Photos of Views from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

In an earlier blogpost, I wrote about my travels to and from Berkeley, California to attend a meeting of the I3P (Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection) consortium that UMass Amherst and about 2 dozen universities, government labs, etc., are part of.

The meeting took place June 22-23, 2011 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

We were put up at the Berkeley Lab Guest House, which is located on a mountain overlooking the San Francisco Bay and the views are quite spectacular.

While there, I saw not only wild turkeys (quite a few of them) roaming around and even deer only a few feet away from me.

I will let the photos above speak for themselves. Seeing the early morning fog over San Francisco Bay was magical.

Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P) Meeting at MITRE

After teaching my undergraduate class in Transportation & Logistics this past Wednesday, I was picked up by Dr. Kevin Fu of the CS Department at UMass Amherst (who also taught his undergrad class that morning) and we headed to the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P) meeting that was taking place at MITRE in Bedford, MA.

I3P is a consortium of academic institutions, government labs, and nonprofit organizations that focuses on information infrastructure protection. This consortium is led by Dartmouth College. Its new Research Director, Dr. Shari Pfleeger, formerly of Rand, assumed this position on September 1, 2010. She is terrific and very knowledgeable and dynamic.

UMass Amherst is a member and Dr. Fu is the rep from UMass while I have been appointed the alternate. The member map is available here. The talks and brainstorming sessions were terrific over the past two days as were the many conversations that took place during the breaks and at the dinner Wednesday night at the Bamboo restaurant (simply magnificent).

I personally very much enjoyed meeting with consortium members from the University of Idaho, the Idaho National Laboratory, Indiana University, the University of Tulsa, Carnegie Mellon University, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, SRI International, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and MITRE. When you get a group of very engaged and smart researchers together, the intellectual discussions are very rewarding and exciting. Also, one can't beat face -to-face communications.

You can find more information on the I3P here.

I was pleased to see my research on transportation, the Braess paradox, and the wisdom of crowds featured in the September 2010 issue of I3P Researchers in the News.

News Highlights from the Isenberg School -- Business Schools and Research

The intellectual life of a university depends on the research of its faculty and the give and take with students through teaching and scholarship.

I teach and conduct research at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, which values interdisciplinarity. The academic departments at Isenberg clearly reflect this from my own department, Finance and Operations Management, to Resource Economics, Sport Management, and Hospitality and Tourism Management, plus even the more, shall I say, "classical" departments of Management, Marketing, and Accounting and Information Systems.

My department, in the last two years, has recruited two new Assistant Professors, Dr. Ahmed Ghoniem and Dr. Senay Solak, from Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech, respectively. Their work has already earned not only accolades but grants: Dr. Ghoniem has received funding from the Qatar National Research Fund to study how to minimize air traffic congestion whereas Dr. Solak has received funding from NSF to conduct research on housing foreclosures and nonprofit organizations.

Last year, we recruited the new Dean of the Isenberg School, Dr. Mark Fuller, whose appointment is also in my department (and, yes, I served on the search committees for all these hires, and chaired those of the two above).

Also, based on a proposal for a cluster hire that I, with colleagues in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and even Communications, was involved in, we were able to recruit for a position in cyber security. Dr. Traci Hess and her husband, Dr. John Wells, both from Washington State University, will be joining my department this Fall as Associate Professors.

My colleagues conduct research on hedge funds, serve on FDA panels on food safety and risk, explore issues of privacy and marketing, to highlight only a few, very cool research topics.

My own research and passion is heavily focused on networks, especially on complex networks with applications as varied as supply chains, humanitarian logistics, financial networks, electric power generation, and transportation. My recent research has emphasized network design and fragility and vulnerability analysis with applications to critical needs and healthcare products from vaccines to medicines as well as sustainability.

Being in a business school, one can conduct research on the latest topics and this brings an energy and enthusiasm to the classroom which are palpable. Being trained in operations research and management science (my advisor at Brown University, Dr. Stella Dafermos, was the only female at that time in Engineering and Applied Math) one has the skill set to address many important problems.

Although campuses will be teaming with students, both new and experienced ones, come the Fall, during the summer, the faculty are getting prepared as they work on new breakthroughs, present their work at conferences around the globe, rework their course materials, and take the time to reflect.

Soon I will be giving keynote talks in Europe -- at the Computational Management Science in Vienna, Austria and at the Yalta Optimization Conference -- Network Science in Ukraine. As I tell my students, research can really take you places and introduce you to fascinating people!

Working at a university is a great privilege and responsibility and always filled with new challenges, opportunities, and, sometimes, even drama (I will write about the latter topic sometime in the future)!

Cyber Security, Vulnerability Analysis, and CUTC Awards

The Cybersecurity Research and Education website at UMass Amherst is featuring the award that my most recent to graduate doctoral student, Dr. Patrick Qiang, received at the Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC) in Washington DC last month.

Dr. Patrick Qiang received the Charles V. Wootan Award from the Council of University Transportation Centers for his doctoral dissertation, Network Efficiency / Performance Measurement with Vulnerability and Robustness Analysis with Application to Critical Infrastructure. He received this national dissertation award, which is given for the best doctoral dissertation in the transportation planning and policy.

More information on other award recipients from the CUTC can be found here. We congratulate all the awardees and their mentors for their terrific hard work!

Dr. Qiang has won additional awards, including the INFORMS Judith Liebman Award in 2009. He is actively involved in the profession, as he was the President of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Student Chapter of INFORMS from 2007 to 2008, and is an active member of INFORMS and the Decision Science Institute. Dr. Qiang joined the faculty of Penn State Great Valley in 2009. At Penn State Great Valley, he has taught Operations Management, a core course for all MBA students.

Dr. Qiang is the co-author with Professor Anna Nagurney, who was the chair of his doctoral dissertation committee, of the book, Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, John Wiley & Sons (2009).

Dr. Qiang is a Center Associate of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management.

The Cybersecurity Website is Now Live!

The Cybersecurity website that details the breadth and depth of research and education activities at UMass Amherst on this topic is now live. We are delighted with this important initiative that includes faculty and students from such outstanding departments and schools at UMass Amherst as: Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mathematics and Statistics, Political Science, Communications, and the Isenberg School of Management.

You will find on this site more information about the various campus-wide activities, including the relevant research that we have been conducting at the Virtual Center for Supernetworks on the Modeling, Analysis, and Computation of Solutions to Complex Network Systems.

Last term, as part of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series in Operations Research / Management Science, we hosted the presentation of Professor Brian Levine of the Computer Science Department on cyber forensics (which the audience members are still talking about). This term, the upcoming talk of Richard Brooks on smart grids is also relevant to cyber security.

We are looking forward to further supporting the important research and education efforts on this most important topic and are glad that we were able to support financially, in part, the development of this website.

Forensic Investigation of the Internet and Mobile Systems -- Last Lecture in the Fall 2009 Series in Operations Research

We are delighted that Dr. Brian Levine of the UMass Amherst Computer Science Department will be delivering his lecture, Forensic Investigation of the Internet and Mobile Systems, this coming Friday at the Isenberg School of Management. With this lecture we conclude our 2009 Fall Speaker Series in Operations Research / Management Science.

We have a terrific lineup for Spring 2010 and I hope that many of you will be able to join us. The announcement will be out soon.

Below is the announcement on Professor Levine's talk that was prepared by the award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter that I serve as the Faculty Advisor of.

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The last INFORMS Speaker Seminar of the Fall 2009 semester is scheduled for the next Friday, December 4, 2009. We are delighted to have Professor Brian Levine, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst, who will speak on "Forensic Investigation of the Internet and Mobile Systems."

Dr. Levine joined the UMass Computer Science faculty in Fall 1999 and is currently an associate professor. His research focuses on mobile networks, privacy and forensics, and the Internet, and he has published more than 60 papers on these topics. Much of his work is based experiments using a unique mobile network testbed, DieselNet, which is comprised of computer-equipped PVTA buses and a network of mesh APs in downtown Amherst. Brian's active funding
includes awards from the National Science Foundation NETS, GENI, Trustworthy Computing, and SFS programs, DARPA's Disruption Tolerant Networking program, and the National Institute of Justice's Electronic Crime program. He received a CAREER award in 2002 for work in peer-to-peer networking, one of NSF's most prestigious awards for new faculty. He was a UMass Lilly Teaching Fellow in 2003 and was awarded his college's Outstanding Teacher Award in 2007. In 2008, he received the Alumni Award for Excellence in Science & Technology from his undergraduate alma mater, the State University of New York at Albany. He has served as an associate editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking since 2005, and is the co-founder of the ACM Northeast Digital Forensics Exchange Workshop.

He received his PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1999.

TITLE: Forensic Investigation of the Internet and Mobile Systems

Abstract: The strong impact of computing has revolutionized certain types of crime. Dissemination of data to peers is efficient because of the Internet, and criminals have de facto anonymity from exploiting open wireless access points. Mobile devices are extending the reach and character of the Internet and its relevance to crime. Fortunately, the use or even possession of computers by those that commit many crimes will typically result in digital evidence, and
investigations of murder, contraband trafficking, identity and intellectual property theft, fraud, and espionage have shown.

In this talk, I review our current research projects in digital forensics that seek to address investigation of these crimes or other violations. First, I will focus on the wired Internet and our work investigating peer-to-peer file sharing networks, which support trafficking in contraband and the exploitation of children. The problem faced in these investigations is not discovering those who commit such crimes. The tools we have developed for P2P investigations are in
everyday use by MA and PA State Police and has resulted in evidence of tens of thousands of users sharing such data. The challenge for investigators is instead deciding which of these myriad leads to follow up on next. P2P networks should be viewed as a massive data set representing the dynamic exchange of resources between users. And the most productive next investigation is the user that is selected based on an analysis past network activity. For example, who is often
source of new content on the network? Who is a trove of existing data? Ideally, these network characteristics can be linked to real criminological behaviors.

Date: Friday, December 4, 2009
Time: 11:00AM - Noon
Place: Room ISOM 112

The Announcement for this talk can be found at:
http://supernet.som.umass.edu/informs/speakernew.html

INFORMS Student Chapter website:
http://student.som.umass.edu/informs/

UMASS Amherst Student Chapter of INFORMS

Knowledge networks and Cyber security

Last week the Computer Science Department at UMass Amherst hosted a national meeting on Cyber security. UMass Amherst was selected as the site for this meeting by the Institute for Information Protection (I3P.org), which is a consortium of leading universities, national laboratories, the Department of Homeland Security, and nonprofit organizations.

More information about the two day meeting is available here.

The presentation that I prepared for this meeting was entitled: Identification of Vulnerabilities in Fragile Network Systems: Transportation Networks, the Internet, Financial Networks, and Electric Power.

The conference brought together 40 researchers for presentations, brainstorming sessions, business and research discussions, as well as social events, including a lovely dinner at the Amherst Women's Club (and for some of my colleagues in engineering and computer science this was the first time that they were in that beautiful building). I had the pleasure of meeting some truly brilliant and extremely nice representatives of this consortium from Dartmouth, CUNY, the University of Virginia, IUPUI, Idaho, and the Department of Homeland Security.

In this impressive group were also researchers whose work I had been citing and whose work Patrick Qiang and I reference in our Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World book! I could not resist a photo op!

I had become very interested in cyber security while researching the book, Supernetworks: Decision-Making for the Information Age, which I co-authored with June Dong. Our supernetwork team was then selected as one of the nine teams in the US to take part in the National Science Foundation program, Management of Knowledge Intensive Dynamic Systems. The research that we conducted under this project is now being used in many fascinating areas, including cyber trust research. I am pleased to share with you the link to our most recent paper on knowledge networks, which is co-authored with Patrick Qiang. The paper, A Knowledge Collaboration Network Model Across Disciplines, will be presented at a conference at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

Cyber security research spans different disciplines, and it is extremely important, fascinating, and timely. It is an honor to be included in this truly innovative group.