Will be Speaking at the Cornell Memorial Symposium for Walter Isard

Later this week, I will be flying to Cornell to speak at the Symposium on the Legacy of Walter Isard.

The symposium will take place April 29, 2011, in the afternoon, and the Memorial Service that morning. The Isard family is expected to attend.

Professor Kieran P. Donaghy, who is Chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell and the Director of Graduate Studies in Regional Science, has organized the day's events, for which I am most grateful for.

Professor Walter Isard passed away last November at age 91 and I wrote a tribute to him on this blog. I'll never forget how he came to my talk at Cornell on April 1, 2009.

The program for the symposium, which will take place from 2-5PM at Cornell next Friday will include the following speakers and their titles (we have been allotted about 15 minutes) each:

Tony Smith -- The General Theory Book -- A Retrospective

Adam Rose (w/ Henk Folmer) -- Walter Isard’s Contributions to Ecological Economics

Peter Nijkamp -- Behaviour of Humans and Behaviour of Models: A Retrospective View on Walter Isard’s Contribution

I will speak on "A Thank You for the Network Legacy of Professor Isard."

Christine Smith -- Modeling Conflict Resolution

Charles Anderton -- Emergence of Peace Economics

David Boyce -- RSA and Travels with Walter

Peter Batey-- The Development of Regional Science in Europe

T. John Kim-- Input-Output in Urban Models and Founding of the Korean Regional Science Association

Lay Gibson -- Organization of the Mexican and other PRSCO sections

Iwan Azis -- Walter’s Ideas in Action

Glenn Palmer-- Walter Isard and the Peace Science Society.

The confirmed speakers for the morning Memorial Service are: Mike Teitz, Kingsley Haynes, Art Getis, Jean Paelinck, Geoff Hewings, Karen Polenske, Yoshitsugu Kanemoto, Michale Romanos, Dick Schuler, Janet Kohlhase, Maria Willumsen, Manas Chatterji, Judith Reppy, Jean Paelinck, with remarks from Dina Zinnes, Janice Madden, Martin Beckmann read by Kieran Donaghy.

I think that Professor Walter Isard would be very pleased to see how many are traveling even from Europe to honor his contributions and his legacy.

My presentation can be accessed here.

What a Transportation Symposium!

I returned from Northwestern University early this morning after a landing on a delayed United flight from Chicago O'Hare to Bradley airport in Hartford/Springfield that was preceded by an announcement by the pilot that we will be experiencing "extreme turbulence." My trip began about 5:30AM Thursday morning when I was picked up by a van service in Amherst only to have the shuttle to which the other passengers and I were to then be moved to get a flat tire right in front of Mount Holyoke College in the dark of night. Luckily, our shuttle was still in good condition so we did a swap and arrived at the airport in time for our flights. Travel is never dull and especially in the midst of a frigid winter.

My destination was Northwestern University, where its Transportation Center, directed by Professor Hani S. Mahmassani, was hosting a Symposium on Transportation Network Design and Economics. The symposium was to mark the visit of Professor Martin Beckmann (who was on my doctoral committee at Brown University) and the complete symposium agenda can be found here.

The symposium was outstanding and brought together researchers in engineering, economics, operations research, regional science, and even physics. I especially appreciated the attention to detail in the organization of this symposium with sufficient time scheduled for many exciting discussions, wonderful coffee breaks, and a delicious free lunch. Professor Beckmann had arrived on Wednesday having traveled first from Providence to NYC, where he saw an opera and visited museums. He had taken an Amtrak sleeper car from NYC to Chicago (he believes in experiencing many different modes of transportation) and told us that the service was great but his sleeping compartment was rather cold. He is traveling back to Providence also on Amtrak (but through Washington DC).

Professors Mahmassani and David E. Boyce are to be congratulated as well as the staff of the Transportation Center at Northwestern for organizing an exceptional venue and very stimulating symposium program! The discussions that took place germinated numerous research questions and ideas on a topic of great relevance regionally, nationally, and globally. The audience included faculty, students, and practitioners. There were participants from Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Urbana, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Purdue University, Roosevelt University, Loyola University, and UMass Amherst, as well as individuals from the Chicago Transportation Authority, Cambridge Systematics, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, and several independent consultants.

The symposium was a perfect way in which to honor the lasting contributions of Professor Martin Beckmann to the economics and science of transportation networks! It was thrilling to, once again, see Professor Beckmann, who is 85 years old, and whose wit and brilliance still astound.

The photo above of Professor Beckmann with me was taken at the lovely dining hall at the Allen Center at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University on January 28, 2010.

The Transportation Network Design Symposium is this Friday and Admission is Free!

I am delighted to be able to take part in the upcoming Symposium on Transportation Network Design and Economics that will take place this Friday at Northwestern University. Information is below. Professor David E. Boyce, along with Professor Hani S. Mahmassani, have made this symposium possible and I thank them.

Symposium on Transportation Network Design and Economics
January 29, 2010
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM

On the occasion of the visit of Professor Martin Beckmann to Northwestern University, a one-day symposium has been organized for January 29, 2010, on topics related to his seminal work on transportation network equilibrium and efficiency theory.

In Part I of his 1956 book, Studies in the Economics of Transportation, co-authored with C. Bartlett McGuire [1925-2006] and Christopher B. Winsten [1923-2005], Martin Beckmann established basic principles for user behavior on congested transportation networks, as well as for optimal network vehicle flows, when user choices are respectively uncoordinated or coordinated. Beckmann’s contribution launched the new subfield of transportation network economics. Two ongoing international symposia (ISTTT and TRISTAN), the founding of three international transportation journals in 1967, 12 books and two academic handbooks may be traced to Beckmann’s pioneering contribution. Today, Beckmann’s findings are being applied to many congested economic network questions, not only to predict road traffic and public transit flows and to establish road tolls in cities around the world, but also to describe and route telecommunication flows on the Internet, and to price electric power transmissions through generation and distribution networks with many intermediaries and decision-makers.

The Symposium on January 29, 2010, will bring together several leading academic researchers to address some of the implications of Beckmann’s contribution for unsolved problems. One focus of the discussion will be the design of transportation and similar networks (communication, electric power, the Internet). Although network design has been explored formally and informally over the past 60 years, operational design methods have yet to be regularly applied in the planning of large-scale transportation systems by public agencies or private firms. A second focus of the symposium concerns decision making about the pricing, expansion, operation or maintenance of such public and private systems.

In addition to several Northwestern University faculty associated with the Transportation Center, speakers and panelists, according to the official announcement, will include:

* Anna Nagurney, John F. Smith Memorial Professor, Department of Finance and Operations Management, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
* T. John Kim, Endowed Professor of Urban and Regional Systems, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
* John F. McDonald, Gerald W. Fogelson Distinguished Chair in Real Estate, Roosevelt University, Chicago
* Yanfeng Ouyang, Assistant Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Download the agenda here.

The Symposium is open to all interested persons - there is no fee to attend!

Please register online or by contacting
Diana Marek:
d-marek@northwestern.edu
847.491.2280

LOCATION
Transportation Center
Ruan Conference Center
Northwestern University
Chambers Hall
600 Foster St., Lower Level
Evanston, IL 60208

Professor Martin Beckmann's 1956 book, Studies in the Economics of Transportation, is available online here. The Web of Science recently showed 527 citations of this book. Of these, 277 citations (53%) appeared since January 2000, illustrating the significance of this work today. The citing authors represented 39 countries throughout the world.

Symposium on Transportation Network Design and Economics

On January 29, 2010, the Symposium on Transportation Network Design and Economics will take place at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. This symposium has been organized by Professors David E. Boyce and Hani S. Mahmassani to honor and celebrate the visit of Professor Martin Beckmann to Northwestern. The symposium program is now available.

Professor Beckmann is the only living author of the classic book, Studies in the Economics of Transportation, published in 1956 by Yale University Press, and co-authored with Bart McGuire and Chris Winsten. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of this classic book, in 2005, we organized several sessions at the San Francisco INFORMS meeting and both Beckmann, and McGuire (who died two months after), came to the sessions and took part in the festivities. Please click here for those talks and many photos as well as for a link to the classic book, which is now available online.

Professor Beckmann was on my doctoral dissertation committee at Brown University, which was chaired by Professor Stella Dafermos, and I remember so well the question that he asked after my defense plus the party that I gave in Barus and Holley (that well-known engineering and physics building at Brown) afterwards. Beckmann, a true cosmopolitan and lover of travel and terrific food, especially enjoyed the European tortes that I had prepared for the occasion (although we were quite poor grad students at that time and did not have all the right utensils for slicing). He took advantage of a plastic spatula to do the job.

Professor Beckmann, I hear, will be traveling by train to Northwestern, from Providence, Rhode Island, and the day before the symposium, will be speaking on his reflections of the classic book (BMW).

Boyce, Mahmassani, and I wrote a journal article on the impacts of BMW, which was published in Papers in Regional Science in 2005 .

At Northwestern, I will be speaking on some of my latest work and will be delivering the paper, Supply Chain Network Design Under Profit Maximization and Oligopolistic Competition.

I am very much looking forward to this symposium, which will honor the work of a truly great scholar and human being.

For those who would like to see additional photos of Professor Beckmann, who, as Professor Boyce, was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science, please click here. These photos were taken in various locations around the globe, including Australia and Sweden.