Great Time Speaking on Investing in Infrastructure on the Dr. Matt Townsend Show

Last April, I published an article in The Conversation, "Calculating where America should invest in its transportation and communication networks." 

The article was republished in multiple publications and in May I received an email from a very friendly segment producer of the Matt Townsend Show. The message stated that Dr. Townsend had read my article, liked it a lot, and would like to have me as a guest on his radio show. Multiple dates as options were provided, but, given my very busy conference schedule this summer, plus the fact that I am a Summer Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (RIAS) at Harvard, we settled on today as the date!

Trying to find a landline was not easy but, thanks to RIAS, a nice quiet and comfortable office was found and I also had a cell phone as a backup. I had listened to several segments of the show and very much enjoyed the facility with which Dr. Townsend asked questions and kept the conversation going on numerous timely topics being addressed by those that he was interviewing.

I came prepared with a bottle of water and my latte from Peet's to keep myself hydrated and pumped, which was easy.

 

Critical infrastructure networks is a topic I am extremely passionate about and have done research on with wonderful doctoral students from the Isenberg School as well as collaborators from Harvard to many other universities; some of these are Supernetwork Center Associates. Most notably, I mention Dr. Patrick Qiang, with whom I wrote the Fragile Networks book, and which was featured in the interview.



The interview can be accessed online.

Many thanks to Dr. Matt Townsend for the invitation to be on his show and for his terrific questions as an interviewer! I enjoyed the experience a lot.

And, coincidentally, afterwards, I had lunch with Professor David Parkes, a chaired professor of computer science at Harvard. When I was a Science Fellow at RIAS in 2005-2006, he, Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania, and I co-authored a paper on the Internet and the Braess paradox, which was published. 

Of course, in my interview with Dr. Matt Townsend I had to speak on the Braess paradox!

Super First Day of Classes at the Isenberg School of Management

There is something special about the month of September, when the new school year begins. The nights are cooler in the northeast, some of the leaves have started to change colors, and there is an air of anticipation.

I am sure that you remember many "first days" of classes, from elementary school onward through high school and college, and perhaps graduate school or a professional school.

I never get tired of the start of the new academic year and last night I was so excited, that I could hardly sleep.  Today, was the first day of the new academic year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and, in the Fall, I always very much enjoy teaching my Logistics and Transportation class, which is an elective in the Operations and Information Management Department.  Also, if the classroom size permits, I allow interested students, especially from Industrial Engineering, into the course, who have some background in operations and modeling.

Faculty members, as some students do, too, I expect, take the time to decide what outfit to wear on the "first day of school." One of my Marketing colleagues always wears a red tie and recommends something bright and cheery and for those of you who follow Alex Pentland's work (we have hosted him at the Isenberg School through our great UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series), you will know that first impressions - which may be only seconds or minutes long - do matter! Pentland is from MIT and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a well-deserved honor.

Today, after having breakfast, I checked my email messages and there was good news, and a perfect start to this special day.

Our paper, which I have blogged about, A Generalized Nash Equilibrium network model for post-disaster relief, and which was co-authored with one of my former undergraduate students, Emilio Alvarez Flores, who received a degree from the Isenberg School in May 2016, and a colleague from economics, Professor Ceren Soylu,  is the lead article in the November issue of Transportation Research E. I received a nice preprint today before my class.

Having such news before your first class is clearly energizing plus synergistic.

During class I asked the students to share a fun fact about themselves having to do with Logistics and Transportation, and these were so interesting and so much fun - from stories about commuting close to two hours each way for their summer internships, to riding mopeds as a mean of transport in Thailand and without a helmet, to driving over 3,000 miles this summer to help a family member move, to flight delays and travails, to working on yachts in Boston, and also fear of flying. It should be a very interesting semester.  One student mentioned that her favorite mode of transport was Uber!
Coincidentally, last night I read the latest issue of The Economist and guess what was the cover story?! It will be fascinating to see what happens with autonomous vehicles, in general, and the impact on Uber, which has no hard assets, for example, one of the issues explored in this issue.

And then, during office hours - I was not sure whether anyone would show up since I do not assign homework on the very first day - a student who was also in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class stopped by and we brainstormed for 90 minutes (it felt like 10 minutes) about possible topics for her honors thesis. (Emilio's honors thesis I co-supervised last year.) But, mostly, we just talked about healthcare and hospitals and improving the quality of care and our personal experiences.

Catching up with colleagues at the Isenberg School was also a lot of fun today and  hearing about how they spent their summers.

Then it was time for our weekly NSF project teleconference on our EAGER grant (which are high risk but potentially high return projects). Along with Associate Dean of the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, Dr. Tilman Wolf, I am working with colleagues from the University of Kentucky, who are computer scientists: Dr. Ken Calvert and Dr. Jim Griffioen. Together we had also had, with NCState and RENCI, a multiyear NSF Future Internet Architecture (FIA) grant and we worked on ChoiceNet. Our work is getting a lot of citations which is gratifying.

And, as part of the discussion, Ken mentioned that he had listened to a very interesting podcast in the NPR Freakonomics radio series: http://www.npr.org/podcasts/452538045/freakonomics-radio, the July 213, 2016 edition, entitled: Is the Internet Being Ruined? He mentioned that Dr. David Clark of MIT was interviewed in this segment, so I had to listen. David Clark is one of the brains behind the Internet and an absolutely delightful individual. Two years ago, on September 20, 2014, I had the pleasure, with my wonderful colleagues: Professor Mila Sherman of Finance, Professor Senay Solak of my department, and Professor Wayne Burleson of Electrical and Computer Engineering, of organizing a workshop at the Sloan School at MIT on Cybersecurity Risk Analysis for Enterprise Security (a mouthful). This was made possible through a grant that we received from the Advanced Cyber Security Center in eastern Massachusetts and also with support from Mila's dissertation advisor at MIT, the renowned Dr. Andrew Lo, who also gave a keynote speech.  Dr. David Clark, a visionary and thought leader, was also a keynote speaker and I still remember the research assignment that he had given me. You can see photos in my post on the link above.

I hope that your first day of the new academic year was enjoyable and rewarding!

Serving on Habilitation Dissertation (Higher than a PhD) Committee in France

Academics are always open to new experiences.  New experiences are interesting and valuable and help you to grow.

Today, I had the pleasure of taking part in a dissertation defense since I am on a habilitation dissertation committee of Dr. Patrick Maille.  Dr. Maille is an Associate Professor at Telecom Bretagne (part of Institut Mines-Telecom) in France and last year was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California Berkeley, working with Dr. Jean Walrand, whose work I am very much a fan of.

I agreed to be on Patrick's committee after I received an invitation from him last March since Patrick's work is very complementary to our NSF project research, both to our most recent ChoiceNet project and our new EAGER project.

Moreover, he is the co-author, with Dr. Bruno Tuffin, of the book: Telecommunication Network Economics,  published by Cambridge University Press, which I have read and reread.

I like it that in the book he cites my Supply Chain Network Economics book since I consistently see (and he does, as well) many behavioral similarities associated with decision-makers in the Internet space and in supply chains.

A habilitation is even "higher" than a PhD. According to Wikipedia, a  habilitation is "the highest academic qualification a scholar can achieve by his or her own pursuit in many countries in Europe, Central Asia, Egypt and the Caucasus." And it is usually earned after attaining a research doctorate.

This was a new experience for me since, although I have chaired 18 doctoral dissertations, and have served on committees as an external examiner for dissertations in Canada, Norway, and Sweden, this was my first habilitation experience.

In addition to reading the habilitation dissertation, I read quite a few papers of Dr. Maille's, and examined his professional dossier of accomplishments. I also had to complete a report on his publications provided to me one month before the defense date, which was today.

I was invited to the defense in Rennes, France, but, given all of my travel commitments this month, which I blogged about in a previous post, I asked whether I could teleconference in. Tough to turn down a trip to France during this beautiful time of year especially since another member of the committee, Dr. Eitan Altman, had been my host in Paris at the NetGCoop conference  4 years ago when I gave a keynote talk on supply chains. But, as I have written on this blog, this October is an extremely busy month for me.

Dr. Maille had received permission from his university to have me teleconference in for the defense. Yesterday, we checked out the technology, a new software I had never used before,  and Skype. The new software worked yesterday but not this morning, so good old reliable Skype was used and it worked great! I had been sent the presentation slides this morning. Last year, I Skyped in for Niklas Arvidsson's doctoral dissertation defense at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Niklas  received an international dissertation prize a few months ago for his thesis, which is terrific.

The habilitation this morning, for me, and the afternoon for my French colleagues, began with an introduction of the committee, followed by about a 45 minute presentation by the candidate. Then it was time for comments from the committee members, and questions from the committee, followed by more discussions. Overall, the defense took about 2 hours and then the committee members in France (with me, in the meantime, getting a virtual tour of the premises)  ambled with the computer with Skype to another room where we together prepared a report in French.  I am fluent in several languages but French is not one of them so this part was quite interesting. Luckily, some of my comments after Dr. Maille's presentation had been typed up so there was some translating and enhancing done and the report was completed. It was a very enjoyable part of a very pleasant habilitation experience!

The candidate successfully passed his habilitation so a BIG congratulations to Dr. Patrick Maille. He can now apply for a Full Professorship and can supervise doctoral students independently.

I toasted with a glass of champagne virtually!

Net Insecurity, Cybersecurity, and New Future Internet Architectures

I was mesmerized by the terrific article in The Washington Post written by Craig Timberg entitled: Net Insecurity: A Flaw in the Design.

Not only did it feature David Clark of MIT, who spoke at the Cybersecurity Rosk Analysis for Enterprise Risk Security Workshop that my Isenberg School of Management and College of Engineering colleagues and I organized, with funding provided by the Advanced Cyber Security Center (ACSC)  and which took place at the Sloan School of MIT last September, but also Richard Stallman, who was a keynote speaker at the INFORMS Computing Society Conference this past January (and I had the pleasure of not only speaking with him but also sharing a taxi with him to the airport).

Below are photos of Clark and Stallman (with my great INFORMS colleagues Bob Fourer and Matt Saltzman)  that I took at these respective events.

In Timberg's Post article, Clark is quoted as saying in regards to the development of the Internet that: "It’s not that we didn’t think about security,” Clark recalled. “We knew that there were untrustworthy people out there, and we thought we could exclude them.”

The Post article ends with the following prescient sentences: In 2008, Clark crafted a new list of priorities for a National Science Foundation project on building a better Internet. The first item was, simply, “Security.” I  could not agree more.

Coincidentally, on June 1 and 2,  the Future Internet Architecture (FIA) Spring 2015 meeting is taking place at MIT at the Stata building. Although I am in Sweden and will be taking part in a Finance conference in Gothenburg, two of my doctoral students will be presenting there on our NSF ChoiceNet project work, since we are one of five teams selected (and sponsored) by the NSF as part of its very ambitious and visionary Future Internet Architecture program.  Our ChoiceNet project aims to construct an economy plane for the Internet, which will allow more choices and cybersecurity is, of course, a possible primary feature.

Specifically, on June 2, my doctoral student, Shivani Shukla, will be presenting the poster below, which is based on a paper of ours: "Game Theoretic Model for Cybersecurity with Nonlinear Budget Constraints."

My doctoral student, Sara Saberi, will be presenting a poster on our paper, "A Network Economic Game Theory Model of a Service-Oriented Internet with Price and Quality Competition in Both Content and Network Provision," that was published in the INFORMS journal Service Science. The paper was co-authored with the lead PI on our NSF project, Tilman Wolf of UMass Amherst.

My first paper on cybercrime, "A Multiproduct Network Economic Model of Cybercrime in Financial Services,"  was also published in Service Science.

Our paper, "A Game Theory Model of Cybersecurity Investments with Information Asymmetry," Anna Nagurney and Ladimer S. Nagurney,  is now in press in Netnomics.

Also, our paper,  "A Supply Chain Game Theory Framework for Cybersecurity Investments Under Network Vulnerability,"  Anna Nagurney, Ladimer S. Nagurney, and Shivani Shukla, is in press in the book: Computation, Cryptography, and Network Security (2015), N.J. Daras and M.T. Rassias, Editors, Springer, New York. Since The Washington Post article expands on the challenges faced by encryption, especially in the early years of the Internet, this book should be very timely!

Given the importance of cybersecurity, I am delighted that the UMass Amherst  Provost Katherine S. Newman is helping to spearhead a new Cybersecurity Institute at UMass Amherst and, with the interest in the topic at the Isenberg School of Management, the School of Computer Science, the College of Engineering, and also other schools at UMass Amherst, this is a very exciting initiative!

A Great Week for Our Research on Networks

Last week was the first week of the new academic semester at UMass Amherst and it was a very exciting one.

I always very much enjoy meeting new students in the courses that I am teaching.

Plus, it was a great week for news on our research on Networks.

One of the best things about collaborations, besides the synergy and dynamism of researching tough problems together, is that, when one gets good news, such as a paper getting accepted, or hearing of its publication, and/or some great publicity about the work, you can share it and celebrate together - even if it is across the miles!

This week, Luis Marentes, who was a visiting doctoral student in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst last year, and who is from Colombia, Professor Tilman Wolf (who was his host), and with whom I have a large NSF grant, and Professors Yezid Donoso and Harold Castro of the  Department of Systems and Computing Engineering, Universidad de los Andes in  Bogota, Colombia, and I had our paper, "Overcoming Economic Challenges of Internet Operators in Low Income Regions through a Delay Tolerant Architecture with Mechanic Backhauls," appear online in the journal Netnomics.  It was great to share in the happiness of all those involved in this publication, which is on the dynamic pricing of Delay Tolerant Networks, and proposes a new computer architecture. To-date, there has been minimal work on the pricing in this domain and the identification of the potential profitability of Internet Service Providers in poor, and, often, rural communities, where even mechanic (even in the form of mule transportation) may be used to transport Internet information.

Also, our paper, "Securing the Sustainability of Global Medical Nuclear Supply Chains Through Economic Cost Recovery, Risk Management, and Optimization," co-authored with Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford and my doctoral student, Dong "Michelle" Li, appeared this week in the special issue of the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation devoted to Sustainability in Transportation Networks.  The paper was accepted for publication close to 3 years ago so it was nice to see it officially in the journal volume!

The first paper above has 5 co-authors, the second one has 3, and the one below only one (but ensuing ones on cybersecurity will have co-authors).  Specifically, the paper, "A Multiproduct Network Economic Model of Cybercrime in Financial Services,  that I wrote after our very successful Advanced Cyber Security Workshop at the MIT Sloan School last Fall, received very nice reviews from an INFORMS journal, and it has been revised and resubmitted. In the Acknowledgments I also thank the audience who came to my presentation at the Boston INFORMS Analytics conference in Spring 2014, which was a fabulous conference!


Another highlight this past week was having our NSF project: Network Innovation Through Choice, which we are calling ChoiceNet, and for which Professor Wolf and I are PI and Co-PI (along with 5 other Co-PIs from the University of Kentucky, NCState, and the Renaissance Institute (RENCI) at UNC) being featured on the UMass Amherst Research website in Research Next.  And the article, Internext, UMass Amherst experts are driving the future of Internet infrastructure, will appear in the 2014 UMass Amherst Annual Report on Research which will be available, I am told, by the end of this month. 


This should be a very exciting week as well with many interview candidates coming both to the Isenberg School and to UMass and with a major snowstorm forecast for early this week!

Packed Up and Off to the INFORMS Computing Society Conference in Richmond

Having a conference such as the 2015 INFORMS Computing Society Conference, which takes place in Richmond, Virgina, January 11-13, 2015,  is a treat.

The theme of the conference is: Operations Research and Computing: Algorithms and Software for Analytics.

The timing of the conference is convenient for faculty and students since it is taking place during the winter break between academic semesters.

I have packed up my suitcase and briefcase and will soon be heading to the airport.

The weather in Richmond is much milder than here in western Massachusetts so that will make the conference pleasant as well.

The conference organizing committee and the stream chairs did a terrific job putting the program together There will be many methodological sessions as well as application-based ones - I am especially interested in the network applications, the homeland security, and the  health applications tracks. There is also a marvelous lineup of plenary speakers and tutorial speakers.  The first plenary speaker is Professor George Nemhauser of Georgia Tech, tomorrow morning - a talk not to be missed.

The program and the Proceedings can be downloaded from this page.

On Tuesday morning, in a session in the Network Applications track, I will be presenting a paper, with assistance from my doctoral student, Sara Saberi, entitled: "A Game Theory Model for a Differentiated Service-Oriented Internet with Duration-Based Contracts." This paper is joint with also Professor Tilman Wolf of the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst and Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Hartford.

Our paper can be accessed from the online Proceedings, compliments of INFORMS.

Many thanks to the Editors of this volume: Drs. Brian Borchers,  J. Paul Brooks, and Laura McLay!

Our presentation can be downloaded from the Supernetwork Center site here.

Looking forward to seeing many INFORMS Computing Society members soon in Richmond, Virginia!

Offering More Choices on the Internet Through Duration-Based Contracts

We, as consumers, are locked into contracts with Internet Service Providers (ISPs)  over time durations that are too rigid,  over periods of yesrs, typically.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if consumers could be offered more choices, with choices including having contracts for Internet services for the time period that you actually want and need? Perhaps you just want to catch up on the news or view a video or movie.

This is one of the characteristics of a Future Internet Architecture (FIA) that we have been working on as part of our multiuniversity National Science Foundation (FIA) project: Network Innovation Through Choice. Specifically, we have been researching both theoretically and in terms of implementation an architecture which we are calling ChoiceNet with the goal being of introducing an Economy Plane for the Internet. The three principles of ChoiceNet are depicted graphically below.

In one of our fundamental conceptual papers, written by all the investigators on this project, we note that: These three principles interact in a cyclic process that results in increased competition, a faster pace of innovation, and better information for consumers, making it possible for users to make more informed decisions. We expect this “virtuous cycle” to be repeated over and over, on much smaller time scales than is possible in today’s Internet, where customers are locked into their local provider and rely on the latter for everything. Furthermore, we note that omitting any element of the cycle destroys the effectiveness of the others.

In order to investigate duration-based contracts for the Internet, we developed a game theory model for a differentiated service-oriented Internet with duration-based contracts. The model uses variational inequality theory for the formulation of the equilibrium in service usage rates, quality, and contract durations and projected dynamical systems theory for the underlying competitive dynamics. This paper we will be presenting at the 2015  INFORMS Computing Society Conference in Richmond,, VA in mid-January.   The paper will also be published in the conference proceedings. My co-authors on this paper are: Professor Tilman Wolf, who is the Lead PI on our NSF project, Sara Saberi, one of my doctoral students in Management Science at the Isenberg School, who this year received the prestigious 2014 Isenberg Scholar Award, and also Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney, whose university posted a writeup on our paper.

And for those of you who can make it, next Friday, Professor Tilman Wolf will be delivering a talk on ChoiceNet at the Isenberg School of Management in our great UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series. I hope that you can join us!

Net Neutrality and Opening Up the Black Box

I very much care about fairness, equity, and making sure that there is no discrimination and that also is the case for the Internet.

Net neutrality is a topic that is now being fiercely debated on the news and talk shows and has many taking political sides.


To many consumers, and even businesses, the Internet is a “black box,” which has revolutionized the way in which economic and social transactions and interactions are conducted, entertainment is obtained and experienced, communications are done, and numerous educational activities participated in. If one were to ask Internet users to identify the mechanisms by which the videos that they view, the news that they read online, and the messages that they disseminate, one may very well find that a consumer would be able to identify the content provider and, perhaps, the network provider. The user/consumer will not know where the content is being delivered from, the routes that have been taken to transmit the data, and the service providers that might have been transacted with en route. Moreover, they will not be aware of the encumbered costs and, very likely, the profit garnered.

Hence, we are dealing with information asymmetry in today’s Internet, a subject that, in terms of quality, dates to the Nobel laureate’s George Akerlof’s classic 1970 paper. Consumers, as well as businesses, are unaware of the intermediaries involved in network provision, the costs and profits of service providers, and are locked into contracts of durations that are inflexible and, possibly, not optimal from their utility perspectives. Such an economic landscape creates an inertia for innovation as well as consumer satisfaction and limits competitive behavior. Furthermore, it is not clear, due to the lack of transparency and information asymmetry, whether scarce resources are being utilized in an optimal manner, with the understanding that different stakeholders and decision-makers may be faced with distinct objective functions, which may, include, for example, aspects of environmental sustainability as well as cybersecurity and even enhanced quality for network transport provision.

Furthermore, the constraints that stakeholders and decision-makers are faced with are not transparent, which may result of an inefficient use of resources. The information asymmetry results in a lack of trust, and, even to a certain extent, paranoia on the consumers’ part since vital economic and engineering information is not shared in a transparent and clear manner.


The topic inspired us to write a Guest Commentary entitled, "Net Neutrality, the Past, Present, Future and What It Means to Us"  for masslive.com


My colleagues and I have been working since 2011 on a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Network Innovation Through Choice. As part of the project, we are envisioning the components of an economy plane for Future Internet Architectures and, in particular, one which we are developing and which we are calling ChoiceNet. 

Specifically, we wish to offer consumers more choices and in a transparent way. Why should we be locked into long-term contracts, for example, when it comes to Internet services?!

Towards that end, we have proposed duration-based contracts for a service-oriented Internet. In the paper, A Game Theory Model for a Differentiated Service-Oriented Internet with Duration-Based Contracts, co-authored with my doctoral student, Sara Saberi, Professor Tilman Wolf, the PI on our NSF project, and Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney, we introduced a game theory model of a service-oriented Internet in which the network providers compete in usage service rates, quality levels, and duration-based contracts. We formulate the network-based Nash equilibrium conditions as a variational inequality problem, provide qualitative properties of existence and uniqueness, and describe an algorithm, which yields closed-form expressions at each iteration. The numerical examples include sensitivity analysis for price functions at the demand markets as well as variations in the upper bounds on the quality levels for the services.

The paper will be presented at the INFORMS Computing Society Conference in January 2015 in Richmond, VA and will be published in its Proceedings.

And speaking of quality, our paper,  A Network Economic Game Theory Model of a Service-Oriented Internet with Price and Quality Competition in Both Content and Network Provision, appears in the December 2014 issue of the INFORMS journal Service Science.

In the meantime, I am sure that the lively discussions on net neutrality and regulations will continue!

Transparency is key!

An Economy Plane for the Internet - Upcoming Talk

We are delighted that Professor Tilman Wolf of the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst will be speaking at the Isenberg School as part of our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series, which I help the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter to organize.

His talk is one month away and it should be quite a provocative one!

Professor Wolf and I started working on our joint National Science Foundation project: Network Innovation Through Choice in September 2011, and, together with our Co-PIs and collaborators at the University of Kentucky, the University of North Carolina, and NCState, we have spearheaded a new Future Internet Architecture that we are calling ChoiceNet.

More background on this project, along with a list of our publications can be found here.

Cybersecurity Risk Analysis for Enteprise Security - Great Presentations Now Online!

I would like to thank the Advanced Cyber Secuity Center (ACSC) for funding the second phase of our project at UMass Amherst, which focused on Cybersecurity Risk Analysis for Enterprise Security.

As part of the project, with Co-PIs Professor Mila Sherman and Senay Solak of the Isenberg School of Management and Professor Wayne Burleson of the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, we organized a workshop at the MIT Sloan School on September 19, 2014. I had blogged about the workshop and am delighted that the ACSC has now made all of our presentations online so that you can read and reflect at your leisure!

The full agenda is here.  I have posted the first page of each presentation below along with the link to the presentation in the order of presentations, so enjoy. Cybersecurity is not only a topic filled with  fascinating research questions but also one of great practical importance for businesses and organization and their very security.

Link to Guenther's presentation.

Link to Burleson's presentation.

Link to Clark's presentation.

Link to my presentation.

Link to Devadas' presentation which was part of a panel.

Link to Lo's presentation.

Link to Getmansky Sherman's presentation.

Link to Solak's presentation.

Delay Tolerant Networks - When Transportation Trumps the Internet

It has been fabulous to be back in Sweden where I am continuing my third year appointment as a Visiting Professor at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg. I arrived in Europe on May 11. 

Being based in Europe for a couple of glorious weeks allows for some great conference chaining which I have been doing and have also been highlighting on this blog in several previous posts.

There has also been a North South theme to this visit since I have given talks at workshops and conferences, since my arrival, in Erice, Sicily (south), came back to Sweden (north), then ventured to Taormina, Sicily and  Catania, also in Sicily (south) and onwards to Chalkidiki,  Greece (south). Back in the north now in Gothenburg.

As a researcher and a very frequent flier, who also works on networks and their numerous and fascinating applications, including transportation and communications, practical, real-world  experiences reinforce my research and vice versa! Plus, you acquire great stories to share with your students in classes.

Before flying to Europe, we were finishing up a paper on Delay Tolerant Networks, and, in the meantime, we have also completed another one. This is a collaboration initiated by a doctoral student in engineering, who is from Colombia, and who is visiting my Co-PI on our National Science Foundation project, Network Innovation Through Choice, Professor Tilman Wolf of the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst. The doctoral student is Luis Marentes and he sat in on my SOM 825 course this past semester on Variational Inequalities, Networks, and Game Theory.

In the beautiful parts of southern Europe - I can't resist sharing some photos of Sicily and Greece where I spoke at below, there, nevertheless, were major issues with the Internet!  Even when it was up it might take as long as an hour to access an email message and, as for tweeting 140 characters, sometimes we waited for 24 hours, and the tweet was still not transferred.  But we were patient and the beauty and the caliber of the  conferences and people made up for the technology shortcomings. I will share a story at the end of this post.

Our work on Delay Tolerant Networks, is inspired, in part, by that of Dr. Alex "Sandy" Pentland of MIT, whom we have hosted at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass in our INFORMS Speaker Series, and whom I have interacted with on other occasions. I am a huge fan of Sandy's and was thrilled when he was ecleted to the National Academy of Engineering this year.

Pentland's paper, DakNet: Rethinking Connectivity in Developing Nations, published in Computer in 2004, speaks of connecting remote villages in India and Cambodia through a combination of wireless and asynchronous means.  

When I tell people that there are parts of the globe in which residents desperately need information that we take for granted and that which we access through the Internet but they lack digital connectivity because of market and pricing forces (including poverty) and can benefit from using transportation modes (from busses to mules - I am not kidding) to secure the information, I receive expressions of shock!

In our first paper, "Overcoming Economic Challenges of Internet Operators in Low Income Regions Through a Delay Tolerant Architecture with Mechanic Backhauls," Luis Marentes, Tilman Wolf, Anna Nagurney, Yezid Donosoa, and Harold Castro,  we study the following. Regions with low population densities and low income, which may be rural, are far behind in Internet access as compared to their urban counterparts. Economic unsustainable deployments have been suggested as one of the factors with high negative impact. Researchers using the Delay Tolerant Network Architecture (DTN) have established a less expensive alternative, but they do not provide guidelines on how to price the new possible services nor any indication as to operators’ profitability. These two points are the contributions of this paper. Based on a continuous pricing model, we show that projects using the DTN architecture have a positive net present value using real demand data.

In this paper, we also explore how far the use of this technology is going to help in attaining profitable deployments with real and delay tolerant services. Our findings indicate that although it is not possible to support the investment reported in a previous actual deployment, a great portion of the investment is actually covered by the predicted gross profit of our model. We hypothesize that the remaining value is affordable if service differentiation is enabled by means of a new architecture. Three components to test the hypothesis are introduced: (1) the pricing elements to form service level agreements, (2) a general overview of the architecture requirements, and (3) a novel pricing model. In this regard, our results show a positive effect of service differentiation which improves profits by 10% without any customer additional payment.

In our second paper, "Towards Pricing Mechanisms for Delay Tolerant Services," Luis Marentes, Tilman Wolf, Anna Nagurney, and Yezid Donoso, we again note that one of the applications of the Delay Tolerant Architecture (DTN) is rural networks. For this application researchers have argued benefits on lowering costs and overcoming challenging conditions under which, for instance, protocols such as TCP/IP cannot work because their underlying requisites are not satisfied. New responses are required in order to understand the true adoption opportunities of this technology. Constraints in service level agreements and viable alternative pricing schemes are some of the new issues that arise as a consequence of the particular operation mode. 

In this paper, we propose a novel model for pricing delay tolerant services, which adjusts prices to demand variability subject to constraints imposed by the DTN operation. With this model we also show how important parameters such as channel rental costs, cycle times of providers, and market sensitivities affect business opportunities of operators.

In both of these papers, the consumers respond to the average time of the delivery of the services, which could consist of a combination of communication and transport modes!

As for our journeys in southern Europe, we ended up, in Chalkidiki, Greece taking the ferry to the neighboring town of Marmara (transport) and back to seek a decent WiFi connection.

And we were successful. Decent WiFi was found at a restaurant at which we also had a fabulous meal - it was so good that I blew kisses to the cooks and then they surprised us with a tray of fresh cherries and exotic, delicious Greek desserts!

We then, the next day, explored another mode of transport to access the Internet - we walked rather than taking the ferry to Marmara and it took us about the same amount of time - plus the beach views were glorious. And for those news junkies there, we even found a small shop where we purchased the same day edition of The International New York Times, which was printed in Greece. The owner is British.

Facebook Data to the Rescue of Metcalfe's Law

The December 2013 issue of IEEE"s Computer magazine has as its theme: Computing Laws Revisited. Our hardcopy issue (my husband is a subscriber) arrived yesterday, on New Year's Eve, and, today, New Year's Day, I sat down to read the article, "Metcalfe's Law after 40 Years of Ethernet," written by none other than Bob Metcalfe, Ethernet's inventor, himself. The Ethernet is the physical transport level of today's Internet. On May 22, 2013, Ethernet industry leaders gathered at the Computer History Museum in California to celebrate its 40th birthday and to catch up on what has become a $100 billion industry (do I now have your attention?).

I have been interested in Metcalfe's Law since, as an Associate Editor of over a dozen journals, and a frequent reviewer of journal articles, as well as a Co-PI on a Future Internet Architecture NSF grant: Network Innovation Through Choice (which I most recently spoke on at the Network Frontiers Workshop at Northwestern University), I not only encounter related controversies but also write and review papers that touch upon this law.

I guess that Metcalfe must have been reading over my shoulder!

Now, back to a controversy: In 2006, Briscoe, Odlyzko (I do like some of his math models a lot), and Tilly published an article, "Metcalfe's Law is Wrong" in the IEEE Spectrum, which you can read online without a subscription. These authors described Metcalfe's Law as both "wrong" and "dangerous."

So, what is Metcalfe's law, you may be asking (for those not so much into hardware). As explained by Metcalfe himself in his very clear and erudite December Computer magazine article: The "law" bearing his name states that the value of a network grows as the square number of users: V= NxN. The law started as a high-concept Ethernet sales tool in the early 1980s and entered into the public discourse in the new millennium when Gilder "championed" Metcalfe's law in his book, "Telecosm: The World After Bandwidth Abundance," published in 2000.

During  a presentation to the 3Com sales force (Metcalfe cofounded this company in 1979), Metcalfe showed the figure below (thanks to his article in Computer magazine) to argue that if  a network is too small its cost exceeds its value, but if a network gets large enough to reach a critical mass, then the sky is the limit.

Valuation of Internet-based companies such as Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and others is clearly important and detractors have said that Metcalfe's law may be overvaluing such firms.

The main critique of Metcalfe's law, noted by Metcalfe, himself, was that Briscoe, Odlyzko, and Tilly countered that not all network connections are of equal value and that the growth in the value of a network is approximately Nxln(N) and not NxN as Metcalfe had stated.

Moreover, neither "law" had been validated empirically until Metcalfe did recently and reported the results in his article in the December issue of the IEEE Computer magazine.

And he used 10 years of real data from Facebook and fitted the data looking at N as a function of time. To estimate the growth of users and individual groups of friends, he first applied a sigmoid function (S-shaped adoption function). He then generalized it to what he calls a "netoid" function using the Python programming language. (It looks as though Metcalfe also thinks in code, which is cool.) He plotted Facebook annual revenue (as the value V) for the last 10 years and used a Python slider to the Metcalfe's function to "get a pretty good visual fit to this data" as he displayed in the figure below reported in Computer magazine.

Metcalfe also notes that a more elaborate model of network growth and value would involve using "nesting netoids." Fascinatingly, he observed that Facebook groups seem to be netoiding (a new verb) towards Dunbar's number, which is due to the anthropologist Robin Dunbar who theorized that humans have a cognitive limit on the number of people with whom they can maintain stable social relationships with this figure being about 150. And, since Facebook has about 1.06 billion users and 150 billion friend connections this implies  an average of 141 friends per user.

So, as we begin to celebrate the New 2014 Year, it is quite interesting that we are also marking technological advances that challenge and intrigue us in both theory and practice and that are still very much with us such as the Ethernet, which is now 40 years old!

There is also a great interview with Bob Metcalfe, thanks to Charles Severance of Computer magazine, which can be viewed below.

The 2013 Summer Edition of the Supernetwork Newsletter is Now Online

It has been a fabulous couple of months at the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management. We are pleased to report that the 2013 Summer edition of our newsletter, The Supernetwork Sentinel,  is now available online. It highlights the many professional activities of the Center's Associates.

In it, you will find find a summary of the AAAS Dynamics of Disasters Symposium that I organized and which took place in Boston, Massachusetts and highlights of contributing to a Dream Course on Engineered Systems at the University of Oklahoma and to a panel at The New York Times EnergyforTomorrow Conference in NYC that I spoke at. You will also find information on awards and other recognitions received by the Center Associates, who are based on 3 different continents,  and who provide a wide reach for our activities in research, education, and outreach on topics ranging from supply chains to innovations on the Internet to financial networks and even humanitarian logistics.

In the 2013 summer edition, we also have news on our latest publications and notable conference presentations around the globe.

Supernetworks are networks of networks and the associated methodologies and applications continue to grow.

All editions of The Supernetwork Sentinel  can be downloaded from The Virtual center for Supernetworks website.

Enjoy and thanks for your support!

Network Models in Economics and Finance and the Acropolis

On Thursday, I was flying from Gothenburg, Sweden to Athens, Greece via Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, our flight was delayed, due to the strike of the air traffic controllers in Athens. The KLM pilot ultimately decided to forge on since he had heard that the strike would be over about the same time as we were to land but we had extra fuel in case we had to circle. Our plane was about the 10th one to land that afternoon.

I was coming to Athens to take part in the Network Models in Economics and Finance Conference at which I was to give a plenary talk, which I did yesterday, despite the fact that the university (National Technical University of Athens) was also on strike.

My presentation was on Network Economics and the Internet.

The conference was wonderful although I missed the first day because I had to give a commencement speech in Sweden, There were speakers from Greece, Italy, Russia, and the US and it was nice to be at a conference with just single sessions (no parallel ones). Speakers were from operations research / management science, computer science, economics, mathematics, and finance.
Lunch and snacks were provided.

 

 Last night, we had the conference banquet at the new Acropolis Museum with a view of the Acropolis and the Parthenon. We watched as the sun set to see the Acropolis then lit up in all its glory. This was an unforgettable evening in which we talked about mathematics and creativity, research, and friendships -- absolutely fabulous.

I thank the organizers: Professors Panos M. Pardalos, Valeriy Kalyagin, and Themosticles Rassias for a conference that we will never forget!

This is my third trip to Athens (always involving conferences) and it is undoubtedly the best!

Network Economics and the Internet

In 1993, my first book, Network Economics: A Variational Inequality Approach, was published as the first volume of  the ACE series: Advances in Computational Economics. The second and revised edition of this book came out in 1999.  My 10th book, Networks Against Time, was just published by Springer.


Since the publication of my Network Economics book, there have been many synergies associated with the modeling of the Internet and other network systems, including decentralized transportation networks, with even the Braess paradox, which was identified in 1968,  being relevant also to the Internet.

What I find amazing, and actually quite exciting,  is that some of the language associated with the Internet is similar to that which we are encountering and using in supply chain networks -- from service providers to transport network providers, to start.

I have been involved, since last year, in a truly innovative and challenging project: funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled Collaborative Research: Network Innovation Through Choice. The investigators on this project are: Dr. Tilman Wolf (lead PI) and Dr. Anna Nagurney (Co-PI) - UMass Amherst; Dr. Jim Griffioen and Dr. Ken Calvert - University of Kentucky; Dr. Ilia Baldine - RENCI at UNC, and Dr. Rudra Dutta and Dr. George Rouskas - NCSU.

We have regular teleconferences during which we discuss our research and brainstorm and it is fascinating to be working with such top electrical and computer engineers and computer scientists. Together, we generate many good ideas and the discussions are always very stimulating. There are several doctoral students also involved in this multiyear project. I am supporting, through this grant, one doctoral student in Management Science at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass.

The project that we are working on we are calling ChoiceNet and we have two papers with all 7 of us as co-authors: our SIGCOMM paper, "Choice as a Principle in Network Architecture," and an invited paper, "ChoiceNet: Network Innovation Through Choice," that Dr. George Rouskas will be presenting in France next month at the Optical Network Design & Modeling Conference.

As we note in the latter paper, The Internet has been amazingly robust to changes in both technology and usage over the past three decades. A large reason for this success has been the fact that users are able to create and deploy a wide range of applications, devices, and services on end-systems around the edge of the network. In addition to enabling the Internet to support new uses that were not envisioned by its creators, this has also led to a vibrant economic environment for innovation at the application layer.
 
The many successful Internet companies that have arisen in the last two decades testify to the ability of a platform on which novel ideas can be developed, tested, and adopted to lead to value creation. Ironically, the same paradigm (i.e., the ability to create new functionality and let users choose winners and losers) is not presently supported inside the network. It is widely agreed that the current Internet architecture inadequately supports adaptation in the data and control planes. 

In the early days of the Internet, innovations were deployed in the core by consensus among a small community of researchers and operators. With today’s dramatically larger community, consensus is more difficult to achieve and innovation is for the most part limited to the edge. This limitation inhibits the development and deployment of new networking services, protocols, security designs, management frameworks, and other components that are essential to support the increasingly diverse systems, applications, and communication paradigms of the next-generation Internet.

We are hoping through a vision for the Internet to offer more choices and this entails the crucial economy plane. Users should not be stuck with contracts over extended time horizons and should be able to dynamically select service and transport network providers.

The underlying network economics issues from contracts to game theory models of competition from Cournot and Nash to Bertrand are very intriguing and we have been developing computable game theory models using variational inequality theory and projected dynamical systems theory. Drawing on some results in my first book we are also designing and constructing extensions and pushing the methodological foundations forward.

For more information on the NSF Future Internet Architecture (FIA) projects click here.

Conundrum -- Satellite Communication Resiliency, Haiti, and the Last Mile

The issues of communications, and associated coordination, along with logistics and the bottlenecks, have permeated the post-earthquake humanitarian relief efforts in Haiti. Ironically, and, in a strange way, propitiously, it turns out that Haiti's Internet connectivity is robust precisely because its telecommunications infrastructure is so underdeveloped. Specifically, as reported in the IEEE Spectrum Tech Talk, most Haitian ISPs connect to the Internet via satellite and are not dependent on the country's lone undersea fiber optic cable link, which was knocked out the during the quake. The challenge for engineers now is the proverbial last mile--getting local connections to satellites restored so NGOs can get online. What is needed, from a communication hardware perspective, is that additional capacity, in the form of bandwidth, be added for satellite communications.

As I had written in this blog early on during this crisis, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a branch of the United Nations, located in Geneva, Switzerland, is providing additional satellite communication capacity (as it has done in numerous disasters prior). Dr. Cosmas Zavazava, the Head of Emergency Communications at the ITU, spoke at the humanitarian logistics conference that I organized, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation. You can find his presentation here, along with many others, or access it directly below.


Our book, Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, discusses how to identify the most important nodes and links in networks from telecommunications networks to transportation, logistical (including humanitarian ones), and even financial networks.

The United States and western Europe depend heavily on their copper and fiber optic interconnections (which are physical) for phone, Internet, and cable TV. There may be a very ironic lesson here and a critically important one in terms of the resiliency and robustness of telecoomunication infrastructure.

Happy Birthday to the Internet!

CNN.com has a wonderful interview with Dr. Leonard Kleinrock. Dr. Kleinrock, a professor at UCLA, is sometimes referred to as a Father of the Internet and today marks the 40th anniversary or birthday of the message that he sent from the first node of the net at UCLA to Stanford. His interview illustrates his love of tinkering and his fascination with figuring out how things work but my favorite quote in the interview comes at the end of it and it is:

Life is one big puzzle for me in the positive sense. There are a lot of things to play with. And they pay me for it.

One can read more about Professor Kleinrock, who has received numerous awards, and those of us in operations research and engineering are also well aware of his numerous contributions to queuing theory, in this interesting article.