Supernetwork Center Associate Reunion at INFORMS San Francisco

Conferences at which you get a chance to see in person wonderful collaborators, colleagues, and former students are always my favorites and, of course, the venue is also important.

The 2014 INFORMS conference was fabulous and served as a great venue at which many of the Supernetwork Center Associates got together face to face. Although not everyone could be there, including Professor Dmytro Matsypura of the University of Sydney in Australia (a regular at this conference) and Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy, as well as Dr. Stavros Siokos, Sciens CEO of London, UK, Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria,  the representation by the supernetwork team was, nevertheless,  great! It was extra special that doctoral students could meet some of the more senior Center Associates, who are Full Professors or managers in industry.

Below I provide photos that will keep the wonderful memories alive of this terrific supernetwork team and this great conference.

We went to J&G's for dinner on Sunday and one of several of my colleagues, who were born in China,  remarked that this was the best Chinese food that they had had in the US and I agreed. Thanks to Professor Min Yu of the University of Portland for locating it and to Professor Patrick Qiang of Penn State Malvern  for being our navigator to the location.

Our supply chain network competition session that I organized generated good questions and we thank Professor Vladimir Boginski of the University of Florida for taking the group photo below and for inviting me to put together this session!

In the above photo top row are: Professors Min Yu, June Dong of SUNY Oswego, and Ke Ke of Central Washington University, with Isenberg School Management Science doctoral students Sara Saberi and Dong "Michelle" Li. In the front row Professors Patrick Qiang and Amir H. Masoumi of Manhattan College  are seated with me. All of the presentations delivered in this session are now posted on the supernetwork center website.

After our session it was time to celebrate the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter cum laude award at a very nice ceremony. It was great to see Professor Min Yu come to support the students. She had been a long-serving member of the chapter before receiving her PhD.

On Tuesday, we had a great turnout for the WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) awards lunch at which we enjoyed the delicious food (an amazing dessert) and the conversations.

It was special to speak with Center Associate Professor Jose M. Cruz of the University of Connecticut and Dr. Padma Ramanujam of SAS, both of whom received their PhDs with a concentration in Management Science from the Isenberg School at UMass. I was their very proud dissertation advisor.

Center Associate Professor Trisha Anderson of Texas Wesleyan University was also a presenter but could not stay for the full conference. She spoke at a session on supply chains that Professor Cruz organized and her co-author was Center Associate Professor Zugang "Leo" Liu, whose wife recently gave birth to a baby girl (so he was otherwise preoccupied).

It was also to have Doctoral Student Center Associate Sara Saberi present for the first time at an INFORMS conference. Sara spoke on our joint work with Professor Tilman Wolf on game theory and a service-oriented Internet.

Will be Blogging from San Francisco

I am almost packed for the San Francisco INFORMS Conference and am so looking forward to seeing several of my former doctoral students, two present doctoral students, who are presenting our joint research, as well as numerous colleagues and good friends from around the world!

While at the INFORMS conference I will also be blogging on the conference website and my first post has already been published.

This is actually the 4th INFORMS (formerly ORSA/TIMS) conference that I will be attending. The first one was with my doctoral dissertation advisor at Brown University, Professor Stella Dafermos, and we shared a room.

Looking forward to the WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Events #INFORMS2014

After teaching today and holding office hours I will be starting to pack for the INFORMS Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

Several of our doctoral students who are taking part in various colloquia are already flying out today.

I am looking forward to many aspects of this conference - the talks, the people, the special events, and the great venue of San Francisco! It will be a marvelous conference, I am sure. I will have two of my present doctoral students delivering our joint papers and one previous one. Plus, I expect to see at least 6 of my former PhD students there and friends from around the US and the globe!

One of my favorite series of events and sessions is organized by the INFORMS forum known as WORMS, which stands for Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences.  And the events are not for women only! In fact, I found out about some of the events from my former male doctoral students! The WORMS Awards luncheon, which takes place next Tuesday is sold out, since it is so popular, and I remind my students to purchase their tickets early. I posted photos from the WORMS lunch in Minneapolis last year here.  I  am delighted that the Isenberg School of Management Dean, Dr. Mark Fuller, has again provided support for this event!

Below, I have reprised a message that was sent out by the WORMS President, Dr. Susan Martonosi of Harvey Mudd College.  Of course, you don't need to be a WORMS member to attend all the events at our conference, but there are benefits to joining so you may wish to join. It's a great, supportive community!


Dear WORMS members,

On behalf of the WORMS officers, I would like to invite you to the various WORMS events next week at the Annual Meeting in San Francisco!

Sunday Nov 9, 6:15 - 7:15:  Business Meeting: Please come to hear about the exciting things we have done this year and share your ideas for the future of WORMS!  (Hilton Ballroom Level Continental 3)

Tuesday Nov 11, 11:00 - 12:30 : Panel Discussion: Academic Leadership     (TB59 - Hilton Golden Gate 3)

Tuesday Nov 11, 12:30 - 1:30 : Annual WORMS Luncheon (Sold out!)    We will be presenting the WORMS Award for the Advancement of Women!  (Hilton Lobby Level - Plaza A)

Tuesday Nov 11, 13:30 - 15:00 : Best of Women in OR/MS (TC59 - Hilton Golden Gate 3)
Hear talks on research published by women in top journals this year!  Speakers include Robin Dillon-Merrill, Nilay Noyan and Canan Ulu.

Tuesday Nov 11, 16:30 - 18:00 : Joint Session WORMS/JFIG/MIF: Speed Networking (TD14 - Ballroom Level Imperial B)
Bring your business cards; speed networking is back!  Find new research collaborations and industry connections.  If you would like to volunteer, please email me!

Tuesday Nov 11, 16:30 - 18:00 : Joint Session WORMS/MIF: Panel Discussion with Department Chairs: How to Recruit, Retain, and Support Women and Minority Students  (TD59 - Hilton Golden Gate 3)


We are looking forward to seeing you next week!

Best,
Susan

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Susan Martonosi
Associate Professor
Harvey Mudd College
Claremont CA
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Supply Chain Network Competition: Advances in Models, Methods, and Applications

Thanks to INFORMS for already putting up the program for the San Francisco INFORMS Conference.

I was asked by Professor Vladimir Boginski to organize a session as part of the Network Optimization cluster, which I did.

The title of the session that I organized is:  Supply Chain Network Competition: Advances in Models, Methods, and Applications.

There are 4 papers in this session with the first one being: Supply Chain Network Competition with Information Asymmetry in Quality and Minimum Quality Standards. This paper is a paper that I wrote with my doctoral student, Dong "Michelle" Li, and which was just recently published in the journal Computational Management Science, but with an expanded title.


The second paper is this session will be presented by Dr. Patrick Qiang. and is entitled:  The Closed-Loop Supply Chain Network with Competition and Design for Remanufactureability  This paper was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

The third paper will be presented by Professor Min Yu and is based on joint work  with our collaborator at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, Professor Jonas Gloden. The title is: Supply Chain Network Sustainability Under Competition and Frequencies of Economic Activities. This paper was also recently published in Computational Management Science with an expanded title.


The last paper in this session, Supply Chain Supernetwork Model with Suppliers' Risk Diversification,  will be given by Professor June Dong in collaboration with Professor Jun Ma.

We will also be presenting our latest research  on our NSF-funded Future Internet Architecture project at this conference, but on that Wednesday.

This INFORMS conference will be a wonderful venue to reconnect with many former doctoral students, collaborators, and colleagues from around the globe. And who can resist San Francisco!

More Evidence of Our Fragile Networks -- the Bay Bridge

The San Francisco Bay bridge is still closed, days after 5,000 pounds of steel collapsed from it last Tuesday, causing havoc for commuters, who have had to determine new routes of travel to work (and back to their homes). This is another example of the fragility of the transportation network infrastructure in the United States, and one of the major themes of our Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies book.

CNN.com has provided an update to this important story.

The Europeans "get it" and are applying the measure that Patrick Qiang and I developed to determine the importance of various nodes and links in critical infrastructure networks, including transportation networks, the Internet, electric power distribution and generation networks and even financial networks.

For example, the Nagurney and Qiang measure has been applied to determine the efficiency of transportation networks in Germany and the ranking, in terms of importance, of various highways. It has now been proposed as a powerful tool in evaluating a proposed addition to the Dublin, Ireland metro in a very interesting article written by John Walsh. The article is contained in a glossy publication in the October 2009 issue of ERCIM, which focuses on Green ICT. The issue is in pdf format and may take a while to download but it is certainly worth the wait. More information about the ERCIM organization can be found here.

Those links in networks (think: roads, bridges in urban transportation networks; electric power lines, communication cables and fiber optic links in telecommunication networks, and even manufacturing and distribution channels in supply chains, including those in vaccine and medical ones) that are identified as most important from a network efficiency/performance standpoint, should be best maintained and protected since their removal or disruption will have the biggest impact on the system. At the same time, one can ascertain what improvements via the measure that we have developed will have the greatest positive impact.

What is the U.S. waiting for? What matters more than the infrastructure that our society and economy depend upon?!