My Upcoming Plenary Talk in New York City on Cybersecurity, Game Theory, and Operations Research

When the invitation arrived a few months ago from Professor Quanyan Zhu of New York University asking me whether I would be interested in giving a plenary talk at a conference in New York City, I did not hesitate. The conference, SecGames 2016, Decision and Game Theory for Security, will take place November 2-4, 2016.

First, the theme of the conference meshes perfectly with one of my major research themes; secondly, the venue is one of my favorite cities (I grew up in neighboring Yonkers), plus the season - mid-Fall is also perfect, and I had collaborated with Professor Zhu on another initiative.

Also, I do believe in the importance of having female plenary speakers at technical conferences, so it is important, when invited, and it is feasible (I am not on another continent speaking elsewhere), to accept the invitation.

The conference has a great organizing committee and the technical program committee consists of leaders in game theory and cybersecurity.

I have started working on my presentation, which is on: Game Theory Models of Cybercrime and Cybersecurity Investments Under Network Vulnerability. I am having a terrific time preparing my presentation. In my presentation I will focus on research that I have done both independently and with collaborators which integrates game theory and operations research.

As a plenary speaker, one has to generate and sustain interest among the audience members, so, of course, it is important to have great content and a topic that one is very excited to be speaking on.

I am one of two plenary speakers - with the other one being Dr. George Cybenko of Dartmouth.

UMass Amherst has an announcement for my plenary talk at this conference.

I have had some wonderful speaking engagements in NYC, some not very typical. In fact, just yesterday, while teaching my Transportation and Logistics class about the Braess paradox, I showed my students a segment of a videoclip of the World Science Festival panel in NYC on Traffic that I was part of in 2009, which was an extraordinary experience.

 Also, in 2013, I was on the Transportation panel, along with Dr. Janette Sadik-Khan, at the New York Times Energy for Tomorrow conference in NYC. The panel was moderated by the Times columnist Joe Nocera. You can view the video here.

In November 2008 I was a plenary speaker at the North American Regional Science Association in Brooklyn and my presentation can be downloaded here.

I remember walking fondly over the Brooklyn Bridge, which is a favorite bridge of mine, and I hope to do that again next month in NYC!

The Fun of Public Speaking and Giving Invited Seminars

When faculty (or students) complete research, it is important to disseminate it.  Of course, one should always disseminate research results through publications such as journal articles, OpEds, and, if you have a substantive amount around a central theme, even through books. Speaking at conferences is another wonderful way in which to share one's research and also to get feedback on it.

Another great venue at which to share your research and to educate is through forums such as invited seminars that many departments within colleges and universities organize and hold at regular intervals.

If you have a great talk (or, better yet, since sometimes it is more fun not to be repeating oneself even if the faces in the audience are different, several talks) and are willing to travel, then, when the right invitations come, giving an invited seminar can be great fun.

You may get to go to places that you might not otherwise have gone to and meet new colleagues and students during your travels and also learn about other schools and their challenges.  I recall giving the Kleber-Gery lecture at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, where the faculty have survival gear, including snowshoes, in their car trunks. I was put up in a hotel where Jesse James stayed and I got the bridal suite, complete with a canopy bed!  I spoke at the University of Oklahoma as part of their Dream Course series, instituted by President Boren and was put up in my own villa with multiple rooms decorated with U. of Oklahoma paraphernalia.

I have also given quite a few invited seminars abroad in other beautiful locations such as Stockholm and Gothenburg, Sweden, Vienna, Austria,  and in Catania, Italy. Some of the questions I received from the audiences have turned into research problems that we are now pursuing. The food was also amazing in all those locations and the hospitality!

Other very enjoyable experiences I have had, in terms of speaking engagements, were through the INFORMS Speakers Program. I have traveled to Dallas to speak at SMU through this program, where the audience consisted of academics, students, and practitioners, many from the airline industry, and also to Boston to speak at the Boston INFORMS Chapter with my wonderful host, Dr. Les Servi of MITRE.  For the former presentation, I made it with just minutes to spare - the taxi driver was asking me for directions to SMU  and I had never been there, plus it was after 7PM and pitch dark!

Every audience that you speak to generates new ideas for you and that has something to do with the give and talk of a lively seminar.

Sometimes the invitation to speak may come from an organization or venue, which is unique and also very rewarding. Examples of the latter that I have had have included being a panelist at the World Science Festival on Traffic in NYC and also a panelist on Transport and Traffic at the New York  Times Energy for Tomorrow Conference, also in NYC, with a theme of Building Sustainable Cities. One member of the audience, from Toronto, at the former venue still communicates with me and told me that my panel and presentation changed his life! This year's Energy for Tomorrow conference is taking place in Paris next week under heightened security.

At times the audience may even be a bit "frightened" of your talk. When I organized a team residency at Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center on Lake Como in Italy back in 2004 and was there for 2 weeks, my group, which consisted of three females - we were the first Operations Research group invited for a residency in the center's 50+ year history, gave a talk to other Center Fellows, who included civil rights activists, poets, and even a Lincoln historian. Some were a bit scared that we would be showing some math. I think that we made our talk quite enjoyable but then, to me, networks can be a global language. A similar experience I had while speaking on Dynamic Networks at Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, while I was a Science Fellow there in 2005-2006.

In my previous blogpost, I wrote about how thrilled I was that so many students showed up to my game theory and cybercrime seminar late in the day just  two days before Thanksgiving, when the talk was not even required and no faculty member was taking attendance!  Now, that was an energizing experience and so rewarding.

I will be busy on the lecture circuit over the next few months.

This coming Wednesday, I will be speaking in a Cyber Security Faculty Seminar Series at UMass Amherst (no travel reuiqred). The week after, on December 9, 2015, I will be speaking at MIT in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar Series. I was invited to speak there last year but I was booked with travel and other professional commitments so am very glad that I can do it this academic semester.

On February 17, 2015 (I picked the date), I will be giving a Distinguished Lecture at Yale University in its YINS  (Yale Institute  for Network Science) seminar series, which I am very much looking forward to!

Then the day that our spring break begins, March 11, 2015, I will be speaking at the University of Buffalo (the invitation came before UMass Amherst's football team beat Buffalo's and knocked them out of a bowl game). The seminar series is the Praxis Seminar Series and it was very neat to see Michael Trick, a fellow blogger and INFORMS Fellow,  will be speaking there later this week and my colleague, Sundar Krishnamurthy, who is the chair of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at UMass Amherst will follow me in this seminar series (Maybe it is because the U. of Buffalo is located in Amherst (NY)).

I have also agreed to speak at Carnegie Mellon University of April 4, 2016.

Many thanks to all those who extended such wonderful invitations!

A Stunning Infographic via a Tweet - Nash, Braess, Sadik-Khan, and Me Thanks to Dewan Karim

It's always enjoyable to get a pleasant message whether through email, a phone call, in person, or even via a tweet.

I have been mourning the tragic death of John Nash while in Sweden since he influenced so much of my work and was such an extraordinary individual.

Last week, via Twitter, I received a message from Dewan Karim who tweeted the above infographic, which I thought was stunning. Obviously, it had taken him time to prepare  so I contacted him to thank him  and asked him for permission to post it in this blogpost, which he granted. Dewan tweets under Complete Mobility @DewanMKarim. He is a professional engineer and is a transportation planner in the greater Toronto area.

Not only did he include John Nash, but also Dietrich Braess, of Braess paradox fame, whom I also admire so much, and had the pleasure of hosting at the Isenberg School back in 2006.

Dewan told me that he attended the Traffic panel that I was a panelist on at the World Science Festival in NYC, which I wrote a post on.  He became very interested in the Braess paradox which I spoke on and, in particular, relative to Mayor Bloomberg shutting Broadway from 42nd to 47th Street to vehicular traffic and converting it to a pedestrian plaza.  This decision was made in conjunction with Dr. Janette Sadik-Khan.


Interestingly, I last saw Dr. Sadik-Khan, of whom I am also a big fan, when she and I were panelists together on the Transport and Traffic at The New York Times Energy for Tomorrow Conference, also in NYC, in  2013.

I like the above ninfographic so much that I will show it to my students in my Transportation and Logistics class at the Isenberg School next Fall.

In any event, it is so nice to be on the same page with researchers and a practitioner I so much admire.

Thank you, Dewan Karim!

The Awesomeness of Math, Physics, and the Higgs Particle -- Professor Brian Greene Captured It Best

This past week, I received a very informative email from one of the major scientific publishers, Elsevier, that stated:

Traditional scientific coverage is slowing due to a fall in the number of professional science media working today. In 2009, Nature chronicled the situation by noting that the number of dedicated science sections in American newspapers fell from a peak of about 95 to 34 between 1989 and 2005. Accordingly, in the same survey, 26% of global journalists reported job losses, and of the remaining journalists, 59% had less time per article available.

The Nature article appeared in the same year that more than 1.5 million articles were published, a figure that is growing by 3-4% each year. Meanwhile, research is becoming more technical, inter-disciplinary and global in nature.

In other words, when we need experienced traditional science media professionals most, we have fewer of them. However, the number of freelance science journalists and bloggers is increasing. In fact, as of 2009, of the 2,000 US-based National Association of Science Writers members, only 79 were full-time staff science writers for newspapers. Further, remaining science reporters cited getting more story leads from science bloggers, which suggests science is still being covered, but by a new breed of reporter.

One scientific endeavor that has, nevertheless, been getting a tremendous amount of news coverage in both the press and on the internet is that of the 40-year search for the elusive Higgs particle, which may be nearing an end because of the physics experiments (with help from engineers and computer scientists) being conducted at the Large Hadron Collider, a 17 mile tubular underground track outside Geneva, Switzerland, that crosses the Swiss-French border and then back again. Some researchers have dedicated decades of their lives in the quest for the Higgs particle in order to understand the "basic constituents of the universe" as Professor Brian Greene of Columbia University stated so eloquently in his excellent OpEd Piece, "Waiting for the Higgs Particle," that was published in yesterday's New York Times.

The excitement and suspense of conducting scientific research is captured by Professor Greene, who is a Professor of Physics and Mathematics. He ends his OpEd piece in a truly thrilling way, that captures the awesomeness of scientific research and the beauty of math and how he got hooked on science (yes, as I have written several times, it is often a teacher as well as a parent that inspires).

His concluding paragraphs from his outstanding New York Times OpEd:

Within a year, additional data should settle the question. Perhaps the finding will be disproved. That’s the nature of cutting-edge research. But if confirmed, wow. The legions of physicists, engineers and computer scientists, whose collective efforts created the Large Hadron Collider, will have revealed the deepest layer of reality our species has ever probed.

For me, as a theorist standing outside the experimental effort, the result is no less exciting. Years ago, when I was in high school, my physics teacher gave the class a homework problem: calculating the trajectory of a ball swinging from the ceiling by a piece of chewing gum. That night, when I finished the calculation, I ran down the hallway to show my father — I was utterly and profoundly amazed that mathematical symbols scratched in pencil on a piece of paper could describe things that actually happened in the real world. That’s when I became hooked on physics. With Tuesday’s announcement, tentative though it may be, I’m awed yet again.

I had the honor and privilege of meeting Dr. Brian Greene when I was a panelist at the World Science Festival in NYC in June 2009. He and his wife, Tracy Day, are the brainchilds behind that amazing annual scientific extravaganza.

This is certainly an exciting year both in science as well as in the reporting and discussing of it!

Rest in Peace, Dr. Rosalyn Yalow, Nobel Laureate

As I was growing up in Yonkers, New York, I read The New York Times at every opportunity.

While I was a student at Yonkers High School and in college at Brown University, I would periodically come across articles on the amazing scientist, Dr. Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, who had been born in NYC. She passed away on May 30, 2011, in NYC at age 89.

Her parents never finished high school, but she went on to graduate magna cum laude from Hunter College and then struggled to get accepted for graduate school. When she applied to a midwestern university (I won't mention the name but you can find it here and times have changed somewhat since I was recruited by the same one a few years back for a tenured faculty position) to further her studies in physics, the university wrote back to her professor: She is from New York. She is Jewish. She is a woman. If you can guarantee her a job afterward, we’ll give her an assistantship. This could not be guaranteed, so she was rejected.

Despite being hurt by this rejection, she got a job as a secretary at Columbia University and with World War II opening up academic opportunities for women, she received a teaching assistantship at the University of Illinois in Urbana in engineering. She was the only female teaching fellow/faculty member out of 400! She received her doctorate in nuclear physics in 1945, moved back to NYC, where her incredible scientific career with discoveries in radioimmunoassay, with her collaborator Dr. Berson, continued.

Many new, creative ideas are met with resistance. According to The Times, scientific journals, at first, rejected her research with Berson on insulin antibodies. She did not forget this experience and included the rejection letter in her Nobel prize lecture. She received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1977, only the second woman at that point to have been awarded this major accolade. Speaking to schoolchildren several years after receiving the Nobel about the challenges of a life as a scientist, she said, Initially, new ideas are rejected. Later they become dogma, if you're right. And if you're really lucky, you can publish your rejections as part of your Nobel presentation.

Although Berson predeceased her, and, hence, could not share the prize with her, she named her lab after him, so that his name would appear on her publications afterwards. Yalow was not only a great scientist but also a great person.

This week, the 2011 World Science Festival (WSF) is taking place in NYC, and I hope to catch a part of it, since it is an amazing set of 50 events over 5 days. One of the themes this year, and Yalow would have been pleased, is Women in Science.

Some highlights of my experiences at the 2009 WSF can be found here.

World Science Festival Begins Tomorrow in NYC!

The New York Times had a wonderful article on the third World Science Festival that begins tomorrow in New York City. The article, The Cosmos and the Culture Converge at a Science Festival, by Dennis Overbye captures some of the wonder and excitement of this annual event which combines science, art, music, and even drama (with Alan Alda being one of the main movers behind this fantastic annual event). Dr. Brian Greene, the physicist from Columbia University and his wife, Tracy Day, the journalist, were the originators of this creative extravaganza that transforms parts of NYC during the beautiful month of June into a science wonderland.

I was a participant in last year's World Science Festival as a panelist on Traffic and the experience was simply fabulous. I enjoyed meeting other speakers and participants at the festival and in my meanderings around Soho since several of the events take place at NYU and I was put up in the Soho Grand Hotel.

If you can make it to NYC this week, do take part in the World Science Festival, which even includes a street fair, and with Stephen Hawkings, the renowned Cambridge University cosmologist, as one of the headliners, I promise you that you will not be disappointed!

Daffodil Lectures on Sustainability and the Environment

On Saturday, April 24, 2010, UMass Amherst and its Commonwealth College will be featuring the Daffodil Lectures to celebrate honors education at UMass Amherst.

The lectures will take place at 3PM at the Integrated Sciences Building (see notice above). Two of the speakers are well-known UMass Amherst faculty and one (Professor Taylor) is from the University of Florida. Andrew Revkin (who went to Brown University, as did I, and who also has a master's degree from Columbia) will also be speaking. Mr. Revkin was a long-time journalist for The New York Times (through 2009) and wrote the blog, Dot Earth.

In June, 2009, Andrew Revkin and I were among the featured speakers at the World Science Festival in NYC, which was an extraordinary experience.

Mr. Revkin is now a Fellow at Pace University in NYC. I am delighted that he will be coming to UMass Amherst and am very much looking forward to hearing all these speakers provide their unique insights into sustainability and the environment!

More information about this special event can be found here.

Bloomberg's Experiment and Braess on Broadway

According to The New York Times, the New York Traffic Experiment Gets Permanent Run!

The road closure(s), which banned vehicles on Broadway from 47th to 42nd Streets and from 35th to 33rd Streets, was pitched last February as an innovative way to fight congestion. It quickly became a fascination for tourists and New Yorkers alike, drawn to the curious sight of a pedestrian mall, complete with picnic tables and folding chairs, under the neon lights.

The article states that Mayor Bloomberg was more trusting of separate data collected from GPS devices in yellow cabs. Those numbers encompassed 1.1 million Midtown taxi trips taken between Fifth and Ninth Avenues in Midtown. Of those trips, northbound travel times improved by 17 percent, and southbound trips slowed by 2 percent, but a street-by-street breakdown could not be calculated.

This network redesign, if I may call it, was discussed on the Traffic panel that I was part of last June in New York City as part of the World Science Festival, which was tremendous fun. The above graphics were prepared for that panel.

The closure of that segment of Broadway would be representative, as I depict above, of the reverse of the Braess paradox (in which the addition of a road makes all travellers worse off in terms of travel time due to selfish or user-optimizing, as opposed to system-optimizing behavior). You can read up on the paradox and Professor Braess on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks site.

Of course, one has to realize that midtown Manhattan and its streets are subnetworks of a much larger transportation network with multiple origin/destination pairs of associated demands which vary dynamically over the day and the night.

Nevertheless, this initiative by Mayor Bloomberg demonstrates how the science of traffic flow and associated congestion management tools can be implemented in the real-world and what could be more dramatic than doing this right in the heart of NYC!

Traffic and the World Science Festival plus the Dancing Cockatoo

Last evening, I took part in the Traffic panel at the World Science Festival at the Kimmel Center at New York University. Robert Krulwich, who has been called the "most inventive reporter," was our panel moderator. I joined him and Iain Couzin and Mitchell Joachim, "Dr. J.," on stage. We had been working earlier on "rehearsing" the segment towards a view of integrating the videos and graphics that we had prepared. Our panel theme was what insects and interstates have in common and how biology, human behavior, and urban design can helps us to "solve" one of the most annoying problems -- that of traffic congestion. Krulwich was fantastic as a moderator and managed to interweave our unique expertises and research into a very entertaining and informative segment. Not only did the panelists have a wonderful time but, based on the questions from the audience and the number that stayed afterwards to continue the discussions, it was clear to me that this panel and the questions that it raised, resonated with the audience. I especially appreciated that the audience ranged from an infant to students from high school and colleges through mathematics professors to interested public to very senior transportation and civil engineering professionals. Even my uncle, who is 89 years old, and an award-winning bridge designer, who still works in Manhattan, came to the event, as did one of my collaborators, Professor Lan Zhao of SUNY Old Westbury, who brought her son and friends.

We explored traffic flows from starlings and sardines to ants and locusts plus pedestrian congestion and drivers around the world. We posited "solutions" from enhanced network designs and infrastructure investments, to improved signal settings, to soft-bodied, collapsible cars, some in the shape of sneakers, to sci-fi approaches such as jet packs. I believe that we showed the excitement of the science in the world around us as well as the beauty and elegance of scientific and mathematical approaches to traffic analysis and management.

New York City is pulsating with science since the World Science Festival has "taken over the city." The gala that took place at Alice Tully Hall on Wednesday evening was reviewed enthusiastically in yesterday's New York Times. What an incredible event it was and what a terrific beginning to this festival.

I thank the founders and directors of the World Science Festival, Dr. Brian Greene of Columbia University, and his wife, the journalist Tracy Day, for having the vision, energy, and creativity to establish this magnificent celebration of science!

I also thank the wonderful producers of this festival, with whom I have worked, notably, Alison Snyder and Susan Ades Stone.

To experience and be part of this festival with its terrific community of researchers, scientists, artists, dancers, musicians, explorers, and writers, has been incredibly interesting and rewarding. The stay at the Soho Grande, the hotel for the festival, has also been fantastic. I even got a chance to meet other guests at the hotel who are taking part at the festival, including "Snowball," the dancing cockatoo, who is a youtube sensation and who will be taking part in the segment today on avian geniuses. I had an opportunity to talk with Snowball's absolutely delightful and very kind owners and to also "chat" with Snowball. His cage is decorated with all sorts of wonderful toys and his owners told me that he has very much enjoyed staying in NYC!

The Back Cover of the Fragile Networks book and the World Science Festival

I decided to share with you the back cover of our book Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, which has just been made available by our publisher Wiley. We are expecting that the book will be out in time for the World Science Festival in NYC in June. I have begun preparing graphics for my presentation on Traffic at this festival. The list of speakers ranges from Nobel laureates to musicians to movie stars to academic researchers and scholars who are passionate about science. Our UMass Amherst Chancellor, Dr. Robert Holub, asked me the other day at one of the banquets that we are partaking in at the end of the academic year whether I will be also dancing and singing at this festival. Network researchers engage in such activities but not necessarily in public. I will stick to what I know and love best -- and that is networks and transportation!

A "Typical" Day

As an academic knows, but much of the public does not realize, despite a regular teaching schedule, no two days for a professor are ever alike. This aspect of being an academic makes one's professional life challenging, always interesting, but also not for everyone. There is no such thing as a "typical" or "routine" day.

For example, yesterday, which was a Monday, turned out as follows. In the morning, I discussed, with a producer in New York City, a program that I will be involved in at the 2009 World Science Festival, which will be taking place in mid-June. Last year's festival was the first and it was a huge success. It took place in late spring in NYC and this year's festival will also be in NYC. The festival was modeled after one in Genoa, Italy, and attracted 100,000 participants last year!

Office hours followed with students dropping in as much to chat as to discuss work. Then it was time to teach. I am teaching a doctoral course, Management Science II, and the class lasted for two and a half hours. I love teaching the material and the session felt like ten minutes long to me. Then it was time for a scheduled phone conversation with an executive of a multinational firm, who is an Isenberg School of Management alum. Topics under discussion concerned possible internships for our students, and possible projects in supply chain optimization. Coincidentally, one of the topics of my preceding lecture had been trade-offs between different modes of transportation and the effects on product prices. It is always gratifying that we can be both rigorous and relevant while teaching in the Isenberg School of Management!

After the conversation, more students came pouring in, and it is always those spontaneous conversations that are the most fun. A student on crutches wandered in and we ended up talking, after discussing employment prospects in operations management, and in transportation and logistics, about soccer and the World Cup. He had actually been a professional soccer player in Portugal (and he was now on crutches because of soccer).

Teaching was done for the day and the homeworks graded so it was time to complete the service duties. I have the honor of serving as the Chair of the 2009 WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Award of INFORMS. In the capacity as Chair, I get to select the members of the committee. Yesterday, all the committee members were confirmed and we have a terrific committee in place! They include faculty at business schools and engineering schools as well as a parctitioner. The award will be announced at the INFORMS National Meeting in San Diego next October and the closing date for nominations is July 1, 2009.


As for research, there was good news on this front, too. Two of our papers, which we revised recently, have now been officially accepted for publication. One is on electric power supply chains with application to New England. The other paper is on the horizontal integration of multiproduct supply chains and associated synergies. These papers were co-authored with associates and students that I work with through the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst. The former paper will be published in the journal, Naval Research Logistics, and the latter paper, in the International Transactions in Operational Research.