Fabulous Talk by INFORMS Fellow Dr. Les Servi of MITRE on Robust Mission Network Analysis

After my return from almost 2 weeks in Europe, in addition to seeing my students, I was very much looking forward to the talk by Dr. Les Servi, which took place today in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series.

Dr. Servi is a Group Leader at MITRE Corporation in Bedford, Massachusetts and is an INFORMS Fellow. I have known Les since our Brown University days in Applied Mathematics. He went on to get a PhD at Harvard and has had an illustrious career in industry. I stayed and received my PhD at Brown and became an academic.

The title of Les' talk today was: Robust Mission Network Analysis.

Deniz Besik, the President of the UMass Amhers INFORMS Student Chapter, and I had the pleasure of introducing our terrific speaker today.

In his talk, Dr. Servi emphasized the importance of finding useful patterns, and displayed a Dilbert cartoon, which noted that The Math should fix the guessing. His tweet on that cartoon he told us generated over 17,000 views.

In his talk, he described an extension of robust optimization in the context of functional dependency network analysis (FDNA), followed by analysis without hedging and then analysis with hedging.

His presentation was based, in part,  on two papers of his, and also more recent work, with the papers being: "Deriving Global Criticality Conditions from Local Dependencies Using Functional Dependency Network Analysis (FDNA)", which he co-authored with P.R. Garvey, and which was published in the journal Systems Engineering in 2017 and the paper: "The Last Word: A Modeling Model," which was published in the Phalanx in 2017. He kindly shared these two papers with me and the figure below is from the latter and it is a variant of the figure, featured above, which was emphasized throughout his lecture today.

Some of the takeaways from his talk (and there were numerous ones which will provide us with food for thought for a long time to come):

• Simplicity, when effective and appropriate, is the highest form of modeling.
• Hope is a bad strategy for dealing with what is unknown.
• A model may have needless complexity, with a complex model's fragility producing unanticipated interactions among variables leading to spurious decisions.
• One should practice cautious hedging.

I very much enjoyed hearing about FDNA in order to capture graphically, via a network, the goal of a mission and the various mission tasks (children). He spoke about each link of the network being characterized by two parameters, which can involve a lot of interviewing of experts to determine appropriate values (and ranges) of. The network topology captures the dependencies among mission tasks. He described how the use of the chain rule can help in determining the derivative of the top node (the mission goal) with respect to other nodes, but then also mentioned that sometimes the derivative may not exist. 

The cautious hedge involves solving a robust mission problem. Of particular note, was identifying critical nodes in the network.

We took a group photo after the presentation.

A special surprise was to have Karen Li, an Isenberg School of Management alumna, class of 2017, who was also a Commonwealth Honors College graduate, and winner of the UMass Amherst Leaders for the 21st Century Award at graduation last May, travel from Boston to come to the talk. Karen was featured in an article when we published a paper based on her honors thesis.

Lunch at the University Club that followed was a special treat with even INFORMS Fellow Dr. Peter Haas (formerly of IBM and now of the College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass) joining us.

We thank Dr. Servi for sharing with us his latest, fascinating and extremely applicable research!

Dr. Radhika Kulkarni, VP of Advanced Analytics R&D at SAS, to speak at the Isenberg School

We are delighted to announce - so be sure to mark your calendars - that Dr. Radhika Kulkarni, VP of Advanced Analytics R&D at SAS, will be speaking at the Isenberg School of Management on Friday, March 6, 2015, just over a month away!

This visit has been in the planning for a while and we are delighted that we will have an opprtunity to welcome Dr. Kulkarni to UMass Amherst.

Dr. Kulkarni's presentation title is: Succeeding with Business Analytics: Key Challenges.

The officers of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter prepared the nice poster below announcing her presentation, which I expect will attract a standing room only audience.

I have known Radhika for a while through WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) and she is the supervisor of one of my former doctoral students, Dr. Padma Ramanujam, whose doctoral dissertation received the best dissertation award from what is now the Transportation Science & Logistics Society of INFORMS. I was a very proud academic mother when the announcement was made.

I have visited both Padma and Radhika at SAS's beautiful campus  in Cary, NC.

That morning we will have a meet and greet with Dr. Kulkarni, followed by a reception, and her presentation and lunch with a roundtable afterwards with grad students.

The student chapter and I are very grateful to the INFORMS Speakers Program which is sponsoring her visit, in part, along with my Operations & Information Management Department, with additional support from my Chaired Professorship Smith Funds.

Radhika is the recipient of the WORMS Award in 2006 (and when I received the same award the year after, she presented me with the ward). She was elected an INFORMS Fellow in 2014 at our San Francisco meeting. This time around I preceded Radhika since I became an INFORMS Fellow in 2013.

A Super Year for the Supernetwork Team

The academic year is drawing to a close with exams over with, grading completed and grades submitted,  and graduations upon us!

It is a time of year with many transitions and a great time to take stock.

Soon many of us will be off to conferences and, during the summer, will be immersed in various activities, which, of course, will include research and, for some of us, the supervision of doctoral students.

As the Founding Director of the Supernetwork Center at the Isenberg School of Management, I have been extra busy this past week. Center Directors have met with UMass Facilities Planning folks regarding space needs since we will be having a grand new addition to the Isenberg School!

Hence, there are many exciting and wonderful things happening.

This is a post to celebrate some of the great achievements this year of the Supernetwork Center Associates, who include not only students but also faculty from 3 different continents and several industrialists.

• Center Associate Dr. Jose Cruz of the School of Business at UCONN was selected an Ackerman Scholar for 2014-2016.  The Ackerman Scholar Award recognizes significant and continuing all around academic productivity among the faculty of the School. It is awarded to faculty who are not already supported by Chair or Professorship appointments. This is his second appointment as an Ackerman Scholar, having held this appointment also from 2012-2014. 
• Center Associate Dr. Trisha Anderson of the School of Business at Texas Wesleyan University, received the coveted "Exemplary Teacher Award" from her university.  The award is given to a Texas Wesleyan faculty member who displays quality in the areas of teaching, scholarship, community and University service and personal integrity.  Both Jose and Trisha received their PhDs in Management Science from UMass Amherst and I was their doctoral dissertation supervisor.  Jose has 5 degrees from UMass Amherst - a record!
  
• Doctoral Student Center Associate  Dong "Michelle" Li is one of three Isenberg School of Management doctoral students awarded the 2014 Outstanding Doctoral Student Researcher Award. Given that the Isenberg School has 7 departments, this is quite the accomplishment.
• Doctoral Student Center Associate Sara Saberi is one of ten recipients of the prestigious 2014 Isenberg Scholar Award at UMass Amherst and one of only three such recipients from the Isenberg School.
•  The UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, whose President this year is Doctoral Student Center Associate Shivani Shukla, received the Magna Cum Laude Award for its activities. This is the 8th national award from INFORMS in as many years. I have been the chapter's Faculty Advisor for a decade.
• Center Associate Dr. Amir H. Masoumi of the School of Business at Manhattan College received the 2013 Judith B. Liebman Award of INFORMS for his work with the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter while he was a doctoral student at the Isenberg School.
• Plus, this year was extra special to me because I was elected an INFORMS Fellow last October in the class of 2013.

We expect to hear, shortly,  more very good news on the promotion & tenure cases of two Center Associates. We are just waiting for the final approval from the  Board of  Trustees of their universities.

Also, I would be remiss not to mention and recognize one of our Undergraduate Center Associate Alums, Christina Calvaneso, who worked at the Supernetwork Center,  and is a UMass Amherst alum, class of 2003. Christina, who is the Senior of VP and Business Operations at Eyeview, will be recognized on Jun 18, 2014 by the Isenberg School of Management with the 2014 Young Alum Business Leadership Award!  I nominated her for this award and had over a decade ago nominated her for the 21st Century Leaders Award, which she received from UMass Amherst.

I always say that you can accomplish so much more through collaboration and mutual support, and, besides, it is much more fun to work together!

Since supernetworks are "networks of networks" we certainly practice what we research and preach!

For more news on the Supernetwork Center and its Associates do check out our newsletters, going even back to 2004!

Resilience of Operations Researchers and Raytheon

One of the favorite comments that I received at the recent INFORMS Annual Conference in Minneapolis that I wrote about here and here was from Professor Leon Lasdon of the University of Texas Austin. As he and I were exiting the room where the 2013 INFORMS Fellows Award lunch took place last Monday he said to me: "Anna, we take a licking but we keep on ticking."

I thought that statement was simply perfect and it speaks to the importance of resilience.


Another favorite comment that  I received was  from Professor Michael Florian of the University of Montreal, who is also an INFORMS Fellow and a recipient of the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to transportation science. At the reception at the Transportation Science & Logistics Society business meeting (also last Monday), Florian and I reminisced about Martin Beckmann, (also a Robert Herman Award recipient),  one of the authors of the classic Studies in the Economics of Transportation book, who is in his mid 80s and still going strong.We talked about physical fitness and stamina and, since Florian is a skier, he said to me: "Anna, do you know what happens to skiers? They do not die, they just go downhill."

And, speaking of resiliency, one of my doctoral students, Dong "Michelle" Li, and I arrived back from Minneapolis to Amherst around 1:00AM Wednesday morning and, after only a few hours of sleep, we were off to speak at a Manufacturing Technology Networking event hosted and organized by Raytheon. The event took place at the Tewksbury Country Club (our first time there) and we were so lucky that Mr. James Capistran, the Executive Director of the UMass Innovation Institute, gave us a ride, via gorgeous route 2 with the radiant Fall foliage, in his nice new car with a voice-operated GPS.

Michelle and I were the only invited female speakers so it was essential to show up and to  give our presentations, which we did and we had a great time.Speaking of the serendipity of showing up and the importance of face time, my husband's grad school room-mate in physics at Brown University, who works now at Raytheon,  showed up to see me. What a great surprise it was. My brother also works at Raytheon so the event was extra special. The presentations were by faculty from UMass Amherst, UMass Lowell, RPI, MIT, and WPI.  So many knowledgeable techies and geeks were at the Raytheon event so the questions were great. There were two parallel sessions, and my chairman also spoke in a set of sessions parallel to ours. There were about 200 attendees, which also included suppliers and Raytheon personnel even from Arizona and California.

My presentation was on "Networks Against Time: From Food to Pharma." In my presentation,  I focused on some of the highlights of our latest research including findings reported in our book "Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products."

Michelle's presentation was on "A Dynamic Network Oligopoly Model with Transportation Costs, Product Differentiation, and Quality Competition." Her talk was based on our paper of the same name, which is now in press in the journal Computational Economics.

We managed to get a few photos taken during some of the breaks and during my presentation.

Thanks to Raytheon for a very special workshop!

Is this a Scientific Guinness World Record -- Attendance at 50 Consecutive Annual Meetings of the Same Conference!

I don't think that Guinness in its compilation of World Records has a category for this achievement but perhaps it should.
In November, Professor David Boyce, who is both an INFORMS Fellow and an RSAI Fellow, will be attending his 50th consecutive North American Regional Science conference, which will take place in Atlanta, Georgia. His first such conference was in 1964! Walter Isard was the founder of Regional Science and he passed away in 2010 at age 91.
 
David reflected on his Fifty Years at the North American Regional Science Meetings (we are assuming that he will be there in Atlanta and 49 consecutive meetings is an achievement, as well). in an essay published in the NARSC newsletter in which he wrote:
I attended my first Meetings of the Regional Science Association in November 1964 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. At the time I was a graduate student focused on my thesis research, and working full time on the side to support my expanding family. Through careful planning, and extraordinary good luck, I have not missed the North American Meetings since. If my luck continues to hold, I will attend my 50th consecutive North American Meetings next November in Atlanta.

I have wondered out loud to a few people what I might do to commemorate this event. The likely answer is nothing unusual: give a 20-minute talk, and say hello to the many colleagues I have met over the years, whose friendship I cherish. This invitation to write a few lines for the first newsletter of the North American Regional Science Council presents an unexpected opportunity to say more on this occasion that may interest younger readers, as well as remind some of my contemporaries about the meetings back then.

Given Professor Boyce's outstanding scientific contributions, his mentorship and advocacy of numerous students and professional colleagues, and his impact on transportation and regional science globally, I had to do something to honor this very special person.


So, I asked the Program Chair of the NARSC conference, Dr. Peter Stenberg, and its Executive Director, Dr. Neil Reid, whether I could organize a special session in honor of Professor Boyce, and they both agreed. The response was wonderful and below I have the information on the session, which will take place at the NARSC conference on Friday, November 15, 2013, from 10:30AM-12:30PM. And, if you see Professor Boyce, in the meantime, congratulate him on his stamina, dedication, and as, he even acknowledges, "luck."

Session: In Honor of Professor David E. Boyce – His 50^th NARSC Conference – His Scholarship and Mentorship

Organizer: Anna Nagurney, John F. Smith Memorial Professor, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Paper #1: Conventional Transportation Planning Models: Review and Prospects for Alternatives

Presenter: Tschangho John Kim, Endowed Professor Emeritus, Urban and Regional Systems, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; email: tjohnkim@illinois.edu

Paper #2: A Corridor-Centric Approach to Planning Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure

Presenter: Marco Nie, Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois; email: y-nie@northwestern.edu

Paper #3: David Boyce, RSAI Archivist

Presenter: Kieran Donaghy, Department Chair, Department of City & Regional Planning, Cornell University, Ithaca, NewYork; e-mail: kpd23@cornell.edu

Paper #4: Shrinking Global Population - a Futuristic Scenario or a Current Challenge 

Presenter: Hillel Bar-Gera, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; email: bargera@bgu.ac.il

David Boyce has served as a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania (1966-1977), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1977-1988), and the University of Illinois at Chicago (1988-2003). He is a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International (2002), the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (2003), and the American Society of Civil Engineers (2009), and is an Emeritus Member of the Transportation Networks Committee of the Transportation Research Board. He has published over 190 journal articles, books, book chapters and reports.

A Night to Remember -- Japan RSAI Honors Professor David E. Boyce for his Transportation Research

I am back from Ottawa, Canada where I took part in the 59th Annual North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International, November 7-10, 2012.

On Friday, November 9th, 2012, I attended a truly special dinner honoring the contributions of Professor David E. Boyce. I had blogged earlier about the conference as well as a special dinner invitation that I received from Professor Yoshiro Higano, the President of the Japan Section of the RSAI (Regional Science Association International).

The dinner took place at the Sterling restaurant outside of Ottawa.

Professor Boyce was honored with a special award on the 50th anniversary of the Japan Section of the RSAI for his paper, "Predicting Road Traffic Route Flows Uniquely for Urban Transportation Planning, " published in the  Studies in Regional Science, vol.42, no.1, The 50th Anniversary Special Issue.

In his statement, Professor Higano noted that Professor David Boyce is an expert in transportation planning. He has been engaged for many years in practical urban transportation planning in large urban areas including Chicago in the US and has actively participated in international scholarly meetings of regional science, transportation planning, urban and regional planning, and so on.

In fact, Professor David E. Boyce  has attended 49 North American meetings of the Regional Science Association International in the past 49 years!    What an amazing scientific feat and, as he told me, also luck!

Professor Higano noted that the traffic assignment model, which was developed by Professor Boyce and his heirs in the field of Transportation Engineering, has had  a great impact on practice and theory in the field of urban transportation planning in Japan in 1970’s. The methodology was based on stochastic probability theory.

I can personally attest to Professor David E. Boyce's scholarship and will always value his mentorship and friendship as research in traffic network equilibrium has evolved over the decades!

He remembers the first time that he met me and that was at the regional science conference in Denver, Colorado, shortly after I had received my PhD from Brown University. My dissertation advisor, Professor Stella Dafermos, who passed away in 1990, and I had traveled to the conference.

Below, I have posted some photos of the exceptional meal and ceremony in Ottawa, hosted by Professor Higano in honor of Professor Boyce -- the conversation, stories, and laughter we will always treasure.

Congratulations to Professor David E. Boyce, who, among his many other notable recognitions, is also an INFORMS Fellow and an RSAI Fellow!

Going to Canada and a Letter from Japan

Today is  election day for the President of the US and I am already getting many emails from Europe from colleagues there who are anxious about the outcome -- will it be President Obama for another four years or President Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts?

Needless, to say, I am very anxious about the outcome as well.

The New York Times, last Sunday, had a rather tongue-in-cheek article: At  a Loss? There's Always Canada by Joh Ortved that was commented on in the British press.

I was born in Canada, in Windsor, across the border from Detroit and travel regularly to Canada to give invited seminars and to present papers at conferences. Every time that I cross the border I feel a sense of comfort and recognition.

This week, after the voting is over, and the winner is finalized, I will be off to Ottawa, the capital of Canada.

I will be taking part in the 59th Annual North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International. and will be delivering the presentation,  "A Dynamic Network Oligopoly Model with Transportation Costs, Product Differentiation, and Quality Competition,"   based on the paper co-authored with a doctoral student of mine, Dong "Michelle" Li. The research behind this paper is funded, in part, by our National Science Foundation (NSF) grant CISE #1111276, for the NeTS: Large: Collaborative Research: Network Innovation Through Choice project awarded to the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

I am a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI) and always look forward to this conference, which has a discussant for each paper, and takes place in interesting locations. Last year the conference was in Miami, immediately before the INFORMS conference in Charlotte, which worked out very well. The North American RSAI conference always has very nice social activities, including an RSAI Fellows lunch,  and interesting plenary talks and special sessions. Plus. I enjoy seeing many colleagues from around the globe!

This year, and I hope that the forecasted nor'easter blows through before I board the plane to Canada in which everyone gets an aisle and a window seat simultaneously, we will also be celebrating  Professor David E. Boyce's recent award. Professor Boyce is both an RSAI Fellow and an INFORMS Fellow and a very special colleague.  Dave and I wrote the preface, published in the INFORMS journal, Transportation Science,  to the translation of the Braess paradox (1968) paper that I did with Braess and with my former doctoral student, Tina Wakolbinger (who is now a Full Professor in Austria). I have collaborated on other papers with Professor Boyce, as well.

The Japan RSAI, which celebrated her 50th Anniversary this year,  has awarded Professor Dr. David Boyce a Special Award.   Professor Yoshiro Higano of Tsukuba University shared with me this wonderful news when I was in Gothenburg, Sweden last month. He will be representing Japan RSAI  to present the award to Professor Boyce during a dinner scheduled for Friday evening, 9th November, 2012, in Ottawa.   


I received the lovely invitation letter below, which I very much appreciate.

I am very much looking forward to going to Canada!

Meet a UMass PhD Alum Event at the Isenberg School on November 2 and Poster

Yes, today, UMass Amherst is closed and we are hunkering down for the arrival of Hurricane Sandy. Since we still have power and I hope that this good fortune continues, we can still accomplish some work.

We are delighted that Dr. Benneyan, who received his PhD in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering from UMass Amherst, will be speaking at the Isenberg School of Management this Friday in Room 106 at 2PM. Dr. Benneyan's PhD advisor was Dr. Larry Seiford, who is an INFORMS Fellow, and had served at NSF and is now at the University of Michigan.

Professor Benneyan  is a Professor at Northeastern University and his talk is being hosted by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, which I have served as the Faculty Advisor of, for over 8 years.

The students prepared the nice poster below. If you click on the image you can enlarge it.

Also, immediately after Professor Benneyan's presentation on Healthcare Systems Engineering, we will be celebrating the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter's receipt of the magna cum laude award from INFORMS. This is the sixth award that our chapter has received from our parent society in as many years!

Professor Benneyan is sponsored, in part, by the INFORMS Speakers Program, which I have chaired for the past two years.

In the meantime, all in the Northeast of the US, please stay safe and take care with Hurricane irene.