The IFORS Conference in Vienna, Austria Was Amazing

It is hard to believe that, this summer, I spent 3 continuous weeks in Europe, and spoke at 3 conferences. I already blogged about giving a keynote at the Game Theory Conference in Naples, Italy and about the EURO Conference in Linz, Austria. I also wrote about the IFORS initiative of GLOW on this blog and the various associated events at the conference in Vienna.

The IFORS Vienna Conference attracted over 2,200 delegates from 70 countries! This is truly amazing and so impressive.

The first full day was filled with wonderful highlights including the brilliant plenary by former INFORMS President Radhika Kulkarni to a standing room only audience and with an overflow room needed. Her topic of "Smarter Decisions with AI and OR Collaboration: Opportunities and Challenges," led to many continuing discussions throughout the day.

It was great to see the Secretary of IFORS, Gavin Blackett, and Springer Nature Editors, including Christian Rauscher. I was thrilled to see my book, "Labor and Supply Chain Networks," on display and was touched that Erny Rahayu Wijayanti wanted to be photographed with me.

And, of course, every IFORS Conference needs an International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) Editorial Board meeting led by its great Editor-in-Chief Celso Ribeiro.

I  am grateful for the opportunity to have presented in the invited IFORS Vienna session: Moments in the History of OR & IFORS organized by Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber with the outstanding M. Grazia Speranza as session chair. I very much enjoyed doing the research behind my presentation on "Highlighting Some Historical Women in OR," with focus on Ailsa Land, Alison Harcourt, Marguerite Frank, Stella Dafermos, and Judith Liebman and highlighting what more can be done, how far we have come, and the great initiative of GLOW - Global Leadership of Women in Operational Research. It is not often that one gives a talk and sees in the audience multiple people that one has mentioned in it, in addition to Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber and M. Grazia Speranza! Thanks to all the speakers in the session and to Janny Leung, Paula Carroll, and Annunziata Esposito Amideo for coming and for their leadership! It was extra special to also have Dmytro Matsypura, my former Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst PhD student, and very successful professor at the University of Sydney,  come to our session and all the way from Australia! And Janny Leung carried, amazingly, many GLOW backpacks in neon colors, which I will joyously carry.

It was fabulous to see Mary Magrogan of INFORMS, who has worked there for 45 years, being recognized as a newly elected IFORS Fellow and to have the late Judith Liebman be inducted into the IFORS Hall of Fame, with family members present.

Congratulations and Thanks to Professor M. Grazia Speranza on the Publication of Her Book, "Glowing Women: Women in Operations Research!"

This week I am in Vienna, Austria, taking part in my third conference in Europe, in as many weeks.

The conference taking place now in Vienna is the IFORS Conference, which takes place every three years.

The IFORS Conference is extra special because of the inauguration of the initiative known as GLOW.

Plus, congratulations and thanks to Professor M. Grazia Speranza are well-deserved on the publication of the English (expanded) version of her book, "GLOWING WOMEN: WOMEN IN OPERATIONS RESEARCH," which was published just in time for the IFORS Vienna Conference and its extraordinary GLOW - Global Leadership of Women in Operational Research events. Grazia is a former President of IFORS - The International Federation of Operational Research Societies, an INFORMS Fellow, and a recipient of the EURO Gold Medal, The book recognizes and celebrates the journeys of women from multiple countries, interwoven with Grazia's experiences as a scholar, leader, mother, and wife, and offers thoughtful wisdom and guidance. Through beautifully rendered interviews with (in alphabetical order): Shoshana (Shoshi) Anily, Cynthia Barnhart, Paula Carroll, Marielle Christiansen, Rosiane de Freitas-Rodrigues, Elise Del Rosario, Ola Jabali, Kathy Kotiadis, Martine Labbé, Janny Leung, Anna Nagurney (I am so honored to have been included), Dolores Romero Morales, Sunity Shrestha, Rina Schneur, and Karen Smilowitz, the book provides us with inspiration and a vision for a more inclusive future. The book was published by Armando Curcio Editore. 

More information can be found on the publisher's website: https://lnkd.in/dPviXqUn

Below are photos, the first of which was taken at the ITOR Editorial Board Meeting, run by its outstanding Editor-in-Chief, Professor Celso Ribeiro.

Super Excited to be Presenting at International Conferences this Summer

Conferences are outstanding venues at which to exchange latest research results and ideas, to do networking, and to reconnect with colleagues from around the globe. And, when the conferences are located in beautiful locations, the experiences become even more special and worthwhile.

This summer will be a very busy one. I will soon be presenting 4 talks at 3 different conferences in 2 different countries.

My first talk is the opening keynote talk at the Game Theory Sing21 Conference in Naples, Italy. I am very grateful to Professor Annamaria Barbagallo for the invitation. The title of my keynote is: "Game Theory, Supply Chains, Labor, and Tariffs: Insights from Variational Inequalities."

The program for the conference is now available online: https://sites.google.com/view/sing-21/programme_1/scientific-programme

I will then travel to Linz, Austria to speak at the EUROPT Conference: https://www.jku.at/en/institute-of-business-analytics-and-technology-transformation/conference-europt-2026/ At that conference, I will present a paper that was co-authored with my Isenberg School PhD student, Samira Samadi, which was recently published in the Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS). The paper, entitled, "Ad Valorem Tariffs in Global Supply Chain Networks and Impacts on Labor," can be accessed from the journal website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2025.2592758

The IFORS Conferences, which take place only every three years are some of my favorites! IFORS is the umbrella organization for national Operations Research Societies, including INFORMS. And, since the 2026 conference will take place in Vienna, it is one not to be missed. I love Austria and had a Fulbright at SOWI in Innsbruck, Austria. My family and I very much enjoyed living in Austria.

It will be an easy journey from Linz to Vienna.

Working on the two presentations for IFORS was very enjoyable. I would like to take the opportunity to thank Professor Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber for inviting me to speak in the stream: Moments in the History (and Future) of OR. Preparing my presentation, "Highlighting Some Historical Women in OR," took me on a very nostalgic journey since I was blessed to have known some of the truly remarkable female OR pioneers. And my other presentation at this conference is on a paper co-authored with two females: Samira Samadi and Professor Deniz Besik (who was my former PhD student at the Isenberg School): "Fresh Produce Spatial Price Equilibrium on General Networks: Capturing Commodity Quality Deterioration Through Endogenous Transportation Time Delay Functions with Capacities," which was recently published in the European Journal of Operational Research:  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0377221726003759. Of course, in the former presentation, I will highlight the new initiative of  IFORS: GLOW - Global Leadership of Women in Operational Research! 

More information on the IFORS conference can be found on its website: https://www.ifors2026.at/home/

Safe travels, everyone!

The Amazing IFORS Conference in Santiago, Chile

I hope that everyone who took part in the amazing IFORS Conference in Santiago, Chile, which took place July 10-14, 2023, has safely and comfortably returned to their home destinations.

The conference, which is a triennial one, was face to face and attracted over 700 presentations and 900 registrants from around the globe.

Kudos to the Co-Chairs of the Local Organizing Committee: Professors Rafael Epstein and Jorge Vera, and to the Chair of the Scientific Program - Professor Alice Smith and to their teams for putting together such an informative and rich scientific as well as social program. And even the weather cooperated - the winter while we were in Santiago was quite mild.

It has been an incredibly busy several weeks, since, shortly before the IFORS Conference, I had co-organized the Dynamics of Disasters Conference in Greece. 

It was so inspiring to see the great attendance and enthusiasm of the conferees and, I must add that, on my direct flight from Madrid to Santiago on Iberia, there were several conferees from Italy (Paolo Toth, Grazia Speranza, and Claudia Archetti) and, just after passport control, I had the pleasure of seeing the INFORMS President Laura Albert. It was wonderful to stroll to the conference venues and to be greeted and to share greetings with conferees. It was truly special to have exchanges with both Professors Tom Magnanti and Fred Hillier, luminaries in Operations Research.

The below collage was prepared as a memento of the conference.

I was thrilled to see my latest book, "Labor and Supply Chain Networks," on display at the Springer book at the exhibition hall at the conference and very much enjoyed speaking to the Springer Editors: Matt Amboy, Razia Amzad, and Jialin Yan. 

I also very much enjoyed the plenary and keynote sessions as well other sessions plus Editorial Board meetings of both the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) and the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR).

Many thanks to Celso C. Ribeiro, the Editor of ITOR, and to Roman Slowinski, the Editor of EJOR, for such informative meetings!

With the size of the conference and the two venues, I regret that I did not have a chance to speak with as many conferees as I would have liked to. Additional highlights included meeting colleagues that one had interacted with virtually in the pandemic and finally got to meet in person, including the amazing Anand Subramanian, the developer and interviewer behind the outstanding youtube series Subjectto_

And Professor Subrmanian, with some assistance, brought 16 of his special mugs, to present those who were at the conference and had had the pleasure and honor of being interviewed by him! I will treasure my mug. He has, to-date conducted 72 interviews - an extraordinary effort of historical scientific value.

I'd like to thank Professor Margaret Brandeau for her warm introduction to my keynote talk and I am grateful to all those who came to my presentation. I am grateful to my UMass Amherst engineering colleague Professor Chaitra Gopalappa for taking the photo below.

It was wonderful to also see my UMass Amherst engineering colleague Professor Hari Balasubramanian, who, with his wife, were at the same hotel as I in Santiago - the Ismael Hotel.

Some resilience on my part was required, since as I was shampooing my hair, with a head full of lather, the hotel had a pipe break, and there was no water. This happened about 2 hours before my keynote. Resilience comes with being Ukrainian.

I have posted the slide deck of my keynote on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website. In my keynote, I spoke about, among other work, recent research done with my Isenberg School of Management PhD student Dana Hassani and colleagues at the Kyiv School of Economics in Ukraine Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev, which was published in the Journal of Global Optimization.

It was truly special to have my former Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Dmytro Matsypura, who is head of the Business Analytics Department at the University of Sydney in Australia come to my keynote as well as Professor Renata Konrad on WPI and Professor Moldovan of Romania.

Many thanks to IFORS for the incredible work on this conference! The conference website can be accessed here.

Very Excited About the IFORS Conference in Santiago (Where It Is Winter) and the Dynamics of Disasters Conference in Athens (Where It Is Summer)

Academics are quite good at conferencing and also in optimizing when it comes to packing, etc. Nevertheless, packing for essentially back to back conferences on different continents and seasons can be a challenge especially if the plan is to only have a single carryon as luggage.

In 2006, I spoke at successive conferences in Cyprus (Limassol), Iceland (Reykjavik), and then in Italy (Erice). Family members joined me in Iceland and brought some warm clothing since the temperature, while we were there and it was officially summer, never rose about 48 degrees F. Some reflections on packing for the stream of conferences.

Soon I will be flying to Athens, Greece for the Dynamics of Disasters conference that I co-organized, and then, via Madrid, to the IFORS Conference in Santiago, Chile.

I am thrilled to be delivering a keynote talk, entitled, "Agricultural Supply Chain Networks: From Trade to Resilience and How OR Can Help," at the IFORS Conference.

My keynote will highlight some of our research over the past decade on agricultural supply chain networks including recent work with collaborators in Ukraine. Information on this conference can be found here. I am very honored to be on the list of plenary and keynote speakers.

Also, at the IFORS conference, I'll be taking part in the "Meet the ITOR Editors" panel, which was organized by the outstanding Editor of the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) journal Celso C. Ribeiro! Joining us on the panel is the previous President of IFORS Grazia Speranza and Mario Guajardo. ITOR recently celebrated its 30th anniversary with a special issue. I was delighted to have my tutorial paper on ``Fragile Networks," co-authored with Qiang "Patrick" Qiang included in this special issue. The tutorial paper was based on a tutorial that I gave at the ALIO INFORMS conference in Buenos Aires.

I am very much looking forward to seeing conferees from many continents at this IFORS conference, including my former Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Dmytro Matsypura, who will travel from Australia. He is Chair of the Business Analytics Department at the University of Sydney. The President of IFORS is now Janny Leung and she is traveling from Macao!

And, prior to the IFORS conference, I will be experiencing the warmth of a Mediterranean summer at the Dynamics of Disasters Conference. We have an outstanding lineup of plenary speakers and I thank them all for accepting our invitations. This is the 6th Dynamics of Disasters Conference! It was such a pleasure to work with Ilias S. Kotsireas, Panos M. Pardalos, and Chrys Vogiatzis on this conference.

My presentation at this conference will be on joint work with my PhD student Dana Hassani and colleagues in Ukraine at the Kyiv School of Economics: Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev.

There is clearly and agricultural theme to my presentations at both these international conferences. In fact, at the Dynamics of Disasters one, we also a special Acknowledgment and Dedication.

Back to packing for the conferences with my new suitcase purchased after I wore out my favorite one!

Safe travels to all those heading to conferences!

Looking Forward to Delivering My IFORS Distinguished Lecture in Buenos Aires!

I was deeply honored to have been selected an IFORS (International Federation of Operational Research Societies) Distinguished Lecturer.

I will deliver my Distinguished Lecture at CLAIO, which will take place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, December 12-15, 2022. Information on the conference can be accessed here.

The IFORS Distinguished Lecture program started in 1999 and the full list of previous lecturers can be found here. I find it quite remarkable that I have had the pleasure of meeting quite a few Operations Research scholars on this list!

It was such a delight to receive the letter below from IFORS.

The title of my lecture is, "Human Migration Networks: How Operations Research Can Assist with Refugees and Supply Chain Labor Shortages."

I published my first paper on human migration networks, amazingly, in 1989, and the research has continued, with many wonderful co-authors. During the COVID-19 pandemic, our research on human migration networks intensified, because of the additional challenges and also increasing refugee flows as well as labor shortages in many economic sectors around the globe. Even now we are working on another human migration network paper that focuses on coalitions and social welfare.

I have very much enjoyed working on my lecture. It is dedicated to essential workers who have sustained us in the COVID-19 pandemic with acknowledgment of all the freedom-loving people on the planet including those fighting for their freedom in Ukraine. 

Some of the papers that I will be highlighting in my lecture are: a paper published in the Journal of Global Optimization, co-authored with Professors Patrizia Daniele and Ladimer S. Nagurney, on refugee networks, and the paper that I wrote and which was published in Operations Research Perspectives, which integrates human migration networks with labor in supply chain networks.

I will also highlight research that we published in the IFORS journal, International Transactions in Operational Research, on policy interventions for bringing human migration population distributions in line with system optimization.

I very much appreciate that IFORS posted the statement below on Russia's war against Ukraine on its homepage.

Coincidentally, the last time that I was in Buenos Aires, which was in June 2010 for the ALIO-INFORMS Conference, the World Cup was taking place and I blogged the experience. And, now, the World Cup is again taking place, but in the month of December, and in Qatar, and I will be back in Buenos Aires! I leave you with several photos that I took in Buenos Aires.

And congratulations to Argentina for making it to the quarterfinals of the World Cup today!

A BIG Thanks to Operations Researchers at Lancaster University in England for the Outstanding Hospitality

I am back in Amherst, Massachusetts, after being in Europe for 10 days, traveling first to southern Italy where I gave a keynote talk at a conference in a castle and also blogged about it, followed by a  fabulous day in London, and then several days in Lancaster, where I taught a Masterclass on Network Equilibrium at Lancaster University. There I was hosted by STOR-i, which is a Center devoted to doctoral training in statistics and operational research (or, as we say in the US, operations research). I had been invited to teach the Masterclass last summer, and, since I had given a talk at Lancaster, when I was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College at Oxford University in the spring/summer of 2016, and enjoyed the experience very much, I accepted the invitation. The colleagues in operations research/management science at Lancaster are extraordinary so I was looking forward to seeing them again and also to meeting students that would be taking my Masterclass. This past week was spring break at the University of Massachusetts Amherst so instead of teaching at the Isenberg School of Management I would be teaching at Lancaster University.

On March 11, 2018, I took the Virgin train from Euston Station in London to Lancaster and was delighted to see that the station was promoting the University.

A short taxi ride brought me to the Lancaster House Hotel, which was my domicile for the duration of my stay and the view from my hotel was perfect with seagulls often chirping.

My Masterclass consisted of 4 two hour lectures:

My first evening in Lancaster, I had the great pleasure of having dinner with Professor Graham Rand, who is an extraordinary ambassador for both INFORMS and IFORS, and I have lost track as to the number of conferences I have enjoyed seeing Professor Rand at.

Meeting the students was a delight and I very much appreciated their insightful comments and questions.

Special thanks to Lucy and Luke, two STOR-i doctoral students, who accompanied me to one of the lunches.

It was also wonderful to be able to see Professor Matthias Ehrgott and Professor Judith Wang of Leeds University, for a lunch. I have dined with them even in Auckland, New Zealand, where they were faculty before coming to the UK. Professor Ehrgott has served as the Chair of the Management Science Department at Lancaster, the largest department of its kind in England!

A special thank you to Ms. Rosemary Hindley, who made the arrangements for me and the hospitality extended was exceptional and which I so much appreciated!

Other highlights (yes, I did a lot of lecturing (8 hours worth) but also a lot of eating, which kept my energy level high) included dinner at a Thai restaurant with Professor Pavlidis and his doctoral student, and dinner with two Distinguished University Professors: INFORMS Fellow Professor Kevin Glazebrook, the Director of STOR-i, and Professor Konstantinos Zografos, whom I have known for many years (and he received his PhD at the University of Connecticut and has been recognized with, among his awards, an engineering alumnus award). Professor Glazebrook drove us to the restaurant through the countryside, The Lunesdale Arms in Tunstall, where I had one of the most delicious meals in my life! A huge congratulations to Professor Glazebrook and his team for developing an exceptional doctoral training programme in operational research, which engages students with academics and industrial partners and practitioners.

I will be back in Lancaster, England in September and am truly honored to be giving a plenary talk then at the OR60 Conference! 

And, one of the best rewards of teaching, is inspiring students and I was so pleased to see that Alan F. Wise wrote an excellent blogpost on the Braess Paradox, after my Masterclass!  Coincidentally, I had had a very lovely communication with Professor Dietrich Braess himself, while I was in Europe. And, also, while in Europe, I heard from the renowned physicist, Professor Adilson Motter of Northwestern University, about the publication if his latest paper, which also discusses the Braess (and other related) paradoxes. This paper I thoroughly enjoyed reading after my return.

A big thank you also to all the airlines that carried me on 7 flights over 11 days: British Airways, Alitalia, and Aer Lingus.

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!