Advances in Social Computing

I am back from the International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction, SBP 2010, that took place at NIH (the National Institutes of Health) in Bethesda, Maryland. Although my shuttle van from Bethesda to the Baltimore airport had a flat tire on the busy highway, plus my hotel room had to be switched twice due to excessive noise and a group of strangers trying to enter my room late at night (what is travel without adventures), the conference was a great success. I have the best souvenir from the conference (in addition to the wonderful conversations that I had and great talks that I attended plus new people that I met) and that is the handsomely edited conference proceedings.

The conferees were given the proceedings volume, Advances in Social Computing, which was just released by Springer and was edited by Dr. Sun-Ki Chai, Dr. John Salerno, and Dr. Patricia Mabry of NIH, who was the conference chair. Dr. Patrick Qiang and I gave a tutorial on Fragile Networks immediately preceding the conference on Monday and today Dr. Qiang presented our paper, A Knowledge Collaboration Network Model Across Disciplines, which is published in the proceedings volume. We had excellent questions after the presentation (always a good sign), which we could answer (this is also a plus). We received a great compliment when one of the conferees (an academic from George Mason University) came up to us afterwards and said that he came to the conference explicitly to hear our talk.

The campus of NIH is gorgeous with a lot of trees and blooming flowers. Our conference took place in the Natcher Building, Room 45, and there were no parallel sessions, so there was a lot of community building.

What could be better than very smart people from many different disciplines getting together to talk about very important problems! The range of papers (on topics from childhood obesity to prevention of epidemics to inappropriate emergency department utilization to syndromic surveillance to information overload and viral marketing, to highlight just a few) in Advances in Social Computing certainly reflects this!

Supply Chain Disruptions and New Book

In the post below, I noted that I have organized an invited session, which will take place this Monday, at the Math Programming Symposium in Chicago. In the session, we have a presentation on supply chain risk management and vulnerability analysis, joint with Professor Patrick Qiang of Penn State University in Malvern, and Professor June Dong of SUNY Oswego. The paper that we are presenting on this topic will appear in a new book, out shortly, entitled Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability, which is edited by Professors Teresa Wu and Jennifer Blackhurst. If you click here, you will also find the table of contents, which includes our chapter, and the chapter by another Virtual Center for Supernetworks Associate, Professor Jose M. Cruz of UCONN at Storrs, who contributed a chapter on network relationships. We congratulate Professors Wu and Blackhurst on the completion of this volume!

Here is the preprint of our supply chain risk paper, which captures uncertainty associated with production costs, as well as distribution and transportation costs in multitiered supply chain networks, in which the individual behavior of the decision-makers is modeled, along with the prices that the consumers are willing to pay for the product in the case of random demands. In addition, we define robustness in this setting and provide a supply chain network performance measure.

An expansion of this chapter, with additional motivation and case examples, appears in our book, Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, where we also model network systems and their vulnerability from transportation networks to the Internet, electric power supply chains, and even financial networks! In addition, we demonstrate, how through network integration, one may identify a priori, any possible synergies, which can greatly assist in the evaluation of potential mergers and/or acquisitions.

The Fragile Networks book is published

We are delighted to announce that the new book, Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, has arrived. In the above photo we are holding the first of two copies that we, as authors, received. It's always a very exciting moment to see the book that has been worked on for a long, intensive period of time. The feeling is almost like holding a newborn child in one's arms. The official release date, according to the publisher, John Wiley & Sons, was June 2009, and the book is now out, right on schedule!

The book is a culmination of several years of research and provides a unified treatment of the vulnerabilities that exist in real-world network systems, along with tools to identify synergies for mergers and acquisitions. The book consists of three parts: Part I focuses on the network fundamentals, efficiency measurement, and vulnerability analysis. Part II discusses applications ranging from transportation networks and supply chains to electric power generation and distribution networks, the Internet, and even financial networks. It also examines the efficiency changes and the associated cost increments after network components are eliminated or partially damaged. Part III provides models and analyses for assessing mergers and acquisitions, network integration, and associated synergies.

According to the publisher, Fragile Networks, with its numerous network examples and real-world applications, is an excellent book for courses in network science, transportation science, operations management, and financial networks. It is also a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners in the areas of applied mathematics, computer science, operations research, management science, finance and economics, as well as industrial, systems, and civil engineering. Additional information about the book is available here.

My co-author, Dr. Patrick Qiang, just happened to be wearing his Isenberg School of Management t-shirt when our copies arrived on June 17, 2009. Colleagues have commented from as far away as Italy that the cover of the Fragile Networks book looks "stunning."

We thank the editors and the publication assistants at Wiley for all of their help during the writing and production of this book! Needless to say, given the deterioration in our critical infrastructure and the opportunities that now are being made possible because of President Obama's stimulus package, the book can assist in wise and appropriate investment decision-making for the nation's (and the world's) network systems.