Smarter Cities - A Company Expert Speaks

This past Friday, just before the official of the UMass Amherst Spring Break (one week recess), we had the great pleasure of hearing Dr. Jurij Paraszczak present in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series. And the turnout for his talk in our beautiful new Business Innovation Hub at the Isenberg School was fantastic! I was especially delighted to see undergraduates in attendance as well as faculty and students not only from the Isenberg School but also from the College of Engineering and the College of Information and Computer Sciences! We even had guests from multiple other states! Thanks to the hard work of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter the notice for Dr. Paraszczak's talk even made the UMass Amherst homepage under "Events!"

As is our tradition, as the Faculty Advisor to this great Student Chapter, I welcomed everyone and then this year's Chapter President, Katerina Deliali, did a formal introduction of our speaker. You can see from his bio in the above poster, the amazing career that he has had at IBM, with global impact!

Dr. Paraszczak, as the Director of IBM's Smarter Cities program (and he told us that IBM's Marketing Department deserves the credit for the coinage of the "Smarter" component), has had a wealth of experience. He took the lucky audience on a panoramic view of associated projects, highlighting several ones in greater depth, both in the US and in Europe.

He began his lecture very interactively, querying the audience, as to What is a Smart City? and then continued by asking us:

• Who decides on the objectives?
• What resources are available?
• Who makes the compromises?

He noted that a Smarter City is one that is "optimized around a set of goals," which is a fabulous definition.  He emphasized that there have been dramatic changes since 2013 in terms of the availability of data (sensors, social media, etc.) and Artificial Intelligence, with applications (some existing ones in certain countries in terms of traffic management and even social control and you can guess the country or countries as to the latter). One of my wonderful colleagues from Management (who also happens to be Ukrainian), Dr. Bogdan Prokopovych,  especially enjoyed the statement that: "data is the new oil."

I was delighted when Dr. Paraszczak mentioned Dr. Brenda Dietrich (formerly of IBM and now at Cornell University, who is an INFORMS Fellow). Brenda had spoken in our Speaker Series a few years ago and, coincidentally, was included in a wonderful article published recently in ORMS Today, an INFORMS publication, on ten pioneering women and a Rising Star.

Dr. Paraszczak  discussed the analysis of cities, from building simple models that relate physics to everyday activities, to statistical models, and, ultimately, predictive ones (and I would argue prescriptive ones). He spoke of the hierarchy of: analytics, data, models, and insights.

He also emphasized the competition for resources and Maslow's needs for a city and quality of life. At the Q&A I asked him which city does he think has the best quality of life and he said: Stockholm, Sweden, and both my colleague Bogdan and I agree (although I do love Gothenburg, where I have also lived). How does one do resource optimization, in terms of energy, water, traffic, etc., in a city, when many of the departments work and function as silos? He singled out Minneapolis as being an exemplar of a Smarter City in the US and mentioned that there is usually an individual/leader who has the correct vision and relationships to make things happen. I believe that the students in the audience very much appreciated his emphasis on not only technical skills, but also on soft skills.

Dr. Paraszczak said that cities need to anticipate problems, such as where there may be water breaks, or crime, or traffic gridlock (with a terrific animation of Istanbul, Turkey using cell phone data during the day). He also emphasized the need to sense, analyze, predict, and manage, and how resilience is built upon planning and operations. He noted that people want to be heard and you need to engage citizens.

He also spoke about how the lack of organization among city departments may lead to failure and the challenges of constructing a single objective for a city! Ultimately, it is desirable to "make things better" and to "improve the quality of life."

Needless to say, I was absolutely thrilled when he displayed a photo of Lviv, Ukraine (my parents hailed from that area) and spoke of his work there, which yielded successes.

And he stated that Singapore is the smartest city on the planet but still so siloed, and, coincidentally, back in October, I had the great pleasure of taking part in a Workshop at the Ivey School in Canada on Smart Cities and wrote a blogpost on it since it was amazing and we had a speaker who spoke on Singapore! That workshop was organized by Professors Joe  Naoum-Sawaya and Bissan Ghaddar.

The Q&A period was excellent (but much too short) and many lingered afterwards to chat. Katerina Deliali presented the speaker with a gift from the Isenberg School.

I took the group photo below and then off to lunch at the University Club we went!

The lunch was delicious and the conversations filled with a lot of wonderful exchanges and laughter.

Also, as we always like to do, we shared scrumptious desserts.

Afterwards, we escorted Dr. Jurij Paraszczak to the Supernetworks Lab at the Isenberg School, where Nazanin Khatami conducted an interview with him. We will let you know when the video gets posted on the Chapter's Youtube channel.

It was a great honor to be able to host Dr. Jurij Parazsczak at UMass Amherst - thanks to him and to the great audience!

And a special shoutout to Chapter officer Haris Sipetas, who maintains the chapter website, including the news, for the writeup with additional photos!

Wishing everyone a Very Happy Spring Break!

Cybersecurity and Financial Services and Prescriptive Analytics

Yesterday, I had the honor of speaking on Cybersecurity and Financial Services at the INFORMS Analytics Conference in Boston. The conference was very well-organized, the venue at the Westin Waterfront hotel was marvelous, and the speakers came from both industry (many of the top analytics firms as developers and/or users were there) and academia. Also, there were many students and even a good-sized cohot from our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, which I highlighted in one of my posts.

I had multiple roles at this conference, which made the experience extra rewarding, and INFORMS staff presented me with the nice streamers below.

My talk was in the Prescriptive Analytics track, which was appropriate, and Dr. Marius Solomon of Northeastern University introduced me. I have known Marius for many years through the Transportation & Logistics Society of INFORMS. He shared with me that there were 104 submissions for presentations and out of these 30 were selected. I had carefully thought about the topics that I would like to speak on and chose Cybersecurity and Financial Services since I believe that cybersecurity is a topic that could greatly benefit from analytics and operations research methodologies and the wonderful geeks and brainiacs in our professional community for whom tough problems are both challenging and enticing!

It was great to have Dr. Irv Lustig of IBM  in the audience and some of you may know that Irv was also an Applied Math major at Brown University and I was his TA for an operations research  course taught there by my dissertation advisor Professor Stella Dafermos. Irv is well-known at INFORMS and very active in its Certified Analytics Professional program.   I posted a photo of Irv and me in my previous blogpost. 

Irv asked good questions, but, then again, he has had an outstanding education (his doctoral dissertation advisor at Stanford was Professor George Dantzig, one of the founders of Operations Research). And we continued the discussion after my presentation. Great to hear that IBM is also interested in Financial Networks!

In my presentation I spoke about a project that was funded by the Advanced Cyber Security Center (ACSC) and then segued into our NSF project.

My full presentation, in pdf format, can be downloaded from the Supernetworks Center website.

In the presentation I highlighted a network model that we developed to assess financial network vulnerability and importance of different financial network components, described a network economic model of cyber crime, and also discussed our latest NSF project on envisioning a Future Internet Architecture that we are calling ChoiceNet. Imagine if we could enhance the resilience of the network through redesign.

Thanks to INFORMS for organizing such a fabulous analytics conference!

Congrats to 2014 Newly Elected National Academy of Engineering Members - a Great List with Operations Research represented

After teaching my Humanitarian Logistics and healthcare class this morning I heard the great news.

Today the National Academy of Engineering announced its 2014 list of newly elected members and what a terrific list it is! 


Time to celebrate.

On the list are several individuals that are well-known in Operations Research and Analytics circles and I am so happy for them -- they are great individuals. Their citations are below


Dr. Carlos Daganzo, Chancellor Professor of the Graduate School, and retired Robert Horonjeff Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Berkeley.  For engineering contributions to traffic, transportation, and logistics systems and operations.


Dr. Brenda Dietrich,  IBM Fellow and vice president, and chief technology officer for Business Analytics Software, IBM, Somers, N.Y.  For contributions to engineering algorithms, frameworks, and tools to solve complex business problems.


Dr. Wallace Hopp, senior associate dean for faculty and research, Herrick Professor of Business, professor of technology and operations, and professor of industrial and operations engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  For creating and applying fundamental engineering principles governing the underlying behavior of manufacturing systems and supply chains,


Dr. Alex "Sandy" Pentland, Toshiba Professor of Media, Arts, and Sciences; and director, Human Dynamics Laboratory and Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.  For contributions to computer vision and technologies for measuring human social behavior.
 
Dr. Daganzo is the recipient of the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science, which he received at the INFORMS Minneapolis Meeting in October 2013.

Both Dr. Dietrich and Dr. Pentland have spoken in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series at the Isenberg School of Management plus they were plenary speakers at the First Northeast Regional INFORMS Conference held at UMass Amherst in May 2011, which I helped to organize with Dr. Hari Balasubramanian of UMass Amherst and Dr. Les Servi of MITRE. A blogpost and photos are available here.

I have also interacted with Dr. Pentland on other occasions, including the SBP set of conferences in which I served as a tutorial chair for several years and he gave a fabulous tutorial!

Special congrats also to Dr. Hopp for his great work and much-deserved recognition.

*******Plus, an update from the INFORMS homepage, congrats  also to INFORMS member:  Dr. Stephen Boyd,  Samsung Professor in the School of Engineering; and professor, Information Systems Laboratory, department of electrical engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.  For contributions to engineering design and analysis via convex optimization.********

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!

Rest in Peace, Nobel Laureate Kenneth G. Wilson

My husband, who has a PhD in physics, told me the sad news today that the Nobel laureate in physics, Dr. Kenneth G. Wilson, has died.

I remember him so fondly, since in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was heavily involved in supercomputing and parallel processing and utilized the Cornell National Supercomputer Facility, which Dr. Wilson led. I had heard hi speak on several occasions and enjoyed his vision very much.

I also served for several years on the National Allocation Committee for time at this supercomputer facility, which utilized primarily IBM computers.

My work there blended computational economics with operations research and many applications to spatial economics. I would fly to Ithaca several times a year and always enjoyed my time there.

In addition, IBM at that time would host outstanding short workshops on various themes in idyllic Lech, Austria and I spoke both at the Computational Economics one there and at the Computational Finance one and recall even seeing Dr. Alan King of OR/MS fame at one of them.

After Dr. Wilson's extended time at Cornell he then joined the faculty at Ohio State University.

He enjoyed hiking especially in the Dolomites, the Swiss Alps, and in New Zealand and he got many of his ideas while hiking. I do as well.

Rest in Peace, Dr. Wilson -- you will be missed.

An obituary on Professor Wilson is here.

Networks and Operations Research, Patterns and Big Data -- So How Does Money and Traffic Flow?

We've heard about the new geography -- now we are hearing about the new mathematics and at the prestigious Goldman Sachs technology conference that took place recently in San Francisco.

There, as noted by Quentin Hardy, writing for The New York Times, Steve Mills, IBM's senior vice president for software and systems was quoted as saying that when it comes to algorithms, "If I can do a power grid, I can do water supply..." Even traffic, which like water and electricity has value when it flows effectively. Moreover, Mills is quoted as saying in terms of cross-pollination and finding commonalities and patterns with the help of big data and algorithms that we are now: "leveraging the cost structure of new mathematics."

When I read about flows and especially in the context of transportation, electric power grids, natural resources, and finance, of course, networks and operations research and even economics immediately come to my mind since I have been researching and writing about the topic for many years.

I have always been fascinated by the commonality among problems and find that networks and the associated methodologies, such as optimization theory, game theory, variational inequality theory, and projected dynamical systems, provide a captivating medium for visualization, analysis, and computation and a way of bridging disciplines.

In our research and publications, we were able to answer several open questions, raised over a half a century ago:

1. How does money flow -- does it flow like water or electricity (raised by Cohen in 1952).

2. How are electric power generations and distribution networks like transportation networks (raised by Beckmann, McGuire, and Winsten in their classic 1956 book, Studies in the Economics of Transportation).

You can see the answers to the above questions in our papers in Computational Management Science and Naval Research Logistics, respectively.

In addition, we established, through a supernetwork formalism, how supply chain network equilibrium problems could be reformulated and solved as transportation network equilibrium problems -- thereby, constructing a common conceptual, modeling, and algorithmic framework for these two important classes of problems. That paper, On the Relationship Between Supply Chain and Transportation Network Equilibria: A Supernetwork Equivalence with Computations, was published in Transportation Research E 42: (2006) pp 293-316.

I also have a synthesis of the above equivalences in my Supply Chain Network Economic: Dynamics of Prices, Flows, and Profits book, which was published in 2006 and written that glorious year when I was a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

For those of you who are interested in the history of networks, with a focus on financial networks, and which includes a reference to Cohen above, please see my presentation on Financial Networks delivered at the Workshop on Measuring Systemic Risk, courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the University of Chicago in December 2010.

What seems like new mathematics (as was the case also with the new geography) to some is that now a wider circle is coming to realize the importance of research that has been going on for quite a long time, with major innovations over decades (frankly, centuries). Yes, I think it is really cool when an algorithm I implemented for predicting urban traffic flows can also be used to predict product flows on supply chain networks or financial transactions. Even major corporations are starting to notice.

New Female CEO of IBM as the Glass Ceiling Shatters

I am VERY impressed by the announcement that IBM has selected as its new CEO, to start in 2012, a female, and one with a degree in computer science from Northwestern, no less!

This is fantastic news.

According to The New York Times: Virginia M. Rometty, a senior vice president at I.B.M., will be the company’s next chief executive, the directors announced on Tuesday. She will succeed Samuel J. Palmisano, who will remain as chairman, at the start of next year.

The selection of Ms. Rometty for the top job at I.B.M. will make her one of the highest-profile women executives in corporate America, joining a small group of women chief executives that includes Ursula Burns of Xerox, Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo, Ellen J. Kullman of DuPont and Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard.

And, what is also very exciting, given the focus now on analytics by many of our professional societies, including INFORMS, is that Ms. Rometty has pushed to expand the company’s fast-growing analytics unit, which uses clever software to sift through the vast amounts of data inside companies, on the Web and social networks, to help clients look for sales and cost-saving opportunities.

Great news on all counts!

Happy 100th Birthday to IBM!

Reaching 100 years of age is remarkable for anyone, including a company, so congratulations are in order to IBM, which has reached its first century milestone as a company.

I can say that I grew up with IBM, having used IBM computers (yes, mainframes) as an undergraduate student at Brown University in Applied Mathematics, specializing in Operations Research, and also while a graduate student there. I spent a lot of time at the computing center since I so enjoyed solving those large-scale network problems.

After working in the high tech defense sector and getting my PhD, I was heavilty involved in supercomputing while an Assistant and then Associate Professor at UMass Amherst. I used the IBM supercomputer facility at Cornell, along with other centers at Illinois, and Pittsburgh, which were all then funded heavily by NSF (what a glorious time that was) and even got to serve on the National Allocations Committee at the Cornell Supercomputing facility.

IBM had an initiative at that time to feature one week workshops in Lech, Austria (and I had heard even in Monaco, but I did not get invited to those) and I was an invited speaker in two of them -- on Computational Economics and on Computational Finance. The speakers would get picked up at the Zurich airport and then driven through the Alps to this magical resort where we had not only views and amazing food but light brown cows with bells wandering around and waking us up in the early morning. We even got a chance to meet some top IBM executives. IBM no longer has such workshops, but perhaps the company will reinstitute them.

We all know about IBM PCs and have IBM to thank for them, as well, and, more recently, the great Watson supercomputer and its Jeopardy win.

IBM continues to innovate and to reinvent itself as a company, and is fcusing now on providing services and customer solutions, and I applaud it on its huge milestone. This article from USA Today has more on what reaching this milestone means.

Another reason that I am personally fond of IBM is because of its employees who are not only colleagues in one of my primary fields -- operations research and analytics, but who are also really terrific people.

Since we regularly host speakers through our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, we have had the pleasure of hearing from many IBM greats, including Dr. Brenda Dietrich, who is an IBM Fellow and the leader of its Business Analytics and Math Sciences research activities, and Dr. Robin Lougee-Heimer, as well as Dr. Grace Lin, formerly of IBM.

Real Generals Talk Logistics and Winning in the Great Restructuring

There is an old military saying, which speaks volumes:

Armchair generals talk strategy. Real generals talk logistics.

Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes magazine, recalls this saying in his outstanding column on Innovation Rules: Ten Tips: Restructuring Winners, in which he identifies what elements will help corporations in the great restructuring, which necessarily follows a great recession. Frankly, there is a lot of relevance in his excellent advice to other organizations, including universities. He identifies successful companies such as: FedEx, Southwest Airlines, Microsoft, Apple, Genentech, SAS, and Oracle, which were started during the "rotten decade of the 1970s," during which IBM also managed to flourish.

What struck me about his ten tips for winning in the great restructuring, was that half of them I would classify under the heading of analytics, from his emphasis on identifying where costs can be reduced in your operations, to speeding up your deliveries, to providing leadership in service, as well as in design. But my favorite, was his statement:

PICK A LEADER IN ANY FIELD AND YOU'LL FIND SUPERB LOGISTICS AND SUPPLY CHAINS UNDERNEATH. He singles out Wal-Mart and Amazon.com for their superior logistics.

As for the remainder of his tips, they round out what are fundamental to the success of corporations and organizations, alike. He advises to seek out the best talent, and quotes Bill Gates as stating that a great programmer is worth ten thousand times the price of only a good programmer. What really resonated with me, as well, was his emphasis on the importance of both internal and external communications (with IBM being a model for the latter and the military for the former). Excellent communications is one of my "pet peeves," and I wonder how much we have lost in the realization of the full potential of organizations because some of those "in command" did not provide the necessary information and did not get the important news disseminated.

Karlgaard ends by noting that integrity is essential and that everyone should know your purpose (see, it's about communication, here, too). I'll skip one of his tips -- branding, and will leave that to my marketing colleagues.

And, as for logistics, one of my undergrad students, who took my Transportation & Logistics class last term stopped by my office yesterday to seek advice because he wants a job in this industry, since logistics is his passion. I am sure that he will succeed.

If you wish to learn more about logistics and supply chains, please come to our Northeast Regional INFORMS conference at UMass Amherst, May 6-7, 2011. Information on a relevant tutorial at this conference is below.

Transforming U.S. Army Supply Chains: Management Innovation in DoD for Improved Efficiency, Productivity, and Cost-Effective Global Operations

Greg H. Parlier, Colonel, U.S. Army (retired)
Former Deputy Commander for Transformation, U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command
President, INFORMS Military Applications Society.

Congrats to IBM on Watson's Win on Jeopardy and to All Researchers Who Contributed!

If you have not heard, the supercomputer named "Watson" beat two humans on Jeopardy, and garnered, or its developer, IBM, did, the one million dollar prize!

As reported in The New York Times:

Facing certain defeat at the hands of a room-size I.B.M. computer on Wednesday evening, Ken Jennings, famous for winning 74 games in a row on the TV quiz show, acknowledged the obvious. “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.” he wrote on his video screen.

From now on, if the answer is “the computer champion on “Jeopardy!,” the question will be, “What is Watson?”

For I.B.M., the showdown was not merely a well-publicized stunt, but proof that the company has taken a big step toward a world in which intelligent machines will understand and respond to humans, and perhaps inevitably, replace some of them. The Times article is already noting how IBM is pursuing medical applications with the technology behind the question answering computer.

However, Watson was not perfect and, in an answer, had Toronto being a city in the United States. Time for a Geography Bee competition.

UMass Amherst and MIT contributed to the technology behind Watson. The Boston Globe ran a nice report on the research done in Massachusetts that contributed to its success.

The UMass contribution to Watson was information retrieval technology that helps Watson in the very first steps it takes when it is challenged with a question, allowing it to look for and retrieve text that is most likely to contain accurate answers.

“Our system zips through all the possible resources and puts virtual Post-it notes where the answers might be,’’ said Professor James Allan of the Computer Science Department at UMass Amherst. “Then we turn those results over to other systems to go deeper.’’

According to a press release issued earlier by UMass Amherst, which details other contributors, Watson is named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson and was built by IBM scientists who wanted to create a computing system to rival a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence. The "Jeopardy!" format provides the ultimate challenge because the game’s clues involve analyzing subtle meaning, irony, riddles and other complexities in which humans excel but computers traditionally do not.

Speaking of IBM, Dr. Brenda Dietrich, VP of IBM in the Research Divisions, will be giving a plenary talk at the Northeast Regional INFORMS Conference at UMass Amherst, May 6-7, 2011. Her plenary abstract is below.

Plenary Abstract

A smarter planet is emerging, through instrumentation of physical entities, the integration of information and control enabled by this instrumentation, and the intelligence to manage the entities efficiently and effectively. Examples include transportation systems, buildings, electrical grids, health care systems, governments, and supply chains. Achieving this smarter planet vision requires extensive data analysis, modeling, and optimization - in short, the application of operations research. In this talk some early examples of the use of OR to enable this vision will be described. Our field's potential and some emerging challenges will also be discussed.

And, if you want to learn even more about Watson, you may listen to the INFORMS podcast with Stephen Baker.

Photos from the Women in OR/MS Award Lunch in Austin, Texas

Above I share some photos with you taken at the Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences (WORMS) Awards Luncheon this past Tuesday at the INFORMS conference in Austin, Texas.

Congratulations to Dr. Brenda Dietrich of IBM for being awarded the WORMS award for 2010! Dr. Candi Yano of the University of California Berkeley chaired this year's award committee.

For previous winners please see the WORMS website.

This event is always one of my favorite ones at the annual INFORMS conference.

See how many individuals you recognize in the above photos.

High Tech Mergers Are HOT Again

USAToday.com is reporting that high tech mergers, both in number and in value, are on the increase. Especially attractive, as acquisitions, are firms associated with mobile computing, cloud computing, and search engines. In the past year, SAP, IBM, Apple, and Google have acquired firms and Oracle's success may be due, in part, to its earlier wise acquisitions.

Interestingly, the article also notes that the Chinese are eager to acquire firms. One of the major drivers in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) this time around is the desire to obtain access to new global markets, coupled with bigger firms acquiring smaller, agile firms with technological know-how and cutting-edge technological expertise and products. Moreover, many of the leading high tech companies are sitting on a lot of cash and interest rates are lower than a year ago signaling an improved economic climate for such transactions.

Our research on the integration of multiproduct firms, and the quantification of associated synergy, entitled,"Multiproduct Supply Chain Horizontal Network Integration: Models, Theory, and Computational Results," was just published in the International Journal of Operational Research, volume 17 (2010), pp 333-349. The results therein can be applied to assess the synergy of mergers and acquisitions of firms with similar or distinct portfolios of products and with access to different markets.

Another recent M&A study of ours, which is in press, also in a peer-reviewed journal, Computational Management Science, entitled, "Formulation and Analysis of Horizontal Mergers Among Oligopolistic Firms with Insights into the Merger Paradox: A Supply Chain Network Perspective," shows the impacts on profits of different acquisitions in industries in which the firms compete directly and feed the same markets.

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).

Women, Math, and Most Creative in Business

Fast Company has announced its 100 most creative people in business and Dr. Brenda Dietrich of IBM, who is well-known in the INFORMS community, is on the list. Dr. Dietrich opened up our Fall 2007 Speaker Series in Operations Research / Management Science and we had the pleasure of hosting her during her visit to the Isenberg School of Management. She was hosted by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. Her talk was on service science and she came to Amherst with one of her daughters. It is fantastic that a female in mathematical sciences who has also achieved the ranking of IBM Fellow is now recognized for her creativity and leadership by Fast Company. She is number 27 on the list and Sheila Bair, Chair of the FDIC, who had an office two doors down from me at the Isenberg School before she left to head the FDIC, is number 26. Those of you who know Dr. Dietrich probably know that she is also an amazing knitter -- so, of course, when she was in Amherst she visited WEBS, Americas' yarn store, which is located in Northampton, and which was founded by a former colleague of mine, Professor Art Elkins, and his wife.

Nice to see that the business community continues to recognize the importance of analytics in the optimization of business processes and in the delivery of services. It is especially nice to have a female operations researcher so recognized! Congratulations to Dr. Dietrich and to IBM! Congrats also to Sheila Bair, who is a lawyer, with superb analytical skills!

Dr. Ellis Johnson from Georgia Tech Speaks

Yesterday, February 20, 2009, Professor Ellis Johnson of Georgia Tech kicked off our Spring UMass Amherst Speaker Series in Operations Research / Management Science. His talk on airline challenges and operations research attracted faculty, students, and administrators from the Isenberg School of Management, the College of Engineering, the Department of Economics, and even from the University of Vermont in Burlington! Professor Johnson is the recipient of every major INFORMS prize for his research contributions. Before joining the faculty of Georgia Tech he was with IBM for 26 years where he rose to the rank of IBM Corporate Fellow. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Professor Johnson's talk centered on the challenges of cost reduction in the airline industry with a focus on reducing fuel costs. He compared fuel consumption of various jets, including executive jets, who would fly into smaller airports. He also emphasized the importance of doing environmentally-based research surrounding airplanes and talked about how ahead of the US Europe is in this dimension. He discussed high-speed trains in Europe and the potential/promise of such trains in the US. He had so much to report because of his extensive research contributions to airline transportation, including his work for Sabre and American Airlines, and knowledge. We did not have much time to hear about his work on airline security as well as passenger rage and passenger bills of rights, topics, which he had hoped to also be able to address, but time ran out.

After his presentation, we took Professor Ellis Johnson to lunch at the University Club on the UMass Amherst campus, which is in a building that dates to 1728 (but the food does not). We spoke about his travels to China and Thailand and about luminaries in the field of Operations Research/Management Science. We did not want the lunch to end. As one of the doctoral students said afterwards, the greatest people are also the nicest.

The UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter has posted some photos from Dr. Johnson's visit to Amherst. I leave you with some pearls of wisdom from him. We asked him for advice to students so that they would be successful professionally and he offered the following:

1. be a problem solver,

2. collaborate, and

3. teach others.