Photos from the Fabulous WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Lunch at INFORMS Minneapolis

As the President of WORMS, the inimitable Dr. Laura McLay of the University of Wisconsin Madison stated, the best kept secret of our Annual INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Conference is now out and it is the WORMS luncheon.

This is always one of my favorite events and I tell my students (present and past) to get their tickets early since they sell out quickly.

This year's WORMS luncheon took place on Tuesday, October 8 in Minneapolis at the magnificent Convention Center. Below I include some photos from this event. Notice that men are definitely welcome and this year, as in many past years, Dr. Eric Wolman, one of the recipients of the George Kimball Medal (along with Rina Schneur of Verizon), was in attendance.

Below I capture the specialness of this event through photos that I took this past Tuesday.

First, thanks to the sponsors of the WORMS lunch!

Tracy Cahall of INFORMS and one of our doctoral students from the Isenberg School at the door

Smiling attendees at the luncheon tables

At the above table are several of my former doctoral students, a present student, and friends

Another highlight besides the great company and conversations plus food at the luncheon is the awarding of the WORMS Award. This year's recipient is Dr. Kathryn (Kathy) Stecke of UTDallas. Dr. Susan Albin of Rutgers chaired this year's award committee and shared with us some of the tributes to Kathy in the letters in her nomination packet.

Dr. Laura McLay and Dr. Susan Albin presenting Dr. Kathryn Stecke with the 2013 WORMS Award in the photo above

 

To find out more about WORMS and its various activities, please check out the WORMS page on the INFORMS website.

From communities such as WORMS and INFORMS we gain sustenance throughout the year in our busy professional lives, so do become a member, enjoy the benefits, and help us to grow and support women and men in Operations Research and the Management Sciences + Analytics!

Doctoral Students Tuning Up for INFORMS Minneapolis

A very successful activity of our award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, which we initiated last year, was the Tune-Up for the Annual INFORMS Conference. You may recall that the conference was in Phoenix last year.

This year, we will be holding another such event, and it will take place this Friday, from 1-3PM at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst.

The doctoral students will be giving the presentations that they will be delivering next week at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Minneapolis.

Information is on the flier below, which the students have prepared. Three presenters are doctoral students in Management Science at the Isenberg School and one is from the College of Engineering.

 This tune-up event gives students (and faculty) the opportunity to learn more about one another's research and provides a nice, welcoming venue in which the students can practice their public speaking and presentation skills. Feedback will be provided and questions are welcome.

This year, one of my doctoral students, Dong "Michelle" Li, will be presenting the paper, Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Networks with Outsourcing Under Price and Quality Competition, by
Anna Nagurney, Dong Li, and Ladimer S. Nagurney, which is in press in the International Transactions in Operational Research. Her presentation can be downloaded here.

The other students will be talking about their work on models and algorithms for applications from transportation (airline and shipping) to healthcare.

Hope to see some of you at the Tune-up on Friday at the Isenberg School!

More information on the chapter's activities can be found on its website.

Network Economics of Cyber Crime

I have been working on network economics with interfaces to various applications for quite a while, with the first edition of my book on the topic being published twenty years ago!

About two years ago, we were approached to submit a proposal to the Advanced Cyber Security Center, which was soliciting proposals for its Prime the Pump Initiative and our project, Cybersecurity Risk Analysis and Investment Optimization, was funded.

Our project team is interdisciplinary, and consists of Professors Wayne Burleson of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mila Getmansky Sherman of Finance, Senay Solak, and yours truly of the Operations & Information Management Department, of the Isenberg School of Management, and Chris Misra, of the OIT Department -- all of us at UMass Amherst.

The Project Synopsis:

The vision of this project was to develop:

• rigorous models for cybersecurity risk,
• models for costs and benefits of various cybersecurity technologies,
• techniques for integrating  these models into higher level models that account for other risks and risk management expenditures.

I will be presenting an aspect of our research project at INFORMS Minneapolis in the presentation entitled: Network Economics of Cyber Crime with Applications to Financial Service Organizations.

 The presentation can be downloaded here.

The invitation to submit a paper to the invited session came from Dr. Alla Kammerdiner, whom I met at a marvelous conference in Yalta, Ukraine.

The session information is here.

Dr. Kammerdiner I wrote about earlier in this blog -- she had run the Boston Marathon that was the site for the terrorist attack last April 15.

Another presentation on our project, from a broader perspective, can be accessed here.

Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences (WORMS) Events at INFORMS Minneapolis

Are you excited about the upcoming Annual INFORMS Conference in Minneapolis, October 6-9, 2013?

I certainly am as are my colleagues who will be going and, of course, our students, who will be presenting.

The Annual INFORMS Conference serves as an outstanding scientific and professional conference plus a great social one -- for many of my former doctoral students this is where we hold one of our annual reunions.

And, among our favorite activities and events (for both males and females alike), are the events organized by the Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences (WORMS) Forum.

Below is a flier prepared by Dr. Susan Martonosi to highlight our activities at INFORMS Minneapolis. You can click on the image below to get an expanded view.

Something new this year, is the Speed Networking event on Tuesday afternoon, cosponsored by the Junior Faculty Interest Group and the Minority Issues Forum.

Hope to see many of you at the great WORMS events and others soon n beautiful Minneapolis!