Friday, December 19, 2014

Terrific Operations + Analytics Conferences in 2015 + More!

I am very much looking forward to the New 2015 Year!

The Spring 2015 semester I will be teaching two of my favorite courses at the Isenberg School and the Supernetwork Center Associates and I will be taking part in many conferences.

Shortly after the 1st of the New Year, there will be the 2015 INFORMS Computing Society Conference in Richmond, VA, January 11-13, at which we will be presenting our latest work on our NSF Future Internet Architecture project. The title of our paper is: A Game Theory Model for a Differentiated Service-Oriented Internet with Duration-Based Contracts, Anna Nagurney, Sara Saberi, Tilman Wolf, and Ladimer S. Nagurney. The paper will be published in the Proceedings of ICS 2015. Sara is one of my doctoral students who is also a 2014 Isenberg Scholar.

Then, on February 7, 2015 (no travel needed for us for this one for us), the second Women of Isenberg Conference will take place at, of course, the Isenberg School of Management! I have been asked to speak on the Building Your Brand panel. This should be very engaging and fun and no power point is needed! Last year I enjoyed the inaugural Women of Isenberg conference very much  and blogged about it. It was extra special to see one of my former undergrads and Supernetwork Center Associates, Christina Calvaneso there. Christina was funded, in part, under one of my NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) grants.

Later in February I will be going to a conference in Florida: World Congress on Global Optimization: WCGO 2015, Gainesville, FL, February 22-25. There I will present work with one of my doctoral students, Dong "Michelle" Li:: Supply Chain Performance Assessment and Supplier and Component Importance Identification in a General Competitive Multitiered Supply Chain Network Model. By that time I suspect, given last year's fierce winter in New England, I will need to see some greenery and experience some warmer temps!

In March, 2015, to coincide with my Spring Break, I will have the pleasure of speaking in Berlin, Germany. Last summer I was an invited speaker at a workshop in Erice, Sicily on energy, and a member of the audience liked my presentation so the good word spread. I will be speaking in Berlin on "Sustainable Supply Chains for Sustainable Cities." The conference should be very interesting. It  is on Φ·SOE Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme (Physics of Socio-Economic Systems Division), German Physical Society, March 15-20. So nice to see my name on the elegant conference flier! Danke schon!

(Some folks like to present the same talk at multiple venues - I like to present different talks!)

In April, 2015, it will be time for the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research, Huntington Beach, CA, April 12-14. I had such a marvelous time last year at the Boston Analytics conference, at which I spoke on Cybersecurity and Financial Services, that I had to submit a proposal to speak in CA. We'll see if the proposal is successful! Center Associates Professor Jose Cruz of UConn and Professor Zugang "Leo" Liu of Penn State Hazleton will both be going to this conference.

In early May, to coincide, inconveniently, as also happened last year, with our UMass graduations,  the POMS conference will take place in DC. All of my doctoral students and I have submitted papers for presentation there and I have another one submitted with a former student who is a Center Associate, Dr. Min Yu of the University of Portland.

Once the semester is over with, there will be more travel, of the international kind. I am a co-organizer of the conference, 2nd International Conference on Dynamics of Disasters (DOD 2015)
Kalamata, Greece, June 29-July 2, 2015, which should be outstanding (but I am a bit biased, I must say). The Organizing Committee consists of academics and practitioners from around the globe.In Spring 2015 I am again teaching my course, Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare, so the conference will be very synergistic.

Then it will be time for the EURO XXVII Annual Conference, Glasgow, Scotland, July 12-15,  My great colleague and Supernetwork Center Associate, Professor Patrizia Daniele, invited me to speak in her session, which will also have Professor Tyrrell Rockafellar as a speaker. He is renowned for his work in optimization!

Faculty and even doctoral students are jet-setters but conferences are extremely important venues for knowledge exchange and, of course, networking! Plus, one's institution gains from the enhanced visivility!