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!

The 2nd Virtual Conference on Ukraine was OUTSTANDING!

I'd like to thank KTH The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, for hosting our 2nd Virtual Conference on Ukraine August 22 and 23, 2025. It was truly outstanding. It was an intellectual feast with 3 Nobel Laureates in Economic Sciences: Daron Acemoglu, Roger Myerson, and Paul Krugman delivering keynotes along with Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Subal Kumbhakar. 

I was honored to also give a keynote (the first one) and have posted my presentation as well as that of my Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst PhD student Ismael M. Pour on the Supernetwork Center website: https://lnkd.in/gncCNfTK.

I would like to thank the President of KTH Royal Institute of Technology Anders Söderholm for his warm welcoming remarks as well as fellow members of the Organizing Committee: Lars Harvigson, Almas Heshmati, Hans Lööf, Paul Nystedt, Roman Sheremeta and Hans Westlund. I am grateful to all the presenters of papers as well as to the panelists who joined me in discussing: Challenges of Ukraine's Post-War Reconstruction. Thanks also to those who joined us from many different countries and engaged with us. The networks that we are building in support of Ukraine in terms of research, higher education, and policy-making are inspiring.

So many fascinating research questions are  percolating from this conference. The full program can be downloaded here: https://www.kth.se/ukraine-conference.

Thanks to UMass Amherst for issuing this nice press release: https://www.umass.edu/news/article/anna-nagurney-co-organizes-virtual-conference-featuring-three-nobel-laureates-map

Tomorrow we mark Ukraine's Independence Day in commemoration of the Declaration of Independence of 1991. Slava Ukraini.

Presented Our Integrated War Risk Insurance Paper at EURO in Leeds

The outstanding EURO 2025 conference in Leeds is now over and delegates have disbursed. Scientific conferences are essential to knowledge exchange and also to networking and building communities.

It was an honor to present our recently published paper, "Integrated Crop and Cargo War Risk Insurance: Application to Ukraine," in the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) at this conference.

The paper was co-authored with my Isenberg School of Management PhD student Ismael Pour and Professor Borys Kormych of the Odesa Law Academy in Ukraine. Professor Kormych was a Virtual Scholar, in the first and second cohorts, thanks to the partnership between UMass Amherst and the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE). We enjoyed our collaboration very much.

The paper can be accessed here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/itor.70038?af=R

The paper was presented on Monday, June 23, 2025, in a very relevant session on Data Science in  Insurance and Finance. Information on the session is below.

Integrated crop and war risk insurance

Anna Nagurney, Ismael Pour, Borys Kormych

Finding robust profiles of mental well-being across Europe

Irene Albarran

Premium calculation using Parametric Quantile Regression for insurance count data

Fabio Baione, Davide Biancalana, Aurora Ferri

Implementing non-dominated sorting into asset preselection within portfolio problem

Tomáš Tichý, David Neděla, Sergio Ortobelli Lozza

We took a selfie of the speakers and the session chair.

Thanks to all who came to our session, including Christina Phillips! The link to our slide deck, from which our full presentation can be downloaded, is here: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/EURO-2025-NPK.pdf

The Outstanding Pardalos 70 Conference in Greece

It has been only a few days since the outstanding Pardalos 70 conference in Halkidiki, Greece and the aura continues.

Conferees gathered from 5 continents to celebrate Professor Panos M. Pardalos on his 70th birthday. The talks were excellent (clearly, everyone worked very hard to present their best work) with many including photos and comments on what Pardalos has meant to them as scholars and as a mentor and even a friend.

Panos has supervised the dissertations of over 60 PhD students and has received numerous well-deserved honors and recognitions, including election as INFORMS Fellow and the EURO Gold Medal plus the Constantin Caratheodory Prize. His impact on global optimization, operations research, and numerous applications is profound. The organizers of this conference: Sergiy Butenko, Athanasios (Sakis) Migdalas, and Oleg Prokopyev did an incredible job in site selection, banquet and activity organization, and overall theme selection plus logistics. 

Thanks also to the Program Committee: Vladimir Boginskii, Altannar Chinchuluun, Dalila Martins Fontes, Faruque Hasan, Pavlo Krokhmal, Foad Mahdavi Pajouh, Dmytro Matsypura, Leonidas Pitsoulis, Themistocles Rassias, Mauricio G. C. Resende, and Petros Xanthopoulos for putting together such a fascinating set of single track sessions on the conference theme of "Optimization, Analytics, and Decisions in the Big Data Era." I very much enjoyed also serving on the Program Committee.  The presentations were on topics ranging from sports analytics (quite relevant with the EURO Cup now) to machine learning, complex networks, various aspects of game theory, energy and supply chain applications, and so much more! It was heartwarming to hear in many of the talks how the presenters met Professor Panos Pardalos and his impact on their lives. 

A theme that permeated the conference is that of wonderful friendships, great collaborations, and experiences. Special thanks to Mauricio G. C. Resende for kicking off the conference with his talk on his 30+ years of collaboration with Professor Pardalos. I have been proud to collaborate with Panos for over three decades and we have a new edited Dynamics of Disasters volume going to press shortly with Co-Editors also Ilias Kotsireas, Stefan Pickl, and Chrysafis Vogiatzis. Warm acknowledgments to Professor Stefan Pickl for the presentation of lovely gifts to Panos at the banquet. A very moving part of this conference was seeing a proclamation from the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences in honor of Panos in the presentation given by Tetyana Romanova on work with Petro Stetsyuk and Andreas Fischer.

Below is a collage of photos from the conference.

More information on the conference: https://sites.google.com/view/panos-70/home

And it was quite remarkable to have so many Ukrainians in attendance and as speakers. Although Ukraine lost its first Euro Cup match, it did win its second one against Slovakia and Sergiy Butenko was at the match in Germany with his family.

Below is a photo of the Ukrainians at the Pardalos conference.

Wishing Professor Panos M. Pardalos wonderful experiences on his new journeys!

Looking Forward to Delivering My IFORS Distinguished Lecture in Buenos Aires!

I was deeply honored to have been selected an IFORS (International Federation of Operational Research Societies) Distinguished Lecturer.

I will deliver my Distinguished Lecture at CLAIO, which will take place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, December 12-15, 2022. Information on the conference can be accessed here.

The IFORS Distinguished Lecture program started in 1999 and the full list of previous lecturers can be found here. I find it quite remarkable that I have had the pleasure of meeting quite a few Operations Research scholars on this list!

It was such a delight to receive the letter below from IFORS.

The title of my lecture is, "Human Migration Networks: How Operations Research Can Assist with Refugees and Supply Chain Labor Shortages."

I published my first paper on human migration networks, amazingly, in 1989, and the research has continued, with many wonderful co-authors. During the COVID-19 pandemic, our research on human migration networks intensified, because of the additional challenges and also increasing refugee flows as well as labor shortages in many economic sectors around the globe. Even now we are working on another human migration network paper that focuses on coalitions and social welfare.

I have very much enjoyed working on my lecture. It is dedicated to essential workers who have sustained us in the COVID-19 pandemic with acknowledgment of all the freedom-loving people on the planet including those fighting for their freedom in Ukraine. 

Some of the papers that I will be highlighting in my lecture are: a paper published in the Journal of Global Optimization, co-authored with Professors Patrizia Daniele and Ladimer S. Nagurney, on refugee networks, and the paper that I wrote and which was published in Operations Research Perspectives, which integrates human migration networks with labor in supply chain networks.

I will also highlight research that we published in the IFORS journal, International Transactions in Operational Research, on policy interventions for bringing human migration population distributions in line with system optimization.

I very much appreciate that IFORS posted the statement below on Russia's war against Ukraine on its homepage.

Coincidentally, the last time that I was in Buenos Aires, which was in June 2010 for the ALIO-INFORMS Conference, the World Cup was taking place and I blogged the experience. And, now, the World Cup is again taking place, but in the month of December, and in Qatar, and I will be back in Buenos Aires! I leave you with several photos that I took in Buenos Aires.

And congratulations to Argentina for making it to the quarterfinals of the World Cup today!

The Outstanding Optimization and Decision Science Conference in Beautiful Firenze, Italy

I would like to thank the organizers of the outstanding Optimization and Decision Science Conference that took place August 30-September 2, 2022 in the stunning city of Firenze, Italy.

It was a conference of great scientific value, with wonderful social activities, at the University of Firenze, which brought together researchers from many different countries for face to face exchanges. For many of us, it was the first international face to face conference since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I very much enjoyed all the sessions on variational analysis and equilibrium problems!

I would also like to extend my deepest appreciation to the Conference Co-Chairs: Professors Fabio Schoen and Paola Cappanera, for the warmth and hospitality extended to all of us. The conference website can be found here. Thanks to the Local Organizing Committee and to the Program Committee for their outstanding work!

It was a great honor to give the opening keynote talk at the Museum of Innocents this past Tuesday, followed by a cocktail hour and tour of the museum.  The title of my keynote was: Labor and Supply Chain Networks: It's All About People. The slidedeck can be downloaded here.

Above I am with Drs. Alice Raffaele and Marti Fischetti, two incredibly talented OR researchers and very dynamic leaders of AIROYoung!

The energy and enthusiasm of the conferees was heartwarming to behold. New friendships were made and established relationships further cemented. The sessions were excellent and the University of Firenze a great venue.

It was fabulous that all 5 co-authors of our paper on UAVs, 5G, and Disaster Management showed up! Below are: Yours truly, Daniele Sciacca, Professor Patrizia Daniele, Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney, and Dr. Gabriela Colajanni.

I very much enjoyed listening to the other keynote talks of Professors Bertsimas (virtual presentation), Dick den Hertog, and Paola Scaparra. It was very cool that both the opening and closing keynoters were female!

Below is a photo of the female keynoters.

The social dinner was a banquet at a farm with majestic views of the landscapes in Tuscany. 

It was truly special to see Professor Ivana Ljubic and her postdoc Martina Cerulli at the banquet and to meet colleagues even from the Czech Republic!

I leave you with some views of beautiful Firenze, Italy! 

All the conferees had a fabulous time scientifically and socially.  The great discipline of Operations Research, because of the creativity and dedication of its researchers, educators, and practitioners, is making laudable positive impact globally. Working together we can achieve so much good.

Thanks to the organizers of the great Optimization and Decision Science 2022 conference for bringing many of us together again, in person!

The Book: Dynamics of Disasters: Impact, Risk, Resilience, and Solutions is Published by Springer Nature!

On March 12, 2021, I received an email from Springer Nature, which is the publisher of the book: Dynamics of Disasters: Impact, Risk, Resilience, and Solutions, that I had co-edited with Ilias. S. Kotsireas, Panos M. Pardalos, and Arsenios Tsokas. The email was addressed to Frau Anna Nagurney and stated that the book had been published and was being shipped to my home. I hope that in future correspondence I would be addressed either as Professor or Dr. since my marital status should not be relevant, I would think. 

The next day, quite amazingly, a box with 3 copies of the new book was delivered to our door!

This book is a collection of 16 refereed papers, plus a preface, and is based on the latest Dynamics of Disasters conference that I co-organized with Professors Kotsireas and Pardalos, which took place in Kalamata, Greece in 2019, plus several invited contributions. More information on this international conference can be found here. It was a wonderful conference and the third that I had the pleasure of co-organizing with my outstanding colleagues.

The conference attracted participants and speakers from many different countries, including Canada, Greece, Italy, Germany, Russia, Japan, Nepal, and the US and was a fabulous forum for the exchange of ideas and scientific discussions at a beautiful venue. It is remarkable how our world has changed since due to the COVID-19 pandemic!

The edited volume contains results on many timely topics and the full list of chapter titles and additional information can be found on the publisher's website for the book. Some of the topics in the volume include: drones for disaster assessment, impact of labor disruptions to food supply chains in the COVID-19 pandemic, problems of human migration, infrastructure network resilience, cyber crises, the prevention of geological disasters, the use of blockchain technology, and many others!

The preface describing each of the papers in the volume and the Table of Contents, can be directly accessed here.

UMass Amherst produced this nice news article on our new book.

We are also in the planning stages for the 5th Dynamics of Disasters Conference, which is to take place in Athens, Greece, in mid July in 2021. More information on the conference can be found on the conference website.

The COVID-19 pandemic has clearly added additional complexity to all phases of disaster management and, with disasters increasing in frequency as well as in negative impact, holding such a conference in 2021 is very much needed. Hoping that, with vaccinations and mitigation procedures, it can take place face to face.

Thoroughly Enjoyed Giving the Opening Keynote at the Mexican OR Society Conference

I returned late Friday night from Mexico City where I had the honor and pleasure of delivering the opening keynote at the VIII Annual Conference of the Mexican Society of Operations Research (OR). The conference took place October 16-18, 2019 in México City at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). The title of my keynote was: Operations Research: The TransfORmative Discipline for the 21st Century.  I had been invited early last March to deliver the opening keynote by Dr. Moncayo Martínez and Dr. Erick Centeno-Moreno of Texas A&M University.

I was very intrigued by this invitation and eager to return to Mexico especially since I had lived in Tulancingo, Mexico the summer between high school and college. I had won a national Spanish exam in the US and was invited to go there and to live with a family as part of the Experiment in International Living.  The experience was very special, so I accepted the invitation to speak at this conference.

I headed to Bradley Airport at 5AM last Tuesday and had two very pleasant flights on Delta, with the connection in Atlanta. I was graciously met at the airport and driven to my hotel, which was very close to ITAM Santa Teresa, the venue of the conference.  The views from my hotel room, which was on the 29th floor, and the neighboring area by the elevators, were spectacular.

Shortly after my arrival, I made my way to the conference site in order to get my bearings and I liked the auditorium very much as well as the gardens and flowers.

Welcoming remarks for the opening of the conference were made by Dr. David F. Muñoz Negrón of ITAM, the President of the Scientific Committee, and Dr. Elías Olivares Benítez, the President of the Mexican OR Society. I was introduced by Dr. Luis A. Moncayo Martínez of ITAM, who was President of the local Organizing Committee.

Interestingly, Dr. Moncayo Martínez had been to my Omega Rho Distinguished Lecture at the 2019 INFORMS Conference in Phoenix!

Many of the scientific talks were in Spanish so this gave me a great opportunity to practice a language that I love and, I must admit, I understood about 85% of what was said, and was even able to ask intelligent questions. What very much impressed me was the passion of the speakers, who clearly enjoy the research that they are doing and also enjoy in communicating it. It was wonderful to meet new professional colleagues and many students, as well. It was fun to be asked to be photographed with them, in addition.

In my keynote, which I have made publicly available, I included several photographs of luminaries in our profession, including one of Professor George Dantzig of Stanford, who has passed away, and who I so enjoyed conversing with during many conferences over the years. I hoped to energize and inspire the audience with my talk. I focused on advances in Operations Research in the form of networks and game theory for applications such as: congested urban transportation networks and the Braess paradox, perishable product supply chains from food to healthcare, cybersecurity, and disaster relief. The work on disaster relief was co-authored with a former student of mine, Emilio Alvarez Flores, an Isenberg School of Management and UMass Amherst Commonweath Honors College alumnus, who is originally from Mexico. He now works for Cisco and we communicate regularly. I also discussed some very recent research on global trade networks and the impacts of tariffs and quotas, with a case study on avocados from Mexico. The latter research was conducted with my doctoral student Deniz Besik. Deniz and I have, with co-authors, published a series of papers on the very timely topic of tariffs, quotas, and trade wars in such journals as the Journal of Global Optimization (the issue is to be featured at the Springer booth at the INFORMS 2019 conference that is now taking place in Seattle), Transportation Research E, and the European Journal of Operational Research.

I mentioned in my keynote that I became interested in trade policy instruments, when I was approached by a group of agricultural economists, researching the dairy industry, from Cornell University two decades ago, who wanted to collaborate on ad valorem tariffs focusing on Mexico! And, together, we published a series of paper. Hence, looking back, Mexico has permeated a nice amount of my research, spearheading both advances in methodologies as well as applications.

No conference would be complete without wonderful social engagement and, last Wednesday, after my keynote, I was treated to one of the most delicious lunches in my life at the restaurant Sylvestre. At the lunch were: Dr. Jose Blanchet of Stanford University (another keynote speaker and ITAM alum), Dr. David F. Muñoz Negrón and Dr. Luis A. Moncayo Martínez as well as Dr. Beatriz Rumboz, a Dean at ITAM who holds 2 PhDs, as well as Dr. Erick Centeno-Morena. The food, ambience, and conversations were all exquisite!

And we topped our delicious meals with a portfolio of desserts, which we shared.

I very much appreciate all the logistics arrangements for me and the outstanding hospitality.

It was also marvelous to hear from the conferees about many mutual friends in our profession, which is global in scale, but always feels local, because of the strength of ties.

I would like to wish all the members of the Mexican Society of Operations Research much continuing success in all of you endeavors and, again, I thank the society and the organizers of this conference for being such exemplary hosts! I returned to Massachusetts with many wonderful new ideas, powerful impressions, and new personal connections, which I value very much.

It was also great to hear that, while in Mexico, I received a book contract from Springer to edit another volume on Dynamics of Disasters, with a focus on risk and resilience, with my fellow co-editors, Professors Ilias S. Kotsireas and Panos M. Pardalos!

Fabulous Operations Research Conference in Canada with Photos

It took us three days of driving to get to Halifax, Nova Scotia from Amherst, Massachusetts on a journey through Calais, Maine; St. John and Sackville, New Brunswick, and then to our destination.

Although I was born in Canada, I never was in the Atlantic provinces before so when the announcement went out for the Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS) conference, I was intrigued and was delighted when two of our papers were accepted for presentation.
 



In addition, my doctoral student, Pritha Dutta, had another paper accepted for the CHOW Workshop.
 

Amazingly, on the first day of the conference, we heard that the above paper was accepted for publication in the journal Omega and yesterday we even got the galleys, which we corrected today, and took the selfie below to celebrate.

The weather was quite cool and rainy, for the most part of the conference, the warmth of the conferees and locals was very welcome. The attention to detail by the conference organizers should be lauded - from their responsiveness to queries to the excellent snacks and a banquet complete with lobster and blueberry cobbler with ice cream for dessert. So we wore bibs.

I was very pleased that my Isenberg School of Management colleague, Professor Nikunj Kapadia, also spoke at this conference (his very first OR conference) and commented on how nice and friendly our OR community is, which I fully agree.

It was extra special to see Professor Mark Daskin, an INFORMS Fellow and member of the NAE, and also Professor Martin Puterman of UBC, also an INFORMS Fellow. Professor Puterman had taught at my School of Management for two years (before my time) and he told me that the first seminar he ever gave after getting his PhD from Stanford was at my alma mater - Division of Applied Math, Brown University.

I thoroughly enjoyed all the talks that I attended, and wish that I could have been at several parallel sessions at the same time!

A highlight was the Harold Larnder Prize lecture given by Professor John Birge, who is also a member of the NAE and an INFORMS Fellow. The title of his lecture was: Can Big OR be Bigger than Big Data? He emphasized that what we do in OR is to improve people's lives. He also noted that the promise of advanced "analytics" in its various forms is being realized. However, according to him, unfortunately, OR is not as widely identified with the gains from recent trends. He also emphasized that realizing OR's potential depends on all of our efforts. He displayed a Google trends chart plotting terms such as machine learning, AI, neural nets,and OR.

He discussed Alpha Go and stated that machine learning is essentially stochastic optimization. He also noted that what OR can add is that we focus on the objective and take a comprehensive view and also how the objective relates to sets of parameters and any other conditions (constraints). He also stated that we ensure that the analysis is consistent with "laws" such as the law of one price and even mentioned equilibrium, which was thrilling because my group has for years focused on a variety of network equilibrium problems with fascinating applications, including supply chain ones in healthcare and disaster relief. He made several very interesting suggestions as to how we can "improve" from considering BIG projects and working with collaborators (something that I concur with as is also the focus of the Supernetwork Center that I founded at the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst).

 My colleague, Professor Fatma Gzara of the University of Waterloo, then asked the first question as to why analytics had not also been included. At our table, Mark Daskin mention decision science as also a relevant term for the work that we do.

It was great to see colleagues that I had seen at other OR conferences, including the September one in Berlin, Germany, and to meet even doctoral students from various universities. A special treat was a selfie taken by Professor Dionne Aleman of a group of tweeps. She served as the amazing CORS President for the past two years.

Special thanks also to the event manager for helping the CORS 2018 conference in Halifax be so enjoyable!

And today, once the rain stopped, we enjoyed a glorious walk in the Halifax public garden and along the historic Citadel and then downtown saw a colleague of mine from sports management, who had just arrived for another conference in Halifax and was wearing a UMass Amherst hat!