Ukraine on the Brink of Disaster and Why We Wrote to President Obama and Our Congressmen

Just over  year ago I took part in the Dynamics of Disasters AAAS Symposium in Boston that I had organized and which featured several of our superstars in the profession.

Who would have thought that, in a year, not only did we have the Boston Marathon bombing, but now we are witnessing at terrifying speed the arrival of Russian military troops in Crimea, Ukraine, the site of the Network Science conference, at which I was an invited speaker a few years ago. I even blogged about my great taxi driver, Igor, and the lack of security at the Simferopol airport, one of the sites of what I can only call an invasion of sovereign Ukraine, whose people have suffered over generations. Over the past several months they were demonstrating in Kiev and beyond when Yanukhovich refused to bring the country closer to the West and, specifically,  to the European Union.

In the height of irony or, should I say, perspicacity, the Boston Strong colors look like the Ukrainian flag, with brilliant blue on top, and yellow on the bottom, which I photographed and posted here.

So what is an academic to do when the freedom of  a country is at stake, its sovereignty, and the will of its people, and when international laws are outrightly violated?

Honestly, I was reminded of the movie, which I saw in a drivein one summer, as a child: The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming! and which I have written about.

As I have shared with my readers, my first language is Ukrainian, since I immigrated to the U.S., having been born in Canada. I do have a degree in Russian Language and Literature from Brown University (and 3 more in Applied Math, because I love Operations Research).

I have many Russian friends and I love the language, its literature, the ballet, art, and music and we share similar cuisines. I have been to St. Petersburg - magical!

I wrote about my heritage recently and we have written to President Obama as well as to our Congressmen (including Senators Ed  Markey and  Elizabeth Warren).

President Obama has started to speak out and our former great Senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry, who is now the Secretary of State is doing so as well.   Kerry is expected to arrive in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine,  soon.

I speak Russian - does this give Putin the right to invade the U.S.?

Even the Swedes, in one of my favorite cities on the planet, Gothenburg, where I will be very soon, are expected to support a Ukrainian demonstration for freedom.

I thank all the outstanding journalists who are covering the news from Ukraine. I have tried to personally thank them as well.  Special thanks to The Washington Post and to the BBC and CNN for expert coverage and numerous OpEd pieces in support of Ukraine and freedom-loving people everwhere.

And, would you believe, I was invited to speak recently at a conference in Moscow at the beginning of April, and I would have accepted this great invitation, but I am committed to speaking in Boston at the INFORMS Analytics Conference.

My husband wore the tie below to teach today with the Ukrainian flag and tryzub emblems for solidarity with Ukraine.

So Energized and Relieved -- Second Term for President Obama

My daughter is a college freshman who just voted in her first US Presidential Election.

The enthusiasm and energy and interest of college students and beyond in this election was immense and intense.

People stood for hours, even those who had been left homeless by Hurricane Sandy, some of whom had to make do with makeshift polling stations.

In my previous post,  I wrote that I am off to Canada -- to a conference this week.

Now, given the outcome, I am also eager to return with new hope for more positive change and to have us continue to move forward.

Yes, President Obama, as you said: "We've Got More Work to Do," and through inclusiveness, valuing diversity, recognizing that we must work together to mitigate the effects of climate change for this and future generations, caring for the less fortunate, and investing in science for discoveries and economic growth and our our future, we can, again, make the US the land of wonderful opportunities for all those who work so hard.

We can also be a world leader and example in terms of excellence in all dimensions -- from education to infrastructure to innovation and creativity and rewarding jobs and to peace on earth.

It is truly a great day for our nation.

I continue to get congratulations from other countries on the results of this election.

I am breathing a huge sigh of relief and am smiling from renewed energy and hope for our generation and for our children.

UMass Amherst Goes Green with a Permaculture Garden and Gets Top Votes in White House Campus Champions of Change Challenge

The post below is being updated on Monday, March 5, with the link on the good news noted in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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The votes are in and it looks as though UMass Amherst, which reached the finals of the White House College Campus Champions of Change, has garnered the greatest number of votes for a total of 59, 850 with the voting ending yesterday.

The results are in and the UMass Amherst Permaculture Initiative, led by Ryan Harb, should be congratulated.

The UMass Permaculture Initiative is a unique and cutting edge sustainability program that converts unproductive grass lawns on campus into ecological, socially responsible, and financially sustainable permaculture landscapes that are easy to replicate.

The top five vote getters will be invited to an event at the White House. They will also be featured by mtvU and MTV Act and be given the opportunity to host an episode of mtvU’s signature program, “The Dean’s List.”

UMass Amherst is in good company, followed by the University of Arkansas, Grinnell College, UCLA, and the University of Chicago.

UMass Amherst issued a nice press release on this challenge and even the Isenberg School highlighted some of its alums who were involved.

What also impressed me is that, among the student committee members, are several undergraduates who are majoring in my departmental majors of Finance and Operations Management!

Congrats to all involved -- wonderful to have such hard and important work recognized in such a significant way.

Risk Management and the National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security Announced

I am pleased to see that President Obama has announced a National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security, which is a well-written document that I will share with my students in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare course since our next topics will be the differences between commercial supply chains and humanitarian ones, followed by risk management and vulnerability.

According to a recent article in Transport Topics, "DHS, State Dept. Directed to Devise Plans to Guard Against Supply-Chain Disruptions," which appeared in the January 30, 2012 edition (I have the hardcopy version), both the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department have been directed to guard against supply chain disruptions. According to the article, Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security stated at a briefing at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, recently, that: We must continue to strengthen global supply chains to ensure that they operate effectively in time of crisis, recover quickly from disruptions and facilitate international trade and travel.

Indeed, resilient supply chains are essential to our global economy.

Capturing the associated risk in global supply chains is critical to this effort and our most recent work contains a quantitative framework based on generalized networks, physics principles, risk management, and optimization to capture the complexity of a challenging global supply chain --- the medical nuclear one.

Our paper, "Securing the Sustainability of Global Medical Nuclear Supply Chains Through Economic Cost Recovery, Risk Management, and Optimization," Anna Nagurney, Ladimer S. Nagurney, and Dong Li, can be downloaded from the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website. In it, we model the time-decay of radioisotopes used in medical diagnostic procedures, and also the risk associated with such highly perishable and hazardous, critical products.

This is the second study that we have produced on medical nuclear supply chains.

Our first,"Medical Nuclear Supply Chain Design: A Tractable Network Model and Computational Approach," Anna Nagurney and Ladimer S. Nagurney, focused on the design of such supply chain networks, whereas our most recent one focuses on optimizing the operations and also considers the transition from highly enriched uranium targets to low enriched ones.

We co-authored an Op-Ed on this medical nuclear supply chain topic, Viewpoint: Passage of American Medical Isotope Production Act of 2011 will help ensure U.S. nuclear medicine supply chain, that appeared in the Sunday Republican - July 10, 2011.

What I Liked About President Obama's Speech Last Night

We listened to President Obama's speech last night.

What resonated with me especially is how he emphasized how each child in America deserves a great school and how he would work on making sure that the school buildings are in good shape -- he noted that 35,000 schools will be enhanced in the US, and the schools will be filled with teachers (some of whom would be hired back after being laid off). Great education is not just about mortar and buildings but also about the people that work and learn therein.

I appreciated his references to President Abraham Lincoln, in establishing the National Academy of Sciences and in bringing about the transcontinental railroad, although it was completed after his death.

I found more on the history of the National Academy of Sciences and found it quite interesting that, according to the NAS website:

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) was signed into being by President Abraham Lincoln on March 3, 1863. As mandated in its Act of Incorporation, the Academy has, since 1863, served to "investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art" whenever called upon to do so by any department of the government.

Note the "art" part!

I was also glad to hear about his emphasis on investing in infrastructure (clearly schools are also a critical infrastructure), and in fixing our roads and transportation networks, in general. He even mentioned congestion, a topic, which we had discussed in my transportation & logistics class yesterday morning.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the Jobs Act that he forcefully promoted last night.

I do believe that investing in the production/manufacturing of both goods and services in the US and creating opportunities for all those who are willing to give their best can again make the US great again. At the same time, let's not ignore our environment and the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, and the quality of where we live and work (and even play).

President Obama was right to emphasize the importance of health, safety, and security and the role that government plays in all these dimensions but we, as individuals, and, in groups, can also contribute.

A Vision for the Nation Drawn from a Brilliant University Model

My suitcase is packed and I will soon be leaving for Washington DC where I will be speaking on an invited panel tomorrow morning at the Transportation Research Board meeting.

Tonight I will be watching President Obama's State of the Union speech in DC.

There is great anticipation surrounding his speech and newspapers and bloggers are writing about what they believe that the citizens need to hear -- clearly the country is starving for energizing, positive leadership that will coalesce the strengths and work ethic of its people and that will build upon collaboration and creativity. Competitiveness is being highlighted as well but with an entirely different slant.

David Brooks, in his OpEd piece, "A Talent Magnet," in today's New York Times, presents a brilliant analogy between government and a university and gives guidance to the leadership of our country. In his OpEd, he writes: In this century, economic competition between countries is less like the competition between armies or sports teams (with hermetically sealed units bashing or racing against each other). It’s more like the competition between elite universities, who vie for prestige in a networked search for knowledge. It’s less: “We will crush you with our efficiency and might.” It’s more: “We have the best talent and the best values, so if you want to make the most of your own capacities, you’ll come join us.”

The new sort of competition is all about charisma. It’s about gathering talent in one spot (in the information economy, geography matters more than ever because people are most creative when they collaborate face to face). This concentration of talent then attracts more talent, which creates more collaboration, which multiplies everybody’s skills, which attracts more talent and so on.

The nation with the most diverse creative hot spots will dominate the century.

He then argues that the President of our nation is like the President of a University (coincidentally, UMass just named its new President, Dr. Robert L. Caret) and although the President lives in the "big house" it is the professors, the researchers, the tutors, the coaches and the students that are the real guts of a university. They handle the substance of what gets done. The administrators play vital but secondary roles. They build the settings. They raise money. They recruit and do marketing. They help students who are stumbling.

The administrators couldn’t possibly understand or control the work in the physics or history departments. They just try to gather talent, set guidelines and create an atmosphere where brilliance can happen.

This is what outstanding administrators do, I might add, and we certainly need such talented individuals since incompetent, negative ones can seriously damage, impair, and even destroy an organization. Leaders are desperately needed who can create an environment in which talent is nurtured, supported, and in which laudatory efforts and successes are rewarded and recognized (sometimes a public compliment is worth more than a few dollars in one's paycheck and why is it difficult for some managers to do this?!).

So it is with government in an innovation economy. Entrepreneurs, corporate executives, line workers and store managers handle the substance of the economy. Government tries to nurture settings where brilliance can happen.

Yesterday, a female undergraduate student, who is an Operations Management major, came to my office to chat and we spoke for about an hour and a half. She and I concurred that the time just flew by (but she had to go to a class and I had to go teach a class). We spoke about her family, her courses, her major and dreams, and about the course that she took from me last semester. She told me how she is looking at the world in a different way because of my course (Transportation & Logistics). This was such a compliment and I couldn't be prouder of my students -- from the projects that they do to the jobs that they aspire to obtain to the positive role models that they are for the younger students.

The United States, like our universities, will succeed through administration in which collaboration in a supportive environment takes place so that everyone can be appreciated, can thrive, and can achieve one's potential. The output will then exceed the sum of its parts through knowledge creation. (Interestingly, last year, one of my former doctoral students, who is now a Professor, Dr. Patrick Qiang, and I presented a paper on knowledge collaboration networks across disciplines at the SBP 2010 conference, which was published in its Proceedings volume!)

Free iphone app for the Gulf rescue of oiled birds and animals

After listening to the President's speech on the biggest oil disaster in US history with immense negative environmental and economic consequences and even psychological ones, I was heartened to hear that even thousands of miles away positive, constructive action was being taken through an iphone app that was developed by my colleagues in computer science, public policy, ecology and biology at UMass Amherst. The app enables the rescue of those most helpless and unfortunate and that is the birds and animals that are being covered in the oil spreading in the Gulf of Mexico.

The UMass Amherst researchers hope that the app, called MoGO, will draw on the large network of “citizen scientists” who are as heartbroken as they are to witness the disaster for marine life and who are actively looking for ways to help save wildlife along the 14,000 miles of northern Gulf coastline.

The new app allows anyone who finds an oiled animal to be linked automatically by the phone to the Wildlife Hotline and to provide photos of the stranded animal and its GPS location coordinates to a database here on campus.

Whether the project succeeds rests on how well the word gets out to the public in the Gulf region, the researchers note, so I am trying to do my part to disseminate this simple but powerful technical innovation to harness citizen scientists in saving the affected fauna. Any person, on land or at sea, wishing to use the free app for their iPhone can go to www.savegulfwildlife.org for more information.

According to the UMass press release:

The app takes advantage of “mobile crowdsourcing,” that is, the power of smart personal mobile devices to provide thousands of eyes and ears on the ground. Professor Ganesan who is a computer scientist at UMass Amherst and his research group designed a software framework called “mCrowd,” which simplifies the usual weeks- to months-long process of developing a new mobile crowdsourcing app. “It provides easy-to-use templates that can be tailored to a new application,” Ganesan explains. His mCrowd technology allowed the UMass Amherst team to create the MoGO app and infrastructure in a little more than a week.

A Classmate of Obama's and the Serendipity of Travel

One never knows the experiences that await nor the interesting people one might meet while traveling. As an academic, the majority of my travel entails speaking engagements, whether at workshops or conferences, or in seminar settings. I also do my fair share of travel to serve on panels, including government panels, and give short courses.

My most recent trip, which I have written several posts on, was to Honolulu, Hawaii, to speak at the Workshop on Social Theory and Social Computing. The workshop organizer, Dr. Sun-ki Chai, who is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii, told me at the workshop banquet at a Korean restaurant in Honolulu, that he was a classmate of President Obama's at the Punahou School and that they both graduated together as the class of 1979 (interestingly, they were also classmates earlier in their elementary school). How often does one meet an academic colleague who can say that he went to school and graduated with the President of the US?!

Obama went on to Occidental College, and then transfered to Columbia University; afterwards he received his law degree from Harvard. Dr. Sun-ki Chai, on the other hand, went on to Stanford, where he received 3 degrees, in Mathematical Sciences (a Bachelor's), Computer Science (a Master's), and in Political Science (the PhD).

The Punahou School, which goes from grades K-12, is the largest independent, co-educational school in the US. Given the kind of intellectual leaders that it has graduated, it deserves a round of applause.