Supernetwork Team Shines at INFORMS Conference in Houston

This past week was a whirlwind with the INFORMS Annual Meeting taking place in Houston, Texas, October 22-25, 2017. There were almost 6,000 conferees and the conference, which took place less than two months after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, one to remember.

It was also very special since 12  members of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management that I serve as a Director of were there to present papers, chair sessions, accept an award, and enjoy technical talks, business meetings, and many social events.

Last Sunday, I gathered a group of Supernetwork Center Associates, who had arrived in Houston,  for dinner al fresco at the restaurant Pappadeux, which is right next to the Convention Center.

Kudos to Professor Dmytro Matsypura who travelled all the way from the University of Sydney in Australia to present his work! Eight of my former PhD students, along Isenberg School UMass Amherst PhD alums, were there, plus two of my present doctoral students: Pritha Dutta and Deniz Besik. The PhD alums are now professors at great institutions: in addition to Dr. Matsypura, Dr. Jose M. Cruz is at UConn's School of Business, Dr. Amir H. Masoumi is at the School of Business at Manhattan College, Dr. Patrick Qiang is at Penn State, Dr. Sara Saberi is at the Foisie School of Business at WPI, Dr. Min Yu is at the Pamplin School of Business at the University of Portland, Dr. Dong "Michelle" Li is at the College of Business at Arkansas State University, Dr. Shivani Shukla of the University of San Francisco, and Dr. Trisha Anderson is at the School of Business at Texas Wesleyan University.

I am so proud of my former (and present) doctoral students who are so professionally active and engaged and whose work in both research and education is making a big difference.

I have posted 7 of the presentations that we gave at INFORMS Houston on the Supernetworks Center site since we have had multiple requests.

It was thrilling to see my book with Dr. Michelle Li displayed at the Springer booth at the Exhibition area, along with the latest issue of the Journal of Global Optimization in which Dr. Min Yu, Deniz Besik, and I have our paper on supply chain capacity competition and outsourcing, which Deniz presented at the conference.

Dr. Michelle Li, Dr. Yu, and I also heard last Friday that our paper that Dr. Li presented on Monday on consumer learning in differentiated product markets was accepted for publication in the journal Omega. We could not have asked for better timing!

Below is a photo taken after the session on Networks and Supply Chains that I organized of the speakers and several members of the audience who are a part of our great Supernetworks Team!

Our presentations included ones on freight and sustainability, cybersecurity investments, game theory and disaster relief, closed loop supply chains, and even blood supply chains and game theory!

Another highlight was getting together at the WORMS lunch and, of course, having our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter receive the Magna Cum Laude Award from INFORMS!

 

We all returned energized and brimming with new ideas and also a strengthened sense of community.

Thank you INFORMS for holding the conference in Houston, despite the uncertainty and the associated challenges. It is a conference to be very pleasantly remembered!

Congrats to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter on Its Magna Cum Laude Award Received in Houston

The INFORMS Houston conference, which took place October 22- 25, 2017, will be one for the history books not only in that there was record attendance - about 6,000 conferees from around the globe but also that the conference took place in a city battered by Hurricane Harvey less than two months ago.

Clearly, operations researchers and management scientists as well as analytics professionals were drawn to this conference and it did not disappoint. Plus, we even raised thousands of dollars to provide personal hygiene products that were then distributed to those in shelters. Technologists have a heart and, as Dr. Bill Klimack, the organizer of the conference, stated: We Solve Problems.

I was an official blogger for the conference and enjoyed the talks, seeing friends, going to business meetings as well as the social events immensely. The conference venue, the Convention Center in downtown Houston was also stunning with a beautiful park nearby.

However, most definitely, a high point of the conference for me was the student chapter awards event this past Monday night. That evening, the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter was honored with a Magna Cum Laude Award for its activities in 2016, based on an annual report. Amazingly, this is the 12th award, in as many consecutive years, that this student chapter has received from its parent society of INFORMS, a record that I think we singularly hold. This speaks to the amazing work ethic, sense of community, as well as creativity of the student chapter officers and the members of this chapter. I have served as this chapter's Faculty Advisor since its inception in 2004 and it is extremely rewarding to work with our great students at the Isenberg School of Management and the College of Engineering.

A special shoutout to last year's officers, including the Chapter President Pritha Dutta, for leadership and for numerous exciting activities, from speakers to community service, panels, and social events.

Below are some photos from the event and the wonderful reception that followed.

 

In the above photo are: Ekin Koker (Webmaster for several years), Sayeeda Cebnet (Chapter Secretary),  Pritha Dutta (past President), Deniz Besik (the new Chapter President), and Rodrigo Mercado Fernandez (Communications Director).

It was special to see chapter alums, now Professors, after earning their PhDs, also come to support the students. Below are Dr. Heng Chen and Dr. Sara Saberi.

Finally, celebrating with other award recipients added to the special atmosphere of this awards event.

And, thanks to Carlos Wachzetina and Thiago Serra, we managed to even get a big group of tweeps together for the group photo below at the awards event.

The students that we have in operations research and the management sciences and analytics will ensure the continuing strength, vibrancy, and impact of INFORMS.

Congratulations to all the INFORMS Student Chapters receiving awards at the Annual INFORMS Conference in Houston and keep up the great work! Congratulations also to the Judith Liebman Award recipients.

UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Tunes Up for National Conference in Houston

The 2017 Annual INFORMS conference is taking place in Houston, Texas, October 22-25, 2017, and today I had the pleasure of attending the tune-up for the conference that was organized by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter.  Although everyone is very busy it is very important to support the doctoral students, and the tune-up, which has become an annual tradition, allows the students to not only practice their conference talks and to receive feedback, but the audience members learn about some of the exciting research in operations research and management science that is being conducted on our campus.

We had blocked off a two hour time slot this Friday afternoon at the Isenberg School of Management for 5 presentations as in the nice poster that the students prepared below.

Both doctoral students from the Isenberg School and from the College of Engineering presented today and I thoroughly enjoyed the presentations on a diversity of important topics, ranging from supply chains (capacity competition and outsourcing), game theory and blood donations, energy and Mexico with a goal of achieving climate change goals, deep uncertainty and energy modeling, as well as network models for the spread of diseases.

I was impressed by the professionalism of the slides prepared as well as by the delivery of the presenters. These students are ready for their presentations in Houston. It was special to also see the enthusiasm that they have for their research.

The students even had brought refreshments including pizza!

Below are photos taken of the individual speakers, followed by a group photo that I took.

 

The doctoral student presenters today hail from Mexico, Turkey, India, Sierra Leone, and Mongolia!

They, along with other students from UMass as well as faculty, will be joining me on Monday evening at the Hilton in Houston to receive the Magna Cum Laude Award from INFORMS for the activities of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter this past year, an honor richly deserved.
This is the 12th award from INFORMS in the past 12 consecutive years.

And, during a short break this afternoon, I found out that a paper (one of seven) that  I am a co-author of that we are presenting at INFORMS Houston got accepted for publication in the journal Omega and we has just finished the slides this morning! Gratifying to have hard work rewarded.

Safe travels to all those heading to INFORMS Houston and see you soon!

Brilliant Lecture by Dr. Renata Konrad on Opportunities to Address Human Trafficking Using Operations Research and Analytics

Today we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Renata Konrad of the Foisie School of Business at WPI in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series. This speaker series is organized by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter with my full support.

Dr. Konrad's brilliant lecture was on: Opportunities to Address Human Trafficking Using Operations Research and Analytics.

After an introduction by Deniz Besik, the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter President, Dr. Konrad began her talk, which took place in the Integrated Learning Center at UMass Amherst. She emphasized that human trafficking is a global illicit business with estimates of profits of $150billion. It knows no national boundaries and probably is taking place in your town.

 

She noted that it is important to understand the demographics - who, what, where is being exploited and believes that there is a growing awareness of human trafficking . The associated challenges are numerous: the victims are hidden; often "hidden in plain sight" and with limited societal interfaces. Traffickers are covert, part of hidden networks, with dynamic adaptation, and it is difficult to obtain evidence against the perpetrators and to successfully prosecute them. Evidence may be "ambiguous."

At the same time there are opportunities for operations research and analytics in terms of designing prevention campaigns and identifying best resource allocation for media exposure; assisting in survivor detection and victim identification; searches for abnormal patterns in unrelated data that perhaps machine learning can assist with. I also very much appreciated that she highlighted that extending disaster preparedness approaches may be very useful in combating human trafficking.

Human trafficking is different from standard product supply chains, which calls for new theories. Unlike food or medicines that are consumed, here we are dealing with a "renewable commodity" Another challenge is that the data is incomplete and hard to obtain and often organizations that are involved in combating human trafficking are reluctant to share data with one another. In terms of network interdiction, the agencies may even have possibly different objectives and be non-coordinating with one another.

I was delighted to hear Dr. Konrad mention not only networks and network interdiction but that she also noted that there are opportunities for modeling in terms of illustrating the potential of interagency cooperation using game theory. We had shown the benefits of cooperation in a different context in a recent paper that we published on cybersecurity with Shivani Shukla in the European Journal of Operational Research.

Spending on combating human trafficking is not proportionate to the scale of the problem. At the same time, policymakers want concrete quantifiable evidence as to the effectiveness of proposed policies to address human trafficking based on return on investment. To measure the effectiveness of anti-trafficking policies is an important operations research problem in itself.

Dr. Konrad mentioned work in this area that she is involved in from New Haven to Nepal. She then spoke on two specific projects that she is involved in: 1. working on designing awareness campaigns using a production function objective and 2. selecting locations of rehabilitative shelters in the US (right now there are only 700) and there are 34,000 calls to the hotlines annually. Here, again, identifying an appropriate objective function is crucial in order to capture the associated benefits versus the costs. The latter work she is doing with her WPI colleague, Professor Andrew Trapp, and Dr. Kayse Maass, who is a postdoc at the Mayo Clinic. An excellent article by them on human trafficking analysis can be found on the INFORMS website.

Dr. Konrad was wonderful in answering numerous questions from the audience and also generated many research ideas - even establishing linkages between epidemiology and human trafficking as well as possible incentives based on research in HIV. It was great to have my Engineering colleagues Professor Erin Baker and Professor Chaitra Gopalappa in attendance, with their super questions. Dr. Gopalappa has done a lot of work in HIV prevention and modeling.

We took a photo of Professor Konrad with some of the audience members after her talk and presented her with a token gift from the Isenberg School of Management. Thanks to colleagues and students from the College of Engineering and the Isenberg School who came as well as other guests from outside UMass. I was delighted to even see an Isenberg undergraduate in the audience from my Transportation and Logistics class!

I then had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Konrad at a lunch at the University Club at UMass Amherst.

Deniz Besik also conducted an interview with Dr. Konrad in the Supernetworks Lab, and we will let you know when it gets posted.

We thank Dr. Konrad for taking time out of her very busy schedule to educate us on a topic of profound importance in which operations research and analytics can assist in fundamental ways, some of which have yet to be discovered.

Operations Research Speaks: From Human Trafficking to Distracted Driving to Wildfire Fuel Management and More!

Operations Research has had many successes from methodological advances to important applications and the solution of numerous relevant problems in areas as diverse as transportation and logistics to health care and even blood supply chains.

This semester we are very lucky to have a fantastic lineup of speakers in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series which the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter helps me to organize.

This Friday, October 13, 2017 we are hosting Dr. Renata Konrad from the Foisie School of Business at WPI in Massachusetts. Dr. Konrad will be speaking on human trafficking and how operations research and analytics can help in combating it.  Dr. Konrad I know through WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences), since she is this INFORMS forum's past President.  Also, Renata and I share a cultural heritage in that she was born in Canada and we both speak Ukrainian.

Renata and I were among the invited participants to a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation on Disrupting Illicit Supply Chains, which took place last May at the University of Texas Austin and a followup workshop will be taking place in Arlington, VA in early December.

Then, on Friday, October 20, 2017, the chapter will be continuing its annual tradition of hosting a tune-up for the annual INFORMS conference, which this year is taking place in Houston, Texas, October 22-25. Given the horrific impact of Hurricane Harvey there it will be a memorable experience, I am sure. In this year's tune-up there are 5 doctoral student speakers who will be presenting the papers that they will also be giving in Houston. It's a wonderful way in which to share research and to get positive feedback on presentation skills. The breadth of topics illustrates the wide reach of Operations Research! The doctoral students who are presenting are from the Isenberg School of Management (and are in the Management Science PhD track) and the College of Engineering (Industrial Engineering). Two of my doctoral students, Deniz Besik (the current chapter president) and Pritha Dutta (the immediately preceding chapter President), will be speaking. Also, presenting are doctoral students of Professor Erin Baker and Professor Chaitra Gopalappa.

It will be a very exciting INFORMS Houston conference, since our student chapter, which I have served as a Faculty Advisor of since its inception in 2004, will be receiving its 12th consecutive award from INFORMS there - the Magna Cum Laude Award for its activities in the previous year!

And, the Friday after the INFORMS Houston conference, we will be hosting Dr. Shannon Roberts of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at UMass Amherst. She will be speaking on driving safety and social networks - another extremely timely talk!

On November 3, I am delighted that Professor Dmytro Matsypura of the University of Sydney School of Business in beautiful Australia will be speaking in our series at the Isenberg School!  Dr. Matsypura was my PhD student and is also a Center Associate of the Supernetwork Center that I founded in 2001. He is on sabbatical this term and will be speaking on wildfire fuel management. Given the horrific fires now blanketing northern California, this is also a talk not to be missed!

Many thanks to the wonderful officers of the award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter as well as to its members for enriching the intellectual climate of our campus and broader community through  myriad exciting activities!

All of the above talks are open to the public.

Doing Scholarly Operations Research with Undergraduates

Usually when faculty at a Research 1 university, such as UMass Amherst, conduct research they involve doctoral students, since doctoral students need to do research for their dissertation and, upon receiving the PhD, may continue onwards to do research, as faculty at other institutions or perhaps as practitioners. I have supervised the PhD dissertations of 20 PhD students and  I continue to collaborate with quite a few of them, even working with doctoral students of my doctoral students (nice to see the academic genealogy tree growing).

In the last several years, because of the growing prominence of the Commonwealth Honors College at UMass Amherst and also the Isenberg School of Management, under great leadership, we have been attracting truly outstanding undergraduate students and, my personal bias, is towards the Operations and Information Management (OIM) students, since they are in the department in which I teach at the Isenberg School.

I have had the pleasure of co-chairing two honors theses of OIM majors: Emilio Alvarez Flores, who graduated in May 2016, and Karen Li, who graduated in 2017. Emilio now works for Cisco and Karen for Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Emilio's thesis was entitled: Optimizing Non-Governmental Organizations' Operations and Fundraising: A Game-Theoretical Supply Chain Approach. He defended his dissertation at the Undergraduate Research Conference at UMass on April 22, 2016. A paper that we wrote, together with Professor Ceren Soylu of the Economics Department at UMass, was based on his thesis:  A Generalized Nash Equilibrium Network Model for Post-Disaster Humanitarian Relief, Anna Nagurney, Emilio Alvarez Flores, and Ceren Soylu, Transportation Research E 95: (2016), pp 1-18. I have continued to work with Emilio (below is a photo of us with my great collaborator Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy at the Dynamics of Disasters conference that I co-organized and which took place last summer in Greece).

At the conference in Greece, we presented the paper: A Variational Equilibrium Network Framework for Humanitarian Organizations in Disaster Relief: Effective Product Delivery Under Competition for Financial Funds, Anna Nagurney, Patrizia Daniele, Emilio Alvarez Flores, and Valeria Caruso.

The title of Karen Li's thesis was: Hospital Competition in Prices and Quality: A Variational Inequality Framework and she successfully defended it at the Undergraduate Research Conference on April 28, 2017. Her thesis is 100 pages. Below is a photo from the conference and defense - Professor Chaitra Gopalappa, the co-chair came, as well as many of Karen's friends and even family members!

And today we received some wonderful news: Our paper, with the same title as her thesis, was accepted for publication in the journal Operations Research for Health Care! In this paper, we construct a game theory model to capture competition among hospitals for patients for their medical procedures. The utility functions of the hospitals contain a revenue component and a component due to altruism benefit. The hospitals compete in prices charged to paying patients as well as in the quality levels of their procedures. Both prices and quality levels are subject to lower and upper bounds. We state the governing Nash equilibrium conditions and provide the variational inequality formulation. We establish existence of an equilibrium price and quality pattern and also present a Lagrange analysis of the equilibrium solutions. An algorithm is proposed and then applied to numerical examples comprising a case study focusing on four major hospitals in Massachusetts.

What I found especially gratifying in working with these exceptional students was their energy, intelligence, passion for doing good, incredible work ethic, and, frankly, "fearlessness."  We were going to solve these challenging problems, no matter what, and they permeated our dreams, obsessed us, and we did it! Perhaps it is better to have time constraints on the research in terms of a deadline in the form of graduation but, then again, you need the right students, as well as the fascinating problems. And this morning, as part of an email message from Karen, she said: "oh, how much I miss your lectures!!" Karen is the only student that I have ever had who took all the classes that I teach. Can you top the life and joy of being an academic?!