The Value of Q&A Sessions with Top Operations Researchers from Industry

Last Friday, we had the pleasure and honor of hosting Dr. Mary E. Helander of IBM Yorktown Heights at the Isenberg School of Management through our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. I help the students to organize chapter activities and since Dr. Helander wanted to visit us, we decided to do something a bit different. The event was so successful that one of the students present said afterwards: "Professor Nagurney we have to have more of these Q&A sessions!"

 

Amazingly, it was almost entirely a female audience!

Dr. Helander told the students that they could ask her ANY question.

First, some background on Dr. Helander. She is on the program committee of the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research that will take place in Boston next spring. She is a Master Inventor and Research Scientist and is currently the IBM Research Division leader for Consumer Products. Presently, she is the technical lead for two interdisciplinary research projects involving food safety and traceability.  Not only does she hold a PhD in Operations Research but she is also a Docent in Quality and Software Engineering from Linkoping University in Sweden. At lunch she and I talked about living in Sweden and she told me some mesmerizing stories about her surname -- I'll let you do the research -- another movie should be made.

Plus, Mary was part of one of the 2013 Edelman Award finalists:

McKesson: A Holistic Supply Chain Management Solution

Presented by:
Don Walker, McKesson; Kaan Katircioglu, IBM Research; Bob Gooby, McKesson
Authors:
McKesson Corporation: Robert Gooby, Nathan Mott, David Wagnon, Graeme Case, Matt Johnson
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center: Kaan Katircioglu, Pawan Chowdhary, Youssef Drissi, Mary Helander, Karthik Sourirajan, Lin Li, Karthik Subbian
IBM Global Business Services: James Kalina, Howard Smith
IBM Japan: Takashi Yonezawa.

The Edelman Award is like an Academy Award for analytics and operations research, so although her team did not win to be a finalist is a huge achievement!

From Mary we learned a lot about IBM, and about her research and contributions there. We learned about functional foods and microtoxins and my favorite takeaway and quote from the Q&A session.

Mary said: People that you work with will bring you joy.

Frankly, I think that it is Dr. Mary Helander who is making such a positive impact on all those around her and beyond through her great operations research contributions and dynamic personality, which the students really appreciated!

Thank you so much, Dr. Mary Helander, for coming to the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst!

You are an operations research rockstar!

Hosting Master Inventor Dr. Mary Helander of IBM

Mark your calendars! On Friday, November 22, the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter and I will be hosting IBM Master Inventor Dr. Mary E. Helander. According to Wikipedia: An IBM Master Inventor is an individual selected by IBM. The qualification and appointment to Master Inventor is governed by the value to IBM of an inventor's contribution to the patent portfolio, and through defensive publication (published in www.ip.com). IBM weighs many aspects of an inventor's contributions, including but not limited to impact of invention through licensing, inclusion in product, and percentage of patents with a measurable impact. IBM also considers an individual's contribution to the inventing community inside IBM, whether by acting as a patent reviewer, or providing feedback and guidance to new inventors.

Dr. Helander will be welcomed with a reception in Isenberg School Room 206 beginning at 10:30AM and the Q&A will follow at 11:00AM until noon.

I met Dr. Helander at an INFORMS Conference in Puerto Rico  and,  a few years back, in the Fall of 2009, she visited us and spoke at the Isenberg School on Food Safety in a Global Supply Chain.  
I wrote about her previous visit on this blog.

I would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate Dr. Helander on her receipt of the 2013 Minerva Award from SUNY Potsdam!

Food Supply Chain Networks and Food Safety -- When Research Captures the Real-World

I tell my students to read not only books but also such publications as The New York Times and The Economist.

I believe that the real world can and should inspire research and those who are curious and care about solving problems can find many challenging problems out there.

One of our most recent papers was of modeling competitive food supply chains with a focus on product perishability through the use of arc multipliers and generalized networks.

The paper,  Competitive Food Supply Chain Networks with Application to Fresh Produce,  Min Yu and Anna Nagurney, is now in press in the European Journal of Operational Research.

In the paper, which utilizes game theory and variational inequality theory for formulation, analysis, and computations, we also presented a case study, focused on the cantaloupe market, in the scenario of a foodborne illness, that was inspired by an actual outbreak that occurred a while back.


 Now USA Today is reporting,  that the Latest deadly salmonella outbreak angers food-safety experts.

According to the article:

Agricultural experts say the frequent problems with cantaloupes come from the nature of the melons and sloppy agricultural practices.

In the latest outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said, two people have died and 141 have fallen ill in 20 states in a salmonella outbreak linked to contaminated cantaloupe grown in southwestern Indiana. Thirty-one victims have been hospitalized. Both deaths were in Kentucky.

Last year's epidemic was caused by cantaloupes contaminated with listeria, from Colorado's Jensen Farms, according to the CDC.

We all know the importance of consuming fresh produce and how delicious ripe fresh fruit is -- at least we should be confident and secure that it will support health and not cause illnesses and death because of inappropriate handling and processing. 

In our paper, we show the economic impact of such a foodborne outbreak of the involved firms.

Food Supply Chains -- Competing on Freshness and Price

I have recently returned from two weeks in Sweden and I miss Sweden  already.

I  even miss the food, which was fabulous and tasted better than that in the US. I enjoyed the meals in the cafeteria at the School of Business, Economics and Law at Gothenburg University, where I sampled several lunches (and sneaked down for some dark chocolate as well) and the food in the cafes, bakeries, and the restaurants. During the two week period I dined on Swedish, Turkish, Italian, Indian, French, and even Polish cuisine.From my colleagues I learned about the big fresh produce auctions in Amsterdam but that bananas get shipped directly to Sweden.

Just before traveling to Sweden in mid-March, my doctoral student, Min Yu, and I finished the paper, "Competitive Food Supply Chain Networks with Application to Fresh Produce."  In the paper, we model the deterioration of fresh produce over time and under different storage and transportation conditions. In the network model, we also capture the discarding costs associated with the disposal of the spoiled food products and allow for product differentiation.

We utilize variational inequality theory to formulate the game theoretic problem in which the firms compete until a Nash equilibrium is attached.

 A case study in our paper focuses on the cantaloupe market, in which we analyze different scenarios prior to, during, and post a foodborne disease outbreak.

Corporate Social Responsibility and Food Safety

When the US government is moving too slowly, it is good to see that some companies are acting responsibly and moving forward on food safety. Costco is one such company and it is requiring that its produce suppliers test all of the bagged produce sold at Costco. It is also testing all of its beef at its warehouses for E.Coli (all the strains that it can possibly test for).

This heightened awareness is coming from the food poisoning events, due to E. Coli contamination, that happened over the past few weeks in Europe, and that I have written about, which resulted in thousands of illnesses and dozens of deaths, primarily in Germany, attributed, in the latest analysis, to seeds that originated in northern Africa (and not sprouts, as originally thought).

What is also making such testing now feasible by food companies, is that test kits are now being manufactured and made available that can test for many of the known E.Coli strains. DuPont is one company making such test kits -- thanks!

Corporations need to realize that safety and the quality of their products should be paramount because once a reputation is lost, it is extremely difficult to recover it. Also, the products may be consumed by those you know well and love.

Germany Reports that Sprouts Were the Source of the E. Coli Outbreak

In a recent blogpost, I wrote about global food supply chains, food safety, and the outbreak of a severe "rare" form of E. Coli in Europe with the epicenter in northern Germany, which has now killed 29 and sickened nearly 3,000.

Today, Germany has concluded that bean sprouts grown in Germany were the source of the E. Coli although it has not been able to identify this particular strain at the source, that is, at the farm(s). According to The New York Times, tests conducted on the sprouts produced only negative results. The decision to blame the sprouts was based on interviews with patients and even restaurant chefs where people had eaten bean sprouts, since it was deemed that those infected were nine times more likely to have eaten bean sprouts than those who had not.

Clearly, further supply chain forensics are needed to be able to fully trace the path(s) that this vegetable product took from the farms to the plates where it was consumed.

Could it have been the trucks that were used for distribution? Or, perhaps, handlers or processors of the sprouts that contaminated the produce? Many questions still remain.

The mystery is not yet solved and until it is more illnesses and deaths can be expected.

Food Safety in Global Supply Chains

What is more important than the air we breathe and the food that we eat?!

The news coming from the European continent is shocking with 18 deaths reported, and close to 2,000 suffering from a rare E. Coli bacteria that officials believe was in the food supply, most likely in raw vegetables (cukes, tomatoes, and lettuce have been prime suspects, although the specific strain has not been found in the vegetables), with the majority of the illnesses being traced to northern Germany, specifically, Hamburg.

At this time of the year, when spring is in the northern hemisphere and the consumption of produce is up, to have hundreds hospitalized with severe kidney malfunctions is horrifying.

I travel a lot and enjoy the local, fresh cuisine whenever possible and who would expect such food-borne illnesses in such a highly developed country as Germany? A Swede has died after traveling to Germany and there are supposedly several in the US, also who traveled to Germany, now ill. We actually heard about this major health calamity from the owner of one of our local farms who has a wonderful soft ice cream stand, since she has relatives in that part of Germany, before the news even reached the major western media.

Food safety is essential as is food traceability. Dr. Mary Helander who spoke on a research panel on food safety recently at the INFORMS conference at UMass gave a brilliant talk on the topic in our Speaker Series and you can access her presentation here, which I wrote about on this blog. Ironically, shortly after her talk, there was an outbreak of E. Coli poisoning in hamburgers in the US.

A few years ago, I was on the doctoral dissertation of a student, Mr. Diogo M. Souza Monteiro, whose dissertation was entitled, Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of the Economics of Traceability Adoption in Food Supply Chains. He is now a professor in England, and visited us last Fall. He had also been a student in one of my Management Science classes in which we used my Network Economics book and had done a very nice project on vertical integration in food supply chains. He also cited several of our papers on supply chains and risk management in his dissertation. His dissertation advisor, Professor Julie Caswell, served on a major FDA panel on food safety and risk.

What is happening in Europe now regarding the food supply is turning into a major international incident since countries are refusing produce from certain countries.

I was invited to give keynotes at two different conferences in China that took place last week. Reading about food safety issues there as well as pollution gave me serious pause (you probably have seen the articles on watermelons exploding there due to injected chemicals, the milk being adulterated, and I stop here) and I was advised not to travel there. One of my keynotes in Shenzhen was delivered via videotape. Now, interestingly, Chinese scientists, from Shenzhen, are helping German scientists, to decipher the genetic code of the rare E. Coli bacteria! According to The New York Times, this Chinese laboratory said that the contagion had been caused by a “new strain of bacteria that is highly infectious and toxic.”

Food safety in global supply chains will require not only technology but also the cooperation among all the stakeholders from producers and distributors to consumers as well as regulators. In the meantime, people are very afraid and will continue to be until the source(s) of this severe outbreak is found.

The Locavore Movement and Our Wonderful Country Cousins

The New York Times has an article on the locavore movement, which states that the movement started in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, where we now reside. Locavore refers to food that is locally grown and consumed and with the latest news about eggs and salmonella, having food that one trusts is healthy and, I might add, delicious, too, is a special treat. We are now in the midst of an early harvest and are enjoying fresh berries, corn, and other local produce. In addition, it is special when one can talk to, and even know, the farmers' names.

Since the new academic year is approaching with hectic schedules before us and many of the conferences that I was committed to speaking at in various parts of the world now over, we are finding time to reconnect with our relatives this summer. Many family members, as is typical of families living in the US today, are spread out over great distances, but some relatives of ours, luckily, are within driving distance.

Last Sunday, we visited what we call our "country" cousins who live in Putnam County, NY. The mother in the household runs a large kennel, a local farm, and has 4 young children. She operates like a CEO (but without the staff) and is simply amazing. We arrived via a winding, rock-covered road to be greeted first by wild turkeys. Later, three deer scampering over the road extended their greetings to us.

We were treated to home-made goat cheese with a puree of wild cherries and home-made maple syrup, quiche made from their hens' eggs, and bacon from their (former) pigs.

We set out to see the kennel with quite a few dogs being rescue dogs, and others being housed there and very well-taken care of while their owners were on vacation.

What stunned us was how the farm animals were wandering freely and all the pigs, the cow, the sheep, and the goats, plus her dog had names.

We were mesmerized by how the children interacted and helped out with the animals. They had also rescued 4 kittens, named, respectively, Lady, Gaga, Adam, and Lambert, but, somehow Adam had gotten away. He will certainly find companionship on the farm.

Two goats, named Elvis (white) and Dandelion (black), both featured in photos above, did not want to leave my side. The cow named Sally thinks that she is a sheep, and as a storm was approaching, she headed towards the sheep pen. The cousins told us that the animals are great predictors of weather changes and especially of storms.

The pigs, also featured above, are named Spotty and Snorty.

What a wonderful time we had during which we enjoyed our relatives and so many wonderful animals in the midst of nature!

Food Webs as Nature's Supply Chains and Network Economics: Research that Crosses Disciplines

In a recent paper, The Impact of Boundary Spanning Scholarly Publications and Patents, published in PLoSone, the authors: Shi, Adamic, Tseng, and Clarkson state in the abstract that Human knowledge and innovation are recorded in two media: scholarly publication and patents, ... which carefully cite prior work upon which the innovation is built. The authors conclude after their careful analysis of two very large citation datasets that a publication's citing across disciplines is tied to its subsequent impact. I had been told that the impact of one's work has really made a difference if it is used in other fields so it is gratifying to have such insights now documented. This brings me to another discipline and application that is making use of my results in Network Economics (which was the title of the very first book that I wrote, which was published in 1993 with the second edition appearing in 1999).

I came across a truly original and fascinating paper while researching food supply chains, entitled, NEATS: A Network Economics Approach to Trophic Systems, which is now in press in the journal Ecological Modelling and is co-authored by a group of researchers based in France: Mullon, Shin, and Cury. The paper applies some of the results in my Network Economics: A Variational Inequality Approach book to formulate and determine equilibria in predator prey complex webs. One reads regularly about the impact of science on economics but this paper demonstrates how economics and, especially, network economics, can be used to combine both biological constraints that couple biomass balance equations with complementarity principles using Walras' law. The authors investigate the solutions to simple food chains, bilayer networks, complex food webs, and even to cannibalism (the links loop back to the specific nodes in such networks)!

The authors derive the equilibrium conditions using path concepts, provide theoretical results, and apply the model to the coastal fishery system of Chile. The paper is beautifully illustrated with networks depicting the different species and their volumes along with the resulting species biomass under numerous scenarios. In this framework, one can then investigate the effects of climate change on the species and address numerous ecological questions, from those revolving around differences in productivity, the underlying causes of biological diversity, as well as various controls in marine ecosystems.

The lead author, with associates, will even be offering a course on the subject, Economic versus Ecological Networks: Integrating Economy and Ecology in Scenario Building for Marine Ecosystems, next month on the subject (in France) and the flyer even has my name on it.

A very nice presentation by the authors on the economic approach to the equilibrium of trophic networks can be found here.

In my Network Economics book I discuss applications using variational inequality theory to traffic networks, spatial price equilibrium problems, migration problems, oligopolies, knowledge networks, and even to financial networks. I guess the third edition will need to include applications to biological ecological systems, as well!

Of course I have corresponded with these authors to congratulate them on their excellent paper!

Also, for those of you who read my previous post, I am delighted that Dr. Helander of IBM has how made her slides on Food Safety in a Global Supply Chain available. We thank her!

Hamburgers, Food Safety, and Network Economics

Today's New York Times has an article that may convert everyone to vegetarianism. The article documents the trail that a hamburger, which was adulterated with E. coli, most likely took that resulted in the paralysis of a young female consumer. The article Trail of E. Coli Shows Flaws in Inspection of Ground Beef states that the prefrozen hamburger patty that she consumed had parts that originated in Texas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and even Uruguay! The processor noted that such processing was cheaper by about 25%. Clearly, the true costs are not being appropriately assigned.

What is also extremely frightening is that certain beef suppliers will only sell their "product" to processors that do not check the quality of their beef. There is, hence, tacit agreement or collusion between decision-makers in tiers of the food supply chain to explicitly and outrightly ignore quality of the product. And here we are speaking about food that we eat!

Food safety was a topic of Dr. Helander's presentation on September 18, 2009 in our speaker series at the Isenberg School. She (as the article also notes) stated that it appears that incidents of food adulteration are becoming more and more common. Ironically, other countries (and especially the continent of Europe) are paying much closer attention to the safety of the food that its consumers eat and are passing appropriate regulations and legislation. Indeed, a few years back I was on the doctoral dissertation of a student, Mr. Diogo M. Souza Monteiro, whose dissertation was entitled, Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of the Economics of Traceability Adoption in Food Supply Chains. He is now a professor in England. He had also been a student in one of my Management Science classes in which we used my Network Economics book and had done a very nice project on vertical integration in food supply chains. He also cited several of our papers on supply chains and risk management in his dissertation.

Also, his dissertation advisor, Professor Julie Ann Caswell, had delivered a talk on food safety and what it would take the first year of our speaker series.

A very interesting paper of theirs, which cites my Network Economics book, focuses on the multi-ingredient nature and the economics of food supply chains and traceability.

Dr. Helander on Food Safety, Social Networks, and IBM to Receive National Medal of Technology and Innovation

Yesterday, Dr. Mary Helander of IBM, spoke in our Speaker Series. Since she arrived the evening before and overnighted at the Black Walnut Inn in Amherst, we had a chance to host a reception for her in the Supernetworks Lab at the Isenberg School prior to her presentation on food safety in a global supply chain. The audience for her presentation was standing room only since who does not care about food and staying healthy?! I was so pleased that even several of my undergraduate students in my transportation & logistics class showed up for her talk.

We learned about the initiatives that she is involved in at IBM and such critical issues as visibility and traceability in food supply chains. We also learned about the low margins in terms of returns in food supply chains and what kinds of investments would be needed to ensure a high degree of safety in food supply chains. She discussed concepts of risk and asked whether outbreaks of food adulteration are (or are not) rare events. She also noted how (powerful) companies such as Walmart can raise the stakes for suppliers to provide safe ingredients and products (a member of the audience then added, Walmart is NOT going to be the next FDA). In addition, she spoke on how consumer product companies are rebranding themselves as nutrition companies and how not only analytics are essential in quality control, traceability, and visibility but also food science knowledge. Even RFID technology was mentioned and issues of data analysis and information sharing plus noncompliance brought up.

I was especially intrigued by her statement that perhaps economics could help to identify potential food safety crises (such as the melamine crises, which actually cost, after the fact, millions of dollars) due to different demands for certain supplies. The most valuable asset of a company is its reputation -- something, which it cannot afford to lose!

Dr. Helander even interwove social networks and their importance in the context of supply chains and, speaking of social networks, her first paper based on her doctoral dissertation, supervised by Professor Rajan Batta at the University of Buffalo, appeared in a book edited by Professor Ed Kaplan of Yale; Professor Batta's advisor at MIT had been Professor Dick Larson, and the Head of Dr. Helander's Mathematical Sciences Division at IBM is Dr. Brenda Dietrich. Drs. Larson, Kaplan, and Dietrich had all spoken in our Speaker Series! We had also hosted Dr. Grace Lin and Dr. Robin Lougee-Heimer of IBM in our Speaker Series and their talks were also outstanding.

Dr. Helander gave the kind of talk that will stimulate discussions for a long time to come!

And, as for the "icing on the cake," and we very much enjoyed the lunch and dessert at the University Club after Helander's talk, President Obama yesterday announced that IBM is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. You can read the press release here. There was clear serendipity in our scheduling of Dr. Helander's presentation on the same day as the announcement of this truly prestigious award for IBM!

We thank Dr. Helander for the time that she took to come and speak at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst. It was also the perfect first lecture for the Fall 2009 Series since the Department of Resource Economics has now joined the Isenberg School of Management and the Chair of the Department, Professor Julie Caswell, could even join us for lunch (and then had to host another speaker, who was giving a lecture on dynamic pollution taxes).

Operations Research is Fascinating -- Dr. Helander of IBM on Food Safety in a Global Supply Chain and More

Operations Research is a Fascinating Subject with topics that capture one's attention. This is one theme that we try to get across (and we believe that we are succeeding) through our Speaker Series in Operations Research / Management Science.

Our Fall 2009 lineup begins tomorrow with the presentation of Dr. Mary Helander of IBM who will speak on Food Safety in a Global Supply Chain. The announcement of her presentation even made the UMass Amherst homepage 4 days before her talk, which is testament to the importance of her topic and interest surrounding it! Tomorrow, Friday, September 18, Dr. Helander will be giving her talk at the Isenberg School of Management at 11AM in Room 128. The UMass Amherst Student Chapter of INFORMS is delighted to be hosting her talk and visit. The talk is open to the public.

There is palpable excitement around our campus about our speakers and their topics this Fall. We begin our 2009 Fall Series with Dr. Helander's work on food safety and supply chains and our series will end in December with Professor Brian Levine of the Department of Computer Science at UMass Amherst speaking on cyber forensics. Topics of importance and fascination --- those are themes that operations research and operations researchers and management scientists tackle!

You can read more about the speaker series and other activities that we have been involved in, in the Fall 2009 edition of the Supernetwork Sentinel.