students will be learning about different transportation (and network) behavioral and decision-making principles, including user-optimized (selfish) and system-optimized (unselfish) behavior, and the effects on travel times and costs, and I will also be covering aspects of disaster and emergency preparedness and other timely topics.

Now, we are awaiting Hurricane Irene, and western Massachusetts is forecasted to be in the eye of this hurricane tomorrow afternoon, Sunday, August 28. Governor Deval Patrick has declared a state of emergency as have many other governors of states along the Northeast Corridor of the Unites States where 1 out 5 Americans live.

For the first time in history, NYC, with a population of 8 million, has issued an evacuation order to those living in low-lying areas, which is affecting over 370,000 people, with certain hospitals and nursing homes already evacuated.

Evacuations have also been issued in parts of North Carolina and New Jersey and I was impressed that the Providence Journal (I went to Brown University and we have relatives in Rhode Island) even posted evacuation maps for different localities in Rhode Island!

Maps are, of course, extremely useful as are GPS systems, but neither provides the true picture of what happens when thousands of vehicles flood the roads in the case of an emergency and evacuation since they do not capture congestion. Hence, the roads may be jam-packed as travelers seek to reach points of higher ground inland and safety. Moreover, if everyone uses the "shortest" recommended route, which does not include the travel time due to congestion (the number of vehicles on that road) it may actually become the "longest" one -- dangerous when a hurricane is approaching.

Hence, what should be done, for equity and fairness, interestingly enough (and I have been doing a lot of thinking and research on this topic) is to have the traffic be routed in an evacuation in a user-optimized manner so that all routes have travel times, from each origin to safe destination, that are equal and minimal. This is actually how commuters behave in selecting their cost-minimizing routes of travel and, in an emergency, user-optimization or selfish behavior actually is unselfish!

With the mass transit shutdown in NYC as of noon today, there may be large traffic jams but I am impressed by the attention that has been given to making sure that the subway and train cars are protected. Even tolls (which I also teach about in my course) will be eliminated to assist in the timeliness of evacuations and the flow travel time.

We have stocked up on bottled water, nonperishable food, batteries, and have our flashlights and radios ready as well as our cars filled with gas.

Regions in the Northeast may be without power for as long as a week so one has to be prepared.

We are expecting pounding rain for 10 hours or so with winds up to 70 miles an hour in our area, beginning tomorrow. By that time, only emergency vehicles should be on the roads.

In fact, even our campus is officially closed for 48 hours this weekend.

For more background on our critical infrastructure systems and their resiliency (or not), please see the article, "Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain Age," co-authored with Dr. Patrick Qiang, who's recent statement on disasters and rare events, including our recent earthquake and now Hurricane Irene, appears on his university's website.

Will Hurricane Irene Be Like the Hurricane of 1938?

The last time that a major hurricane hit NYC and western Massachusetts was back in 1938, and there is serious speculation that Hurricane Irene now moving up the eastern seaboard may be as bad as the 1938 hurricane (which is being referred to as its Grandma) and, given the increase in population over the past 70 years in the Northeast, its impact even worse.

One has to realize that 63 million people live in the northeast corridor, 20% of the US population!

There is ongoing analysis as to what may happen to critical infrastructure links, including tunnels and bridges, as well as worst case scenarios.

Given that it is not unreasonable that the NYC subway system could be knocked out, Governor Andrew Cuomo has announced that the NYC mass transit system is being shut down at noon tomorrow, Saturday, August 27. In addition, residents of NYC have been advised to stay indoors from Saturday at 9PM through this Sunday 9PM.

Hundreds of flights have already been cancelled by Jet Blue airline alone. For the first time in NYC, evacuations have been ordered in parts of NYC by Mayor Bloomberg.

For more updates on transit shutdowns and thousands of flight cancellations click here.

Also, since the Northeast corridor is roughly at sea level, the transportation infrastructure along it from roads, rails, airports, etc., can be severely affected by Hurricane Irene. Just think, where does one even shelter all the trains and planes?

Coincidentally, on a recent shuttle trip to catch a flight at Bradley airport, my driver brought up the 1938 hurricane, which he had survived, and he worked for years as a civil engineer. He had told me that people have forgotten about the devastation that resulted. I located some photos of the flooding, etc., on one of our local news websites.

Obviously, we have started to prepare for Hurricane Irene, and unlike the tornados (another "rare" event) that swept through western Massachusetts on June 1, 2011, we have much more time to do so!

The most recent book that I co-authored, Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, with Dr. Patrick Qiang, provides metrics for the identification of which transportation (and other critical infrastructure) network links (and nodes) are the most important.

It appears that many state and local governments are doing a good job in notifying citizens and in preparing for this emergency. In the meantime, make sure that you take care of your family members and watch out for the well-being of your neighbors.

Hurricane Irene and College Moving In (or Out) Day

Hurricane Irene is coinciding with moving in day for many colleges in the Northeast of the US so there has been quite a lot of decision-making and schedule reshuffling going on.

Some colleges have moved the arrival date up to tomorrow, Saturday, August 27, while others have gone as far as closing campuses until Tuesday. In any event, the college orientations in the Northeast I-95 corridor will clearly need to engage in some disruption management and refocusing.

The Boston Globe is reporting on what colleges from Harvard to various UMass campuses are doing in light of Hurricane Irene, which is to hit Massachusetts this Sunday. NYU has delayed its arrival day for students from Sunday until Monday, according to The New York Times, which is also reporting that certain hospitals and nursing homes in NYC in low-lying areas have begun evacuations today. New York City's Health Commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, was chairman of the community health sciences department at Tulane University when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005.

According to The Boston Globe: At least one college was planning to weather the storm with very few changes to its original plan. Andrew Klein, the Dean of Student Affairs at Anna Maria College, a small liberal arts school in the Worcester suburb of Paxton, said the school would start classes Monday as scheduled. As for its 285 freshmen, orientation was still on.

A university in western Massachusetts, Westfield State, is taking a completely different approach and its President, Dr. Dobelle, has issued a statement saying that all students must vacate the campus, beginning today, Friday at 4PM, through Tuesday morning.

Remember the proverb: Prepare for the worst, but hope for the best.