Proud to Have Had Our Work Presented at the Disaster Risk Reduction Conference in Kyoto, Japan

Last week, my collaborator, Professor Myroslava Kushnir of the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv, presented our paper, "Social Network Analysis of Civilian Support Networks for the Ukrainian Military," at the The 10th IFIP WG5.15 Conference on Information Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction (itdrr) in Kyoto, Japan: https://lnkd.in/eAu3_qyN. 

The paper will be published in the conference proceedings. Myroslava was a Virtual Scholar in the outstanding global partnership between the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE),  thanks to the UMass Amherst Office of Global Affairs and the Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst.  I have been working with Myroslava for over two years now and it has been a pleasure to collaborate with her.

Myroslava, in the above photo, is standing with Professor Renata Konrad of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), who presented a poster at this conference. Our collaboration with Professor Konrad produced a paper that was published in the ISCRAM, Münster, Germany, 2024 Proceedings: https://lnkd.in/eFkZ94nB

Myroslava very much enjoyed the conference as well as being in Japan. I have been to both Tokyo and Yokahama for conferences and had extraordinary experiences there and wonderful memories.

Myroslava returned safely back to the Ukrainian Catholic University, where she teaches. I would have loved to have gone to this conference in Kyoto but, with my teaching schedule and upcoming INFORMS conference in Atlanta (next week), I could not make it. I am very proud and happy that she went, after traveling a great distance,  and presented our paper. Thanks also to the reviewers of our paper for their helpful comments and suggestions!

World Congress on Global Optimization in France and a Special Surprise

I returned last evening from Europe, having spent the past three weeks at conferences and transit points between. During this period I had the pleasure of being in 8 different countries. I delivered 2 conference presentations (in Dublin and in Kalamata, Greece), 1 tutorial (in Dublin), spoke on 2 panels (also in Dublin), presented at IBM Dublin, and also gave a plenary talk at the World Congress on Global Optimization (WCGO) in Metz, France. I blogged about the EURO 2019 Conference in Dublin and also about the Dynamics of Disasters conference that I had co-organized in Kalamata (yes, like the olives).

I thoroughly enjoyed all these conferences from the large, with over 2,000 delegates, EURO Dublin conference to the smaller Dynamics of Disasters conference and the mid-sized WCGO.

WCGO began with an opening remarks. The timetable for the conference can be downloaded here.

The plenary talk that I gave at  the WCGO was in the Constantin Caratheodory Prize session. This year I was tremendously honored and humbled and surprised to be the recipient of the 2019 Constantin Caratheodory Prize, along with Professor Anatoly Zhigljavsky of Cardiff University in Wales. More information about the prize and the previous recipients of this prize can be found on the International Society of Global Optimization website. As I said in my acceptance speech, I am standing on the shoulders of giants. I am very grateful to the Chair of the Prize Committee, Distinguished University Professor Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida (and former recipient of this and many other prizes), and to all the committee members for this truly distinctive honor. In the photo below, I am standing with, from l-r: Professor Yaroslav Sergeyev, a member of the prize committee, Professor Zhigljavsky, and Professor Panos M. Pardalos. Professor Sergeyev is also President of the International Society of Global Optimization.

A nice article on the prize was published by UMass Amherst - thank you! I very much appreciate the congratulatory messages that I have been receiving from faculty and staff  at my university and many other faculty and even former students from around the globe!

I have posted my plenary talk because it is on a very timely topic and on research conducted with one of my doctoral students, Deniz Besik, and other collaborators.

The WCGO was an intellectual (and social) feast with plenary talks given by renowned researchers, beginning on the first day with a breathtaking plenary by Pardalos on networks and brain research with applications to epilepsy and Parkinson's,  to a very dynamic, fascinating last day plenary by Professor Sergiy Butenko of Texas A&M University. Butenko, who is the Editor of the Journal of Global Optimization, spoke on his unifying framework for network analysis and cliques with applications ranging from social networks to material science! To have the opportunity to listen to these and such plenary speakers as Professor Ben-Tal of Israel, Professor Immmanuel Bomze of Austria (who is also the President of EURO and I had had the pleasure of seeing him at EURO Dublin), Professor Fukushima of Japan, and Professor Zhigljavsky of the UK, was simply fabulous!

Below I have posted a few photos from the talks of several of the plenary speakers.

Thanks to the organizers for taking the group photo of all the delegates below - a very happy group, I must say!

It was wonderful to have joint coffee breaks, delicious lunches served us, and a truly exceptional banquet, at which I had so much fun, I woke up twice the night afterwards laughing because of the stories and jokes exchanged.

I met researchers from so many different countries at WCGO, including: Botswana, Benin, Algeria, Israel, Morocco, Iran, Italy, Germany, Ireland, the UK, USA, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, India, Japan, among others, and even Kazakhstan! I had to take the group photo at the banquet with researchers from that country and a friend - so many women, which was great and even a rector of a university there!

It was also a delight to see Professor Christine Shoemaker, formerly of Cornell University, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, who is now a faculty member in Singapore, at WCGO.

This was truly a World Congress on Global Optimization and I thank the organizers for an outstanding experience with new friendships made, and new research ideas generated. As a colleague from Germany said to me: this was a conference that we enjoyed not only great scientific exchanges but we also met wonderful new colleagues!

And, at the onset of the conference in France, the US women's soccer team won the World Cup - simply perfect!

Big Bang Theory in Berlin

I am attending a huge physics conference - about 6,000 participants in Berlin, Germany and am here since I was invited by Professor Scholl who organized this conference.

Professor Scholl heard me speak at a workshop on Energy and Complex Networks last summer in Erice, Sicily and extended the kind invitation.

I have enjoyed the talks very much since there are quite a few talks on network problems.

Today was the first full day of presentations and it began with an excellent presentation by Dr. Dirk Helbing from ETH Zurich. He spoke on A Planetary Nervous System to Understand and Measure Our Society. I had last seen Dirk two Septembers ago at a terrific Risk Management Workshop in Zurich, Switzerland, at which we both spoke.

Dirk recorded his presentation this morning and said that it should be posted on Youtube in about 2 weeks.

At the end of the day I immensely enjoyed Dr. Duncan Watts' presentation: Computational Social Science: Exciting Progress and Future Challenges.

The talks here are very interdsciplinary, which I like very much. For example, Watts of small world fame, is a sociologist, who received his PhD from Cornell, and was at Columbia but is now with Microsoft in NYC.

His talk had two parts: the first focused on Twitter and the kind of analyses that he has been doing of rare events - messages that go viral. It was fascinating to learn that about 93% of Twitter posts never get retweeted even once. Those who get retweeted 100 times or more are a small fraction of tweets. He analyzed the network structure of such tweets, which are rare events, and require a huge sample for statistical purposes. He found that some viral tweets have a broadcast structure with the media playing a very important role. He said that if you want your message to spread write an OpEd and get it published in The New York Times. Of course, he noted that Justin Bieber and Katy Perry have 15 million followers so, in effect, that act as broadcasters, very often of images and videos (some of themselves).

In the second part of his presentation he spoke on Crisis Mapping, a project that he has worked on with the United Nations and also using Mechanical Turk.  This really interested me since I am teaching a course on Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare. He was conducting research to map tweets during a disaster for the United Nations to get information about the disaster. He compared the information gleaned during a disaster versus using the same data but having individuals working in groups using Mechanical Turk. He found some unexpected results in that the larger the group the answers were not necessarily better.

Many of the researchers at this conference are interested in socio-economic phenomena and associated problems. I appreciate the methodologies that are being used and the scope of issues that physicists and the like are tackling.

Tomorrow morning I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Luis Bettencourt of the Santa Fe Institute when he gives his invited talk on cities.

I will be speaking Wednesday morning.

It has been wonderful spending my spring break at this great conference in stately Berlin!

Building Supply Chain Relationships Through Game Theory and Social Networks

I was contacted by a journalist recently from "Down Under" who was writing an article for manufacturing executives to introduce game theory. He had read my blogpost on sustainable fashion supply chains and game theory and  was interested in the following:

Specifically, there's one thing I'd like your expertise on: So many people think "using game theory" in negotiations is simply a matter of being as hard-nosed as you can to get the best deal. And yes, sometimes that's the route to go. 

But how would you advise manufacturers to use game theory in supply chain negotiations if they're genuinely interested in a long-term relationship with a supplier? Is it okay to leave some value on the table now if you're fairly sure it will pay off later?

I was very impressed that this journalist had realized that elationships are extremely important in supply chains (and, I might add, also in financial networks -- just think of Canada vs. the US in terms of the financial crisis of 2008 and how banks handled transactions with customers).

Two papers of ours address the integration of social networks with supply chain networks:

Dynamic Supernetworks for the Integration of Social Networks and Supply Chains with Electronic Commerce: Modeling and Analysis of Buyer-Seller Relationships with Computations, Tina Wakolbinger and Anna Nagurney, Netnomics 6: (2004) pp 153-185.
http://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/articles/socnetsupply.pdf
and
Financial Engineering of the Integration of Global Supply Chain Networks and Social Networks with Risk Management, Jose M. Cruz, Anna Nagurney, and Tina Wakolbinger, Naval Research Logistics 53: (2006) pp 674-696.
http://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/articles/intsocsup.pdf

In these game theory supply chain studies we capture the relationship production cost associated with different agents (say, manufacturers and retailers) who are interacting,  the value of their relationships, as well as the risk incurred that is associated with transactions, with the latter depending on the relationship levels. For example, if the relationship level is high (that is, the relationship is strong) then the risk associated with the transaction would be lower. Thus, firms, by investing in relationships may lower their transaction costs as well as the risks.

And, as the journalist surmised, there is an underlying dynamics to such interactions between and among the various decision-makers in a supply chain.

Through our game theory math modeling and associated algorithms and computations we can trace the evolution of the relationships and product flows along with the incurred profits until a Nash equilibrium is achieved, which gives us the  equilibrium (optimal) product flows and relationship levels.

Dr. Jose Cruz, my co-author and former doctoral student at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, has also assessed the vulnerability of supply chains based on our related work on relationships and supply chains:
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-84882-634-2_7

And, since I cannot resist, and the query and discussion arose because of our game theory work on sustainability, UConn, where Professor Jose Cruz teaches at the Business School, was named the #1 Coolest School by the Sierra Club -- quite amazing (UMass Amherst was #27 on the list). Some related work of his on sustainability, game theory, and dynamics of supply chains is:
 Dynamics of Supply Chain Networks with Corporate Social Responsibility through Integrated Environmental Decision-making
Jose M. Cruz,  European Journal of Operational Research 184: (2008) pp 1005-1031.

So Cool to Have Our NSF-Sponsored Research Cited in Granted Patents

Published research and scholarship can be recognized in different ways -- through subsequent citations, the awards and recognitions that may follow, through applications and use in the real world, and through the inspiration of innovations as exemplified through patents.

I have never personally applied for a patent but, had I stayed in industry, I am sure that, by now, I would have.

However, today, while actually digging further into the background on a very provocative article, "Troves of Personal Data, Forbidden to Researchers," by John Markoff  in yesterday's New York Times, in which names of several colleagues that I know quite well:, Bernardo Huberman of HP, Barabasi of Northeastern, Hal Varian, now of Google, and Alex Pentland of MIT's Media Lab, I came upon some recently granted patents.

The inventor of these patents is Dr. Daniel Palestrant. He is an MD so I defer to him and call him Dr. and he is also an entrepreneur as the founder of Sermo and Par80. The three patents that he has been granted cite two papers that I co-authored (all with females) on an earlier National Science Foundation grant: Decentralized  Decision Making in Complex Network Systems. My Co-PIs on this grant were June Dong and Pat Mokhtarian. The grant also supported the research of my then doctoral student, Tina Wakolbinger.

Our papers that are cited in the 3 patents are:

Multicriteria network equilibrium modeling with variable weights for decision-making in the Information Age with applications to telecommuting and teleshopping (with J. Dong and P. L. Mokhtarian) (2002), Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 26, 1629-1650 

and

Dynamic supernetworks for the integration of social networks and supply chains with electronic commerce: Modeling and analysis of buyer-seller relationships with computations (with T. Wakolbinger) (2004), Netnomics, 6, 153-185.

And, Dr. Palestrant also cites the work of Varian and Barabasi in these patents, as well as several others who have contributed to network science!

The INFORMS Speakers Program and Social and Professional Networking

Wow -- now that was a great talk! I have heard such a comment after numerous speaker presentations organized through our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. Many, from faculty to students to practitioners, over the years, have commented that these talks, which we schedule on Fridays, with lunch and further discussions to follow, were the highlights of their week.

In organizing a semester's worth of talks, we looked for speakers who could inform and educate a wide audience on timely topics of interest to the operations research / management science community.

We also availed ourselves of the INFORMS Speakers Program and I personally have greatly enjoyed being a speaker in this program, and have given talks in Dallas, Pittsburgh, and other locations, as a result of it. I especially enjoyed the mix of the audience participants from various industries and universities and the wonderful questions and hospitality of the INFORMS Regional and Student Chapters that have been my hosts. My professional and social networks have also grown from participation in this valuable program.

This year I have the pleasure of chairing the INFORMS Speakers Program Committee, with committee members: Dr. Tim Lowe of the University of Iowa and Dr. Les Servi of MITRE. We are working on enhancing this program by adding new speakers and expanding the program geographically and making it more diverse. We also hope to include more video resources and to enable speakers to edit their profiles.

Do stay tuned as we expand this valuable and exciting resource. The next issue of OR/MS Today coming out in August will include a profile of the INFORMS Speakers Program and some of the advantages of using a speaker through the program.

As for tips on how to run a successful speakers series, read more here.

I leave you with some photos above of several distinguished speakers who have graced our Speaker Series at UMass Amherst who are part of the INFORMS Speakers Program. I am sure that you can recognize them but, just to make sure, the above photos are of the visits of Professor Richard Larson of MIT, of Professor John Birge of the University of Chicago, and of Professor Sheldon Jacobson of the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign.

Thanks to all the speakers in our profession who take the time out of their very busy schedules to come and speak on our campuses and at other sites -- from corporations and beyond!

Social Networking and a Great INFORMS Student Chapter

This month's INFORMS blog challenge is on O.R. and Social Networking and this post is my contribution.

I believe that some of the best educational experiences take place outside of the classroom, and that having students interact with luminaries in the field as well as with one another, with faculty, and with practitioners greatly enhances their learning and knowledge.

Of course, such experiences can happen in a more or less ad hoc fashion, but it is special when there is a common forum and a sense of community.


At UMass Amherst, I have served as the Faculty Advisor to its INFORMS Student Chapter since September 2004. This chapter, through the excellent work of its officers, elected each Fall, and its members, organizes activities each semester, ranging from speakers, to excursions, to social activities, from parties to ping pong tournaments and bowling nights, some of which have become annual events, and help to mark the progression of the academic year.

A highlight (and unique event, thus far) was the First Northeastern Regional INFORMS Conference that took place at UMass Amherst, May 6-7, 2011, for which the student chapter members provided essential support and assistance (thanks). Also, several of the present and former officers spoke on a panel, How to Run a Successful INFORMS Student Chapter. and offered some great advice.


Essential to the building of a community is to make sure that everyone is informed about the chapter's activities. This we accomplish through the use of social networking tools from Facebook and Twitter, through which we disseminate news about our upcoming activities and such communications help to keep our members feeling connected to the chapter. Our chapter Facebook page provides a nice historical timeline of what has been happening over a given year and the students enjoy our tweets as well. The officers also send out regular e-mail news announcements and construct fliers for upcoming activities, plus they regularly update the chapter's website. Postings also take place on the Isenberg School's events page and, quite often, also on the UMass Amherst events page (and even homepage).

Even after the students graduate, the social network that they have established through this chapter lives on and enriches their personal and professional lives and careers.

Those Fascinating Financial and Social Networks

In 1997, I co-authored the book, Financial Networks: Statics and Dynamics, with Stavros Siokos, a former PhD student of mine, who has had a meteoric career in finance.

Since that book, my students, collaborators, and I have conducted a lot of research on this topic, and have advanced the state-of-the-art to include electronic finance within a network framework, financial networks with intermediation, financial risk and node and link vulnerability, and even the integration of financial networks with social networks.

Now, for the drumroll!

Speaking of the reality of social networks and financial networks, The New York Times has announced that the Deutsche Bank will be announcing its new leader this weekend, and, of the finalists. is Anshu Jain. Jain received an MBA from our School of Management at UMass Amherst (which I had mentioned in an earlier blogpost).

Plus, I heard today from one of my former colleagues at the Isenberg School of Management, Sheila Bair, who recently stepped down as the Chairwoman of the FDIC in Washington DC, and whose headship and leadership of that agency for 5 years has been heavily covered and lauded in the press. As of September 2011, she will begin her new position at The Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington DC.

You can read the interview with Ms. Bair conducted by Joe Nocera of The Times here.

Another Female Full Professor!

Attaining the rank of Full Professor in academia is quite the achievement and, typically, to reach this rank, one, after receiving a PhD, becomes an Assistant Professor, then gets promoted with tenure (if all goes well) to Associate Professor, and, after a few more years (and, hopefully, no politics to interfere), attains the rank of Full Professor.

There are also chaired/named professorships, which are honorific-type of appointments that usually come with expanded resources and are, most often, given to Full Professors that merit special recognition.

As a named professor, who has graduated 15 PhD students, I follow the careers of my former students closely and am thrilled by their professional successes.

One of my former doctoral students, Tina Wakolbinger, who received her PhD from UMass Amherst in 2007, with a concentration in Management Science, and who was until recently an Assistant Professor at the Fogelman College of Economics and Business at the University of Memphis, has, as of May 15, assumed her new faculty appointment.

Dr. Wakolbinger is now a Full Professor of Supply Chain Services and Networks at the Institute for Transport and Logistics Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Vienna, Austria! She began teaching a course on Global Supply Chain Management there in English this past week.

Tina, along with Professor Dietrich Braess, and me, translated the famous Braess (1968) article, which included the paradox named after him, from German to English. Together, we also wrote several research articles that have appeared in such journals as Naval Research Logistics and Computational Economics. Her doctoral dissertation title was: A Dynamic Theory for the Integration of Social and Economic Networks with Application to Supply Chain and Financial Networks.

To achieve the rank of Full Professor in only a few years after attaining a PhD is quite the achievement and to get such a position in one of the most glorious cities in the world and in the largest public business university in Europe deserves accolades!

Dr. Wakolbinger actually received the offer last summer shortly after we were at the Computational Management Science conference in Vienna.

For more information on Dr. Wakolbinger's dissertation, and that of my other students, click here. The official announcement of her Professorship is here.

Congratulations to another female Full Professor!

SBP 2011 Conference Highlights Through Photos

The SBP 2011 conference has been a huge success from the outstanding tutorials and great keynotes, as well as paper presentations (with a refereed proceedings volume), plus social activities.





One of the absolute highlights was sponsorship of 30 students to attend this conference!

Many, many thanks to the sponsors: NSF, NIH, ONR. AFOSR, and ARO for bringing together computer scientists, social scientists from economists to anthropologists, operations researchers and management scientists, applied mathematicians, biologists, medical professionals, cognitive scientists and psychologists, as well as engineers and network scientists!

Special thanks to the Conference Co-chairs, Professor Dana Nau of the University of Maryland and Professor Sun-ki Chai of the University of Hawaii, and to the Program Co-Chairs: John Salerno of the Air Force Research Lab and Professor Jay Yang of the Rochester Institute of Technology for such an excellently organized conference, the terrific venue, and so many stimulating discussions plus such a delicious set of lunches and coffee breaks!

Special thanks also to the Conference Committee:

Huan Liu, Arizona State University
John Salerno, Air Force Reasearch Laboratory
Sun Ki Chai, University of Hawaii
Patricia L. Mabry, Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, National Institutes of Health
Dana Nau, University of Maryland
V.S. Subrahmanian, University of Maryland

It was an honor to be on this team as the tutorial chair!

Mark Newman Speaks on Networks at UMass Amherst

I attended a very enjoyable colloquium yesterday in the physics department at UMass Amherst given by Professor Mark Newman of the University of Michigan and the Santa Fe Institute.

The title of his talk was: Epidemics, Erdos Numbers, and the Internet: The Structure and Function of Complex Networks

Abstract: There are networks in almost every part of our lives. Some of them are familiar and obvious: the Internet, the power grid, the road network. Others are less obvious but just as important. The patterns of friendships or acquaintances between people form a social network; the species in an ecosystem join together to form a food web; the workings of the body's cells are dictated by a metabolic network of chemical reactions. As large-scale data on these networks and others have become available in the last few years, a new science of networks has grown up, drawing on ideas from physics, math, engineering, biology, and other fields to shed light on systems ranging from bacteria to the whole of human society. This talk will examine some new discoveries regarding networks, how those discoveries were made, and what they can tell us about the way the world works.

I had hosted Professor Newman several Octobers ago, when Professor David Parkes and I organized an Exploratory Seminar on Dynamic Networks at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, so it was nice to see him back in Massachusetts.

Some of the network images that he used in his talk yesterday are available here.

His audience yesterday was comprised of physicists, engineers, and computer scientists and yours truly (plus some folks I could not name nor did I know their backgrounds).

His talk (with a wonderful delivery and enthusiasm) focused mostly on network structure, whereas my research focuses on a wide spectrum of networks where flows and user behavior matters, in addition to network structure, from supply chains to transportation networks and the Internet as well as economic and financial networks and electric power networks. He mentioned food webs which I could relate to since my work in network economics is being applied to fisheries. I told him afterwards that I would like to see more work in social networks that includes flows (as the work that I did with my former doctoral student, who is now a Professor, Dr. Tina Wakolbinger, does).

Also, as I tell my students, we in operations research/management science and even in economics can trace the literature on the subject even back to the mid1800s! Networks in terms of model formulations, applications, and even methodologies and algorithms have been major topics of scientific research especially beginning with the 1950s and beyond. The fascination with networks and novel applications have made the subject seem "new" to some and especially to disciplines, who have more recently discovered networks and are applying tools from their disciplines to their study.

The Economics of Happiness and Optimization

Andrew Marszal writes in a recent Aol News Opinion Piece on the "Economics of Happiness" and reports on research and studies on this topic which, he notes, is "catching on" with the likes of the Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz (who I might add is an Amherst College grad) and with the French President Nicholas Sarkozy even getting involved.

According to a recent global survey, participants, when asked what is their most important goal in life, ranked "happiness" first, ahead of "'success," "knowledge" or even "material wealth." The
global survey is worth reading since it captures the psychological, economic, and social aspects of well-being in a very thoughtful writeup.

In his Opinion Piece, Marszal writes: Trust is strongly correlated to happiness and varies dramatically among societies. A recent World Values Survey, conducted by an international network of social scientists, found 64 percent of Norwegians responded "Yes, most people can be trusted," compared with just 5 percent of Brazilians. Of Americans, 56 percent held this opinion in the 1960s, but only 33 percent by 1998.

In addition, it is emphasized that family relationships and work are crucial, too.

In economics, as in operations research, the concepts of optimization and utility maximization, under constraints, are fundamental. What is emerging from the above noted studies (and more links to others can be found in the Opinion Piece) is that social networks, whether familial, community-based, or at work do matter and in significant ways. Social networks capture relationships and their evolution can serve as indicators of trust.

In a series of articles, we examined the impact of social networks on different networks, and introduced flows in social networks in the form of relationship levels. When relationship levels are higher, various costs are reduced (not only in a business sense but also, generally, in the form of transaction costs). Our research captured the effects of social networks and relationship levels on supply chain networks as well as on financial networks.

As Dr. Patricia Randall writes in Reflections on Operations Research, It will be interesting to see in the future how Operations Research and analytics can be applied to social networking problems and how these approaches differ from more “traditional” applications.

I strongly believe that much of the breakthroughs will come through the synergies of synthesizing, integrating, and expanding findings and perspectives from different disciplines from the social and behavioral sciences to computer science and operations research and the management sciences, as some of the leaders in social science and social computing are suggesting. As for the potential payoffs, what could be more rewarding than creating societies in which there is a greater level of trust and higher levels of "happiness?!"

A Thank You to Sweden

International conferences serve as a venue for scientific exchanges, reconnecting with colleagues from around the globe, and often bring back a flood of memories. I have written several posts on this blog about the ALIO-INFORMS conference, which took place recently in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The intensity of professional conferences, coupled with their fascinating locations, enrich one's professional and social networking experiences greatly.

At the Buenos Aires conference, one of my many highpoints was the international collaborations panel, sponsored by WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences), and organized by Professor Sadan Kulturel of Penn State Berks.

In preparing my presentation, it became clear how important it has been to my career to not only take active part in international conferences, but to also live abroad. Sweden, in particular, is a very special country to me since while living there I wrote two books, Financial Networks: Statics and Dynamics with Stavros Siokos, and Supernetworks: Decision-Making for the Information Age with June Dong.

The former book I wrote while I held a Distinguished Chaired Professorship at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden and the latter while I was a Visiting Professor there several years after. During the writing of both of these books, my family and I lived at the Wenner Gren Center on Sveavagen in Stockholm.

The Wenner Gren Center is an apartment complex for a community of 150 families from around the globe, consisting of researchers, scholars, and medical professionals. It borders the gorgeous Haga Park. While I worked at KTH, my husband held an appointment at the Department of Electrical Systems Construction in Kista, which is also part of KTH.

Our daughter was only 2 years old the first time we lived in Stockholm and we enrolled her in the local daycare. In her daycare group there were children from her age until 7 and the care that she received there was outstanding. The children spend tons of time outside (remember that the Swedes have a saying that there is no bad weather, only bad dress for the weather). They climb rocks and trees in neighboring parks (believe me this raised my anxiety level a bit, but I guess these are useful life skills), go on excursions, including to musems, play, and just thrive. The daycare cooks prepared meals that included salmon, carrots, and dilled potatoes; Swedish meatballs, and delicious soups, and every child's birthday was celebrated in a lavish way with ice cream and lit candles. (Coming back to the US and the local preschool was a bit of a shock to my almost 3 year old at the time, when she had to brown bag her lunch).

Several of the daycare providers spoke English and there was one child from Japan who also was living at the Wenner Gren Center in my daughter's group. A boy of 7 named Sebastian, who originally was from Colombia, took special care of my daughter and also would often greet me at the door when I would come to pick her up and would motion to me as to her whereabouts. We would run into the parents and children in Stockholm outside of daycare hours and that helped us to feel part of a larger community. We were even invited to the homes of several of our daughter's fellow "classmates" years afterwards.

Above I have posted photos of the Wenner Gren Center, Stockholm, and my daughter's former daycare in Sweden.

The New York Times recently had coverage about the excellent parental leave policies in Sweden (which we observed while living there) and fathers taking advantage of them in an article entitled, "In Sweden, Men Can Have it All." This blogpost was partially inspired by that terrific article (plus who could have missed the publicity surrounding Princess Victoria's wedding that took place in Stockholm yesterday).

Sweden, I thank you for creating a society and system in which those who live there (even if only for a few months) can better balance work and family!

United Nations of Students and a Mini Reunion

This past week, a group of my present and past doctoral students gathered in my Supernetworks Lab at the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst for a mini reunion. The occasion was that it was the week before the UMass Amherst spring break and a former doctoral student, who had arrived from Australia, had joined us as a Visiting Scholar. Dr. Dmytro Matsypura, who received tenure at the University of Sydney and is on sabbatical now, will be with us through mid-May. He received his PhD with a concentration in Management Science in 2006 and joined the Faculty of Economics and Business at Sydney in January 2007. Dr. Matsypura is originally from Ukraine.

Another former doctoral student of mine, Dr. Jose M. Cruz, who is now an Assistant Professor at the School of Business at the University of Connecticut (UCONN) in Storrs, drove up with his wife and gorgeous, almost one year old, twins (a boy and a girl). Dr. Cruz received his PhD from UMass Amherst (also with a concentration in Management Science in 2004). He has 5 degrees from UMass Amherst (in engineering, computer science, applied mathematics, an MBA, and a PhD) and is one of ten children. (His parents in Cape Verde deserve multiple trophies!) Two of my doctoral students were also able to join us for some conversation, exchanges of advice, and serious "catching up."

I have chaired the dissertations of 15 doctoral students and you can find the complete list of their names, graduation dates, and the titles of their dissertations on this academic genealogy website.

What impresses me most about my students is their congeniality and support of one another and their respectful natures. They come not only from the US but from many different countries. Even after graduation, they continue to collaborate and support one another. Quite a few continue to be active Center Associates of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I direct. They have written journal articles together, shared rooms at conferences together, and congratulate one another when notable goals (both personal and professional) are achieved.

For example, Professor Jose Cruz told us at his visit this past week that he had just received the annual undergraduate teaching award from the UCONN School of Business as the best undergraduate teacher (and this evaluation was done over a three year period)! The congratulatory messages were flying but especially thoughtful was one from a Full Professor, Dr. Ding Zhang of the State University of New York at Oswego, who is originally from China, that stated that Jose was not born in the US but in Cape Verde (islands now part of Africa) and in a different culture. Hence, Dr. Cruz's receipt of an undergraduate teaching award at such a big business school is truly impressive. Plus, he was even a finalist for the graduate teaching award!

My doctoral students (present and past) have come from (as already mentioned) Ukraine and Cape Verde, and from Japan, Korea, China, India, Austria, Greece, and the US. I call them the United Nations and they realize the benefits and personal satisfaction of working together, sometimes struggling together, always supporting one another, and laughing together. The synergies that are created benefit education, research, as well as personal and professional growth and success.

Above I share with you a photo taken in my Supernetworks Lab at our recent mini reunion, where many friendships have been made! Each of us in the photo was born in a different country and only the twins were born in the USA!

Dr. Helander on Food Safety, Social Networks, and IBM to Receive National Medal of Technology and Innovation

Yesterday, Dr. Mary Helander of IBM, spoke in our Speaker Series. Since she arrived the evening before and overnighted at the Black Walnut Inn in Amherst, we had a chance to host a reception for her in the Supernetworks Lab at the Isenberg School prior to her presentation on food safety in a global supply chain. The audience for her presentation was standing room only since who does not care about food and staying healthy?! I was so pleased that even several of my undergraduate students in my transportation & logistics class showed up for her talk.

We learned about the initiatives that she is involved in at IBM and such critical issues as visibility and traceability in food supply chains. We also learned about the low margins in terms of returns in food supply chains and what kinds of investments would be needed to ensure a high degree of safety in food supply chains. She discussed concepts of risk and asked whether outbreaks of food adulteration are (or are not) rare events. She also noted how (powerful) companies such as Walmart can raise the stakes for suppliers to provide safe ingredients and products (a member of the audience then added, Walmart is NOT going to be the next FDA). In addition, she spoke on how consumer product companies are rebranding themselves as nutrition companies and how not only analytics are essential in quality control, traceability, and visibility but also food science knowledge. Even RFID technology was mentioned and issues of data analysis and information sharing plus noncompliance brought up.

I was especially intrigued by her statement that perhaps economics could help to identify potential food safety crises (such as the melamine crises, which actually cost, after the fact, millions of dollars) due to different demands for certain supplies. The most valuable asset of a company is its reputation -- something, which it cannot afford to lose!

Dr. Helander even interwove social networks and their importance in the context of supply chains and, speaking of social networks, her first paper based on her doctoral dissertation, supervised by Professor Rajan Batta at the University of Buffalo, appeared in a book edited by Professor Ed Kaplan of Yale; Professor Batta's advisor at MIT had been Professor Dick Larson, and the Head of Dr. Helander's Mathematical Sciences Division at IBM is Dr. Brenda Dietrich. Drs. Larson, Kaplan, and Dietrich had all spoken in our Speaker Series! We had also hosted Dr. Grace Lin and Dr. Robin Lougee-Heimer of IBM in our Speaker Series and their talks were also outstanding.

Dr. Helander gave the kind of talk that will stimulate discussions for a long time to come!

And, as for the "icing on the cake," and we very much enjoyed the lunch and dessert at the University Club after Helander's talk, President Obama yesterday announced that IBM is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. You can read the press release here. There was clear serendipity in our scheduling of Dr. Helander's presentation on the same day as the announcement of this truly prestigious award for IBM!

We thank Dr. Helander for the time that she took to come and speak at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst. It was also the perfect first lecture for the Fall 2009 Series since the Department of Resource Economics has now joined the Isenberg School of Management and the Chair of the Department, Professor Julie Caswell, could even join us for lunch (and then had to host another speaker, who was giving a lecture on dynamic pollution taxes).

Social Networking and Producing a Newsletter

Directing the Virtual Center for Supernetworks requires the production and dissemination of The Supernetwork Sentinel newsletter three times a year. We are pleased to announce that the Summer 2009 edition is now online (in pdf format). This newsletter contains an essay on highlights of recent presentations from Vienna to Rome, provides information on the just-published book, Fragile Networks, reflects on the World Science Festival in NYC, recalls the amazing speakers that visited the Isenberg School and UMass Amherst as part of our Speaker Series, and marks notable distinctions and awards received by Center Associates.

This newsletter serves as a unified vehicle in which to document and distribute news about activities of the Center and its Associates. It also further strengthens the social network ties of the researchers and students involved in the Virtual Center for Supernetworks.