Smart Cities Analytics - A Terrific Workshop In Canada

When the invitation came from Professor Joe Naoum-Sawaya of the Ivey Business School at Western University (formerly Western Ontario University) in London, Ontario, Canada, I was very intrigued. He and his colleague, Professor Bissan Ghaddar, were organizing a Workshop on Smart Cities Analytics, and might I be interested in speaking?

The invitation was quickly accepted and this past Thursday, after teaching my Transportation and Logistics class, I was off to Bradley Airport for my flights on Air Canada to Toronto and then to London (London, Ontario, that is)! The flights on the puddle jumpers were surprisingly very comfortable and I had a delightful conversation on the first leg with a mother, originally from Jamaica, who was traveling with her 7 month old daughter. She had been to visit her 90 year old grandmother in Connecticut and is still fostering children - she has fostered over 100. Hearing about such exceptional human beings is always a wonder of travel.

Having been to England in September for the OR60 conference and the Early Career Researcher Workshop at Lancaster to speak, I appreciated the big welcome sign at the London, Ontario airport (never to be confused with Heathrow but there is a Tim Horton's there). It was my first time to the Ivey School and London, Ontario.

The logistics of my travel were expertly organized with a pickup at the airport. The London Park Hotel, where the workshop guest speakers were accommodated, provided me with a suite which looked more like an apartment - I loved it! Given that I was in Canada, the next morning, I got to see many young hockey players at breakfast who were in town with their families for a tournament. Last Monday was Canadian Thanksgiving so many had a week holiday.

It was thrilling to see the guest speakers at the workshop and the participants. The Ivey School, the site of the workshop, is in a stunning building.

As you can see from the above workshop poster, the speakers traveled from France, Denmark, Ireland, and the US, with one local speaker, for the workshop, which clearly demonstrates the excitement surrounding the theme of the workshop. The full schedule with the talk titles and abstracts can be downloaded here. 

The format of the workshop was excellent, with 45 minute talks and time for discussion. Lunch was also provided as well as refreshments at breaks and registration was free, thanks to the sponsors. The audience consisted of faculty and students from the host university and neighboring universities, including the University of Waterloo (my host for my previous speaking engagement at a Canadian university). I admit, since I was born in Canada, I like to support my Operations Research and Management Science colleagues in Canada and it is a pleasure to do so.

The workshop began with a welcome and opening remarks by Professor Naoum-Sawaya and an Associate Dean at Ivey.

Thanks to Professor Joe Naoum-Sawaya for letting me be the first speaker. As promised to participants, I have posted my talk.


My talk was based on two earlier papers of mine: Design of Sustainable Supply Chains for Sustainable Cities, Anna Nagurney, Environment & Planning B 42(1): (2015) pp 40-57 and Supply Chain Network Sustainability Under Competition and Frequencies of Activities from Production to Distribution,  Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, and Jonas Floden, Computational Management Science 10(4): (2013) pp 397-422.

After the coffee break, it was time for Professor Ivana Ljubic to speak on Very Large Scale Covering Location Problems in the Design of Advanced Metering Infrastructure. Professor Ljubic is a Professor at ESSEC in France.

Her talk focused on smart metering and the Internet of Things (IoT) and the challenges posed by the limitations of current infrastructure. She described elegant models that she had constructed for related facility location problems to determine where to place bay stations for wireless communications to cover homes with the consideration of an investment budget or a percentage of demand coverage.  The exact algorithms that she presented, along with extensive computational results, on truly large-scale problems, were very elegant and impressive.

Professor Ljubic, who is very active on Twitter and is a jet-setter, and we enjoy communicating in this way, told me that she had met me at the Computational Management Science (CMS) conference in Vienna, Austria in 2010, so I promised her that I would try to retrieve some photos from that conference and I have posted them below - even with my former doctoral student, Tina Wakolbinger, who is now a Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business!

Professor Pierre Pinson of the Technical University of Denmark, who is French, presented a talk on Community-Based and Peer-to-Peer Electricity Markets, in which he shared with us that Copenhagen is planning on being carbon-neutral by 2050. He also told us that Denmark produces the cheapest electric power in Europe but, after taxes, it is the most expensive. He suggested that governments may need to rethink taxes in terms of social responsibility with taxes being a function of distance. He emphasized the purchasing of electricity locally and discussed consensus-based optimization with fascinating reciprocity constraints. He described how individuals have self-interest with interest to collaborate locally and how exchanges within a community do not have to be settled with monetary compensation. He also emphasized the construction of a social welfare function and the cost of a social construct with a community wanting to be as autonomous as possible. Professor Pinson further elaborated on networks of communities for urban design and mentioned blockchains and possible coordination mechanisms.He told us that "we need to change the game" and need new business models.

I thoroughly enjoyed his very thought-provoking presentation and told him that I will be reading his papers!

Then it was time for lunch and further stimulating conversations and discussions. Another special highlight for me was seeing Professor Hani S. Mahmassani, the Director of the Transportation Center at Northwestern University. Just to further emphasize how much I respect Professor Mahmassani, I even had a photo of him in my presentation that morning. Hani, if I may, is a true scholar and leader in transportation, one who not only does outstanding research but also parlays his work into practice with high impact. And, to further celebrate his accomplishments, in the introduction to his talk, Professor Naoum-Sawaya shared with us (I also heard this great news at lunch) that Professor Mahmassani has been appointed to the Advisory Board for Smart Cities for Monaco and also to the Advisory Board for the Panama Canal. So, huge congratulations to him!

Professor Mahmassani's talk was entitled: Predictive Analytics for Real-time Urban Mobility: Autonomous, Connected, Electric, Shared (ACES).

 Professor Mahmassani took us on a vivid journey of the state-of-the-art of his topic and described several key takeaways, overviewing connected vehicles (when and in what form and at what rate); major disruptive influences from technology to players; shared mobility fleets; why we still need predictive models even if we may be able to ultimately see the state of the transportation system at all times, and how transportation agencies must be willing to embrace change. He emphasized how autonomous, connected vehicle ideas have evolved from ITS with one of the goals being to eliminate or to reduce human errors. He spoke on connected systems that should be coordinated, with "cooperative driving," optimized flow and routing. He also brought up, which he recognized that I would very much appreciate - that freight services might be managed in a system-optimized manner, whereas travelers even in shared, connected vehicles, might be (should be) routed in a user-optimized way. Such discussions I have had with the students in the Transportation and Logistics class that I teach at the Isenberg School. He also brought out that intelligence (think of Google) will reside in vehicles but what about the infrastructure that will be needed to operationalize connected, autonomous vehicles? He mentioned a report put out by his center on Mobility 2050 - Emerging Futures, definitely word reading.

Given the fascinating talks, I hope that the organizers will be able to post them and, frankly, I asked when will the next such workshop be because of the stimulating important issues and discussions from multiple very creative perspectives!

Professor Mahmassani's talk was followed by a talk from another Northwestern University Professor, Professor Chaithanya Bandi of the Kellogg School. Concidentally, both are MIT PhD alums, but of different programs. Dr. Bandi changed the title and topic of his presentation  and his talk was on: Data Driven Analytics for Government, with a focus on Singapore! I have been invited to Singapore but have not been there (yet) although my husband has and he did bring me some marvelous souvenirs from there. We were presented with numerous fascinating facts about Singapore including that 80% of the population lives in public housing. The government shares "Moments of Life" in which its citizens are congratulated for various milestones. Humans are considered "sensors" with even government-aided dating taking place. Singapore is focused on "customizable communities" and Dr. Bandi shared with us the cost/taxes of vehicle ownership in Singapore. He then described some research that he has been involved in regarding hospital staffing and patient flows - data-rich but an uncertain environment. He also mentioned his work on LEGO Networks with Itai Guravich in which subsystems are first optimized and the system is then built up.

Then Professor Xianbin Wang of the Electrical and Computer Engineering at the host university discussed his research with collaborators in the presentation: Technical Challenges and Business Opportunities of Ubiquitously Connected Society. He asked the question - what are we trying to solve through IoT and by connecting everything? He also mentioned 5G and ICT infrastructure needs associated with it. Some of his concerns include interoperability issues associated with IoT and how to create internetwork collaboration. It was good to hear him mention the increasing overhead associated with cybersecurity and the proliferation of devices and impacts on communications. He is a proponent of "Software Defined Networking (SDN) Enabled Synergistic Resource Sharing".

The final presenter, and he deserves extra applause, was Professor Robert Shorten of University College Dublin, who spoke on: Distributed Ledger Technology, Cyber-Physical Systems, and Social Compliance. He, in his talk, showed us a collage of photos of activities in cities, including one with a homeless person rummaging through the trash and asked us what we had observed. He had posted this photo to demonstrate that we do not enforce social contracts and people may be putting rubbish in the incorrect bins and, hence, not recycling, as they should be. The homeless person was performing a useful task for society. Professor Shorten then described how blockchain has a lot of potential for the enforcement of social contracts and noted that distributed ledger systems (DLTs) have operational costs that are low and fast transaction times. he also spoke about competitive versus collaborative DLTs. He presented an elegant graph model of DAGs (directed acyclic graph) with no transaction fees. Underlying his work are ordinary differential equations for which he has also conducted stability analysis. It was great to see that in my talk I had described a Nash Equilibrium model for sustainable supply chains, and Professor Shorten also had Nash Equilibrium in one of his slides. He spoke about the use of tokens for "the cost of misbehaving" as when one would drive through a red light, for example, and the use of DLTs would be anonymous (an audience member brought up the use of fines). It was very interesting to listen to him speak on how to design controls so as to incentivize people to behave as in being socially compliant in traffic, given the risk of getting caught. He also brought up "string stability," as in what happens downstream in other junctions of the network, if someone drive through a red light.

Since my cellphone was dying I apologize for not taking a photo of Professor Shorten and, instead, I share several photos below of the group of speakers, the group of Twitter users, and the females on Twitter!

Thanks, again, to the organizers, the guest speakers, and the terrific audience, for a fabulous idea-generating workshop!

Operations Researchers Rock in Quebec City - What a Terrific IFORS Conference

I am back from the IFORS (International Federation of Operations Research Societies) conference in Quebec City. It was a delight for numerous reasons and attracted over 1,500 participants from 52 countries which speaks to the interest in operations research globally. This conference takes place once every three years and the next one will be in 2020 in Seoul, Korea.

First, the location of the conference was terrific - the convention center in Quebec City - with large hotels in proximity and amazing parks and old town as well.

Although I was born in Canada, and have been back for numerous conferences and speaking engagements, this was my first time in Quebec City. I travel a lot and Quebec City now ranks in my top group of cities in terms of beauty, greenness, walkability and infrastructure, amenities, cultural opportunities, and the friendliness of the people. The attention to preservation of history and buildings is also outstanding.

I also appreciated that several streets at times of day are for pedestrians only.

This conference had 4 fabulous plenary speakers, including the Nobel laureate in Economics, Alvin Roth, and 1 female - Martine Labbe,  and 10 keynote speakers (4 females among them, including Asu Ozdaglar, whom I have hosted at the Isenberg School).  Special recognition should be given to Egon Balas of Carnegie Mellon University for giving a plenary talk - he is an example for all of us as to how to live and work to the fullest. Professor Balas is in his mid90s and his memoir is a must read.

I enjoyed speaking to Detlof Winterfeldt of USC, who gave a very interesting keynote on a topic that he has worked on for a long time through the DHS Center - CREATE - that of homeland security and decision analysis. I was delighted to see him mention Randy Hall, and to cite the work of Adam Rose, who recently was elected an RSAI Fellow.  On the last slide of his keynote cybersecurity was mentioned (a topic we have been doing a lot of research on). Below is a photo taken with the Executive Director of INFORMS, the always energetic and fabulous, Melissa Moore, and Detlof after his keynote.

A special shoutout to Andres Weintraub of Chile,  who set a new high bar for plenary talks, and who took us on a journey of operations research and practice, overviewing the amazing work he has done with students and collaborators,  on topics ranging from forestry to  mining to enhancing lunches for schoolchildren to a big passion of his - the scheduling of soccer games! He shared the following sage advice in terms of projects:

1. Partner with the person in charge

2. Do not trust anybody (do the whole project)

3. Work daily side by side and

4. Show me the money (free work is not appreciated).

In his plenary talk, he noted how George Nemhauser, an operations research superstar and mentor to generations, came to visit him in Chile to entice him to work on sports scheduling and he also noted Mike Trick, the President of IFORS. Mike deserves applause for his service to IFORS and the profession as well as thanks for the success of this conference as do the organizers. Below is a column by Mike in the latest IFORS newsletter.

Given the size of the conference there were many operations researchers that I did not manage to have a chance to speak to but, nevertheless, I enjoyed not only the scientific talks, and we had two to present, with the titles below, but also seeing many friends and even meeting face to face several Twitter tweeps, including Carlos Zetina, who is a dynamo behing the success of the INFORMS Student Chapter in Montreal..

We had photos taken of the presenters and collaborators in our sessions in which there were speakers from Russia, India, the US, Japan, and the Czech Republic and one of the chairs was from the Philippines.

It was special to see my book, Competing on Supply Chain Quality,  with Michelle Li (who coincidentally got married in Cambridge while I was at IFORS), on display at the Springer booth. And, always, it is great to see the Springer Editors!

The snacks (this is important) were delicious during the breaks and I very much enjoyed the lunch provided on Thursday - joining us at our table was Destenie Nock, a doctoral student at UMass Amherst and a very active member of award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter.

It was also terrific to see some of the fabulous INFORMS staff members, including Mary Magrogan and Maris van der Eijk.

Another high point was seeing two of my former Isenberg School of Management PhD students, Tina Wakolbinger who is a Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in beautiful Austria and Fuminori Toyasaki, who is a Professor at York University in Toronto.  I had seen them both in Vienna in late June at a conference on Humanitarian Operations that Tina had organized that was very successful and that I had blogged about.

Many thanks to the organizers of this IFORS conference and to all concerned who made it the big success that it was! Thanks also for selecting Quebec City as the conference site - this city is magical. I leave you with photos of some wonderful food, some of which we indulged in, and a photo of a sculpture by Salvador Dali that graced the boardwalk in old town.

And, since I was born in Canada, I also have to wish Canada a Happy 150th Birthday! Indeed, as the rumor has it, Canadians are very polite and nice! When the wind blew my hat off in a rainstorm, two Canadians went running after it in a busy street to retrieve it for me!

Fabulous Analytics Day at the University of Waterloo in Canada

This past Thursday, I flew (after a two hour delay) on Air Canada from Bradley Airport to Toronto since I was to speak at Analytics Day at the University of Waterloo. The conference was organized by Dr. Fatma Gzara, who is a faculty member in the Department of Management Sciences there and who had also hosted me almost exactly 5 years ago for a seminar!

I accepted the invitation to be a plenary speaker at this conference and the experience was tremendous plus I always enjoy not the flight delays but the serendipity of whom you may meet while traveling.

I was put up in the stunning Delta hotel, which opened about two yeas ago,  and not only was I staying at the hotel but Dr. John McCarthy, who is the Graduate Dean at UMass Amherst and a Vice Provost, was also there. I found this out while talking to two academics in the elevator and went to see him at a breakfast. I had seen John only two days prior at the UMass Honors banquet. He was in Waterloo for the annual meeting of the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools!

And there was another luminary staying at the same hotel, whom I had seen Thursday evening on the Canadian news - none other than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. I had thought that all the nicely dressed men were actually hotel staff but they were security guards. I saw Trudeau not only yesterday morning as I was getting picked up to go to the conference but also when I returned to the hotel. I took the photo of him entering the limo below. Since I was born in Canada, this was extra special.

My plenary talk was on: Predictive and Prescriptive Models of Cybercrime an Cybersecurity Investments Under Network Vulnerability. The conference was well-advertised and attracted practitioners as well as academics from numerous universities in the Toronto area. Dr. Gzara runs the Waterloo Analytics and Optimization Lab. She had taken part in the recent INFORMS Analytics conference in Orlando and in her presentation included the following slide which was generated by a text mining program of all the abstracts at the INFORMS conference.

 

Great to see Optimization Models prominent  in the text cloud along with Big Data and Supply Chains!


There were opening remarks by the Associate Dean of Engineering at Waterloo. The full conference schedule can be viewed here.

Dr. Gzara did a wonderful job of introducing each speaker and had a slide prepared on each.

I very much enjoyed the talk Optimizing Supply Chains with Advancd Analytics presented by Pete Devenyi and Scott Wahl of Dematic North America.

The Detamic presentation was on electronic commerce and grocery distribution centers. Dematic is a global software engineering firm with 6,500 employees and $70 million spent on R&D a year (I assume that is in Canadian dollars). Their clients include Tim Hortons, Amazon, and Walmart, so I enjoyed speaking with them about my experiences last October at Amazon's first Supply Chain Optimization Conference in Seattle. They talked about predictive analytics to get items to customers in 1/2 a day and placing warehouses closer to customers. I very much enjoyed their presentation which had videos and was very dynamic. They noted that "warehouses" in the future will be truck.

Since there were both industry and academic talks the discussions were great and the day flew by much too quickly. The Dematic presenters stated that they are trying to solve the problem "of the tyranny of now". Customers when ordering online want their orders to be delivered asap. Without the right analytics firms don't have visibility, which is critical in e-commerce.  Dematic also uses descriptive analytics to figure out bottlenecks and is looking towards work force optimization and item storage optimization. Visualization analytics can reveal where there are bottlenecks in terms of processes in a grocery distribution center, for example. Grocery distribution centers are completely different from e-commerce ones, since grocery orders are placed every day. It may cost $100 million to automate a grocery DC. There is even pallet optimization that needs to be done.

The third presentation was by Chad Elkadri, Reza Farahani, and Hany Kashif of SOTI.

As you can see from the photo below, the audience was very attentive and interested in the talks.

SOTI develops software for enterprises and was founded in Canada 20 years ago. It, through its Research and Innovation Lab, has been working on the Internet of Things. Specifically, the company focuses on managing devices including connected devices in the enterprise. I was also very interested in this presentation because only 10 days ago, my collaborator, Professor Tilman Wolf, presented our latest work on the Internet of Things at the IEEE Berlin conference.  

SOTI builds partnerships with OEMs and is in 170 countries. Partners include device manufacturers and also operating system companies such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

SOTI speakers noted how sensors are paving the way for Big Data and it is essential to recognize the varying levels of the importance of data. Also, there is "demand for new analytical models." SOTI is building a performance-aware engine, which was the topic of the presentation. Also, one of the noted challenges is how to extract data without changing the behavior of the system. They also presented a model, which I liked, which had a parameter that captured the value of a data element at a point in time, and I asked a question about this. Performance-aware analytics must take constraints into consideration. Such constraints can include QoS (Quality of Service) constraints. The case study that was presented was on connected cars.

Then it was time for lunch which included all sorts of wrap sandwiches - I chose the salmon one as well as salads and fresh fruits plus a tray of sweets.

After lunch, an academic talk was given by Joe Naoum Sawaya of the Ivey School at the University of Western Ontario. His title was: Optimization in the Age of Modern Analytics and Internet-of-Things. Saway discussed: descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics and emphasized that now algorithms need to be intuitive, distributed, scalable, and have a niche or application. He talked about sensors for Smart Cities since he had worked for IBM for 5 years.  He focused on the automotive industry.  He presented a nice model focusing on SPONGE, which is an energy matching supply and demand framework but that ensures privacy since the central authority does not now the individuals' utility functions.  He noted that because of the Internet of Things, we no longer can assume centralized decision-making.

The second presentation after the lunch was by the Deloitte Consulting Canada group. The speakers were: Snehar Patel and Niraj Dalmia and a consultant. Since I have had one of my former students work for Deloitte (Christina Calvaneso) I also was looking forward to this talk.

They spoke on use cases including one in the oil and gas sector, in which there has been tremendous economic upheaval. Hence, figuring out where costs can be reduced is imperative. They talked about system dynamics approaches (top down) and also agent-based modeling (bottom up).  They noted that "analytics is an opportunity." One example was a mine in Chile in which they use predictive analytics to prepare for possible disruptions.

Another example, which they spoke on, which reminded of a project that some of my Opertaions Management students did a while back in my Transportation and Logistics class at the Isenberg School  and that was on modeling patient flow from an emergency room in a hospital.  Deloitte is taking data from clients and then building models and this is the direction that consulting is going in they told the audience.

Dr. Gzara, the organizer, was the last speaker of the day and gave an excellent talk on working with one of her industry partners - Dematic. She spoke on her group's work on using data from a client's warehouse (and the data is by no means complete) to do diagnostics and to evaluate bottlenecks and where the system processes might be improved. She presented a series of innovative models and also spoke on how descriptive analytics showed them that there is a high variability in orders and some orders have as many as 31 products in them.She discussed network flow models and also a model that I very much liked - using community detection to also graphical depict orders as a network. How can one use community detection and network learning to identify which products are co-ordered. She also stated the need to do predictive dynamic analytics for product order groupings over time.

I made sure that a photo was taken of me with Fatma for a keepsake of an intellectually rich and very stimulating day.

My trip via a shuttle to the Toronto airport was pleasant and there was not so much traffic although it was rush hour.  And, would you believe, I took Route 401 both to and from the Toronto airport to the Delta hotel in Waterloo and the shuttle driver then informed me that the route, Route 401, is the busiest freeway in North America!  I also saw signs of $10,000 penalties if a driver exceeds the speed limit by 50 kilometers (which is 30 miles) and the car also gets confiscated by the police for 7 days. This is to prevent drag racing but, given the congestion, drag racing would be a challenge in itself.

And, as one would expect, I had a delay on Air Canada on my flight back to Hartford. So I took a photo at the airport of one of the national foods of Canada and that is the Tim Hortons donuts.

For the flight back I purchased the last copy of The New York Times and in it was an OpEd piece co-authored by my Provost at UMass Amherst, Dr. Katherine Newman!  My day began with a UMass administrator and in a sense ended with one. The academic network is global and far-reaching and wonderful, I must day.

Many thanks to Dr. Fatma Gzara for a fabulous Analytics Day!