Even Armadillos were at INFORMS in Texas

To give you a feeling (if you couldn't make it) of the scope of experiences that a conferee at the recent INFORMS Annual Meeting that took place in Austin, Texas may have had, I share with you some sights and sites above both in and outside of the conference center venue.

The photos above include snapshots of the Capitol building, the beautiful views on the River Walk, the fabulous keynote talks by Professors Ed Kaplan of Yale and John Birge of the University of Chicago and, yes, even armadillos, which took part in "races" at one of the evening conference receptions. That photo was provided by Professor Debra J. O'Connor of Holy Cross College (thank you)! I assume that the armadillos did not have to pay registration fees.

Photos of Great Times at INFORMS in Austin

One of the most enjoyable parts of any conference is reconnecting with friends in different locations around the country or the world.

In addition to the talks and events that one attends at any conference, it is important to find some time to chat and relax.

Above are photos taken at the INFORMS Austin, Texas conference of a group of us -- all with affiliations with the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, some as former doctoral students or present students -- some as faculty and some as Associates of the Virtual Center of Supernetworks.

There is nothing like getting together and engaging in face-to-face time between sessions and presentations and having a terrific time with a lot of laughter and great conversations!

Smashing Photos from Social Networking and Work and Life Balance Panels

While at the INFORMS Conference in Austin, Texas, November 7-10, 2010, I wrote blogposts on the social networking panel and the work and life balance panel that I very much enjoyed participating in.

Above I share with you some photos of the panelists as well as some of the audience members.

These panels took place on Sunday, November 7, the first one at 8:00AM and the last one at 4:30PM.

Isenberg Students and Faculty with the Magna Cum Laude Award

Last Tuesday morning the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter received the magna cum laude award at the INFORMS conference in Austin, Texas.

Joining me at the awards breakfast: Min Yu, a doctoral student at the Isenberg School of Management, who served as last year's chapter president, and two former chapter presidents, Drs. Patrick Qiang and Zugang "Leo" Liu, who are now faculty members at Pennsylvania State University campuses.

The above photos were taken at the awards breakfast on November 9, 2010. We were presented with the award by Dr. Burcu Keskin of the University of Alabama and Dr. John Fowler of Arizona State University.

It was a terrific event.

On Social Networking Panel at INFORMS in Austin, Texas

This morning the Social Networking and Operations Research panel took place at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.

The panel was organized by Professor Laura McLay of Virginia Commonwealth University and joining me on the panel were: Professors Wayne Winston of Indiana University, Mike Trick of Carnegie Mellon University, and Auriele Thiele of Lehigh University.

The panelists first introduced themselves and discussed briefly their blogs and social networking experiences. Then McLay led the Q&A with the panelists with further give and take with the audience. The audience was terrific and very international -- thanks for showing up to this 8AM session!

Some of the questions that were discussed (and would merit further give and take):

Which have been your most successful/popular posts and what do you attribute their popularity to?

How do you handle rude/inappropriate/negative comments?

How do you manage the time involved in preparing your blogposts?

How have your experiences with social networking tools evolved over the years? What do you see happening with social networking over the next couple of years? Are there new business models and innovations that you can foresee that may be successful? How can operations research help with new business models in this area?

How does one establish credibility on the blogosphere?

The session was recorded and if it gets posted, I will let you know.

In the meantime, some of the highlights and insights:

1. Blogging is an enjoyable activity if you like to write and comment (it need not take much time but it takes a while to draw an audience and you need to do it regularly, just like exercise, I might add).

2. It is a terrific way in which to get news out and to get discussions going in our discipline.

3. There is room for longer posts (and links to essays and white papers) and at the other extreme Twitter with the latter a good way in which to get timely news and info out quickly.

4. Writing about people, issues, and activities (including sports and related figures and events) seems to increase the audience for your writings.

5. Providing careful analysis in your posts can increase one's credibility.

6. Social networking tools are a great way in which to draw students into operations research and the management sciences.

7. We are not journalists but journalists do draw information from blogs.

8. Increasingly, administrators and public relations and communications officers of colleges and universities are looking favorably on bloggers at their institutions.

This was a very enjoyable panel and a great way in which to begin the INFORMS conference.

The weather here in Austin, Texas is sunny and gloriously mild!

Supernetwork Center Associates at INFORMS in Austin, Texas

Nine of the Supernetwork Center Associates will be presenting papers at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas, November 7-10, 2010 so we will be having a very special reunion.

Dr. Tina Wakolbinger of the University of Memphis will be chairing the session: Decision-Making in Nonprofit Organizations in which she will present a co-authored paper, "Collaborative Information Sharing in Humanitarian Supply Chains." In that session, my doctoral student, Min Yu, will present a paper co-authored with Dr. Patrick Qiang of Pennsylvania State University Malvern and me entitled, " Supply Chain Network Design for Critical Needs with Outsourcing." This paper is now in press in Papers in Regional Science.

Dr. Jose Cruz of the University of Connecticut will be chairing the session: Sustainable and Responsible Supply Chain Management in which he will deliver the paper, "Mitigating Global Supply Chain Risks through Corporate Social Responsibility." In the same session, Dr. Zugang Liu of Pennsylvania State University at Hazleton will speak on, "Consumer Environmental Awareness and Competition in Two-Stage Supply Chains," co-authored with Dr. Cruz and Dr. Trisha Woolley (now Anderson).

Dr. Woolley Anderson will present the paper, co-authored with me, "Environmental and Cost Synergy in Supply Chain Network Integration in Mergers and Acquisitions." This paper was published in Sustainable Energy and Transportation Systems, Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making, Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, M. Ehrgott, B. Naujoks, T. Stewart, and J. Wallenius, Editors, Springer, Berlin, Germany (2010) pp 51-78.

I will be presenting, "Supply Chain Network Design under Profit Maximization and Oligopolistic Competition," in a session on Risk Management organized by Dr. Jussi Keppo and Dr. Jie Ning of the University of Michigan. This paper was published recently in the journal Transportation Research E.

Dr. Patrick Qiang will present our joint paper, "A Bi-criteria Measure to Assess Supply Chain Network Performance for Critical Needs," in the session on Disruptive Event Management.

And Dr. Dmytro Matsypura will be traveling all the way from Sydney, Australia, where he holds the position of tenured lecturer at the University of Sydney to present the co-authored paper, "Margining Option Portfolios by Offsets with Two, Three, and Four Legs" in a Financial Engineering session.

In addition, Center Associate Dr. Padma Ramanujam of SAS Inc. will also be joining us at INFORMS in Austin, Texas.

I will be posting our presentations, as they become available, on the Visuals Page of the Supernetworks Center website.

Social Networking through Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Beyond

The INFORMS Annual Meeting begins soon in Austin, Texas and I am so looking forward to reconnecting with former students and seeing colleagues from around the globe! I am also very much looking forward to giving presentations, listening to the latest research, taking part in several business meetings and award ceremonies, and to simply enjoying the various social and special professional events.

The conference will begin, for me, next Sunday morning when I take part in a panel on Social Networking and Operations Research that was organized by my fellow blogger and very dynamic colleague, Professor Laura McLay of the Virginia Commonwealth University, as part of a cluster of panels organized by the super-blogger and promoter of Operations Research, Professor Mike Trick of Carnegie Mellon University! Joining me on the panel will be Professor Wayne Winston of Indiana University and Professor Aurelie Thiele of Lehigh University.

We will share our experiences with social networking tools from blogs to Facebook and Twitter with Q&A from the audience, led by Professor McLay. I am certain that the discussions will be very interesting and illuminating, so join us, if you can!

Professor Trick has promised to cover the panel discussions on his blog and to tweet about them as well

Hope to see many of you at INFORMS in Texas next week where the weather is much milder than in Amherst, Massachusetts!

Professor Bill Cooper's 96th Birthday

At a dinner party at Professor Georg Pflug's lovely apartment in Vienna, Austria, late last month a group of us who had been invited as part of the Computational Management Science conference that was taking place there were talking about the beautiful minds in our field. We were discussing how we had lost Professor George Dantzig of Stanford at age 90 a few years back and were chatting about how there were still giants among us who were doing research well past what one would consider to be retirement age.

We singled out Professor William "Bill" Cooper of the University of Texas Austin. Little did I realize that, while we were talking about him, it was only a few days past his 96th birthday, which took place on July 23! The McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas issued this nice article to mark this grand achievement of longevity and productivity. Professor Cooper, at age 66, after having previously taught at Carnegie Mellon University and at Harvard University, joined the business school faculty of the University of Texas Austin. His professional contributions in accounting, and in operations research and management science are legendary and, I might add, his productivity actually increased in his decade of 78-88 years of age!

Professor Cooper, although now officially retired, still comes to work, and says that he wants to die while living and not from a cold or from pneumonia.

Professor Bill Cooper will be honored at the 2010 INFORMS National Meeting, which will take place next November (conveniently) in Austin, Texas. I plan on being there to thank him and to congratulate him for all of his accomplishments and for his impact.

Above is a letter I received from Professor Cooper when I was named the John F. Smith Memorial Professor (a chaired professorship). The letter hangs in my office directly above my desk. The fact that at age 84, he would take the time to write and have such a letter typed and even mailed to a mutual friend, speaks to the kindness, thoughtfulness, and manners of this titan.