Very Exciting Talks in Our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series this Spring from Knowledge Networks to Machine Learning, and Smart Cities and Analytics

One of the favorite aspects of being the Faculty Advisor to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter (and since I have had this role since 2004, I must really enjoy it) is helping the students organize the Speaker Series each semester.  There is a lot of planning that goes into this, as well as some serendipity. It is always wonderful to have speakers even reach out to us because they want to speak in our Series. Hosting speakers requires excellent logistics, attention to details, and warm hospitality because one wants to create a pleasant experience for all.

This semester has been extra exciting since we are now holding the talks in our new $62million Business Innovation Hub of the Isenberg School, which was opened "for business" in late January 2019.

Thus far, this semester, we have had the pleasure of hosting two speakers, Professor Aurora Liu of the Isenberg School, who spoke on February 1, and Professor Peter Haas of the UMass Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences, who spoke this past Friday.

The posters for their fabulous talks are below.

 

Next month we will be hosting two speakers, which we are also very excited about: Dr. Jurij Paraszczak and Dr. Thiago Serra. The posters announcing their talks are below.

Interestingly, all of our speakers this semester have had industrial experience - Dr. Liu was a management consultant focusing on mergers and acquisitions in pharma earlier in her career; Dr. Haas spent over 30 years at IBM and is both an INFORMS Fellow and an ACM Fellow (we believe he is the only individual to have earned this two major accolades). Dr. Jurij Paraszczak, is also a long-time IBMer, and Dr. Thiago Serra is now at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Cambridge, MA, before he joins the faculty of Bucknell University in the Fall 2019!

Both speakers, to-date, have emphasized networks and graphs (near and dear to my heart) and the solution of very large-scale problems on Big Data, including dynamic Twitter data.  They have attracted audiences from the Isenberg School of Engineering, the UMass Amherst College of Engineering, as well as the College of Computer and Information Sciences. The talks have demonstrated the need for the integration of a variety of methodological tools (helpful, if your team and co-authors have such skill sets) from probability and statistics, to graph analytics, optimization, network analysis and centrality measures, algorithm development, including for machine learning, and even stochastic dynamical systems (loved that part, too)!

Many thanks to the Chapter President, Katerina Deliali, for expertly constructing the above posters and introducing the speakers. Also, thanks to our amazing Chapter Webmaster, Haris Sipetas, who so promptly posts writeups and photos after the speakers' visits.

Plus, please visit the Chapter's Youtube channel, where interviews with our great speakers are posted - more coming soon!

And I can't resist also sharing with you a few photos from our first two talks!

Below are photos from Professor Aurora's talk and lunch afterwards.

 And below are a few photos from Professor Haas's presentation and lunch afterwards.

Of course, as is our tradition, we always share desserts!

Knowledge networks and Cyber security

Last week the Computer Science Department at UMass Amherst hosted a national meeting on Cyber security. UMass Amherst was selected as the site for this meeting by the Institute for Information Protection (I3P.org), which is a consortium of leading universities, national laboratories, the Department of Homeland Security, and nonprofit organizations.

More information about the two day meeting is available here.

The presentation that I prepared for this meeting was entitled: Identification of Vulnerabilities in Fragile Network Systems: Transportation Networks, the Internet, Financial Networks, and Electric Power.

The conference brought together 40 researchers for presentations, brainstorming sessions, business and research discussions, as well as social events, including a lovely dinner at the Amherst Women's Club (and for some of my colleagues in engineering and computer science this was the first time that they were in that beautiful building). I had the pleasure of meeting some truly brilliant and extremely nice representatives of this consortium from Dartmouth, CUNY, the University of Virginia, IUPUI, Idaho, and the Department of Homeland Security.

In this impressive group were also researchers whose work I had been citing and whose work Patrick Qiang and I reference in our Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World book! I could not resist a photo op!

I had become very interested in cyber security while researching the book, Supernetworks: Decision-Making for the Information Age, which I co-authored with June Dong. Our supernetwork team was then selected as one of the nine teams in the US to take part in the National Science Foundation program, Management of Knowledge Intensive Dynamic Systems. The research that we conducted under this project is now being used in many fascinating areas, including cyber trust research. I am pleased to share with you the link to our most recent paper on knowledge networks, which is co-authored with Patrick Qiang. The paper, A Knowledge Collaboration Network Model Across Disciplines, will be presented at a conference at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

Cyber security research spans different disciplines, and it is extremely important, fascinating, and timely. It is an honor to be included in this truly innovative group.