A Big Thanks to Dr. George Karagiannis for His Brilliant Guest Lecture in My Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare Class

This past week, we had the honor and pleasure of hosting Dr. George Karagiannis in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class, which, this year, is being taught remotely because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

An integral part of this course is having guest lecturers who are expert practitioners. Hearing from such experts reinforces the course material and provides for a rich educational experience for the students.

Now, for some background on Dr. Karagiannis, whom I met back in 2015, when I co-organized the Dynamics of Disasters conference in Kalamata, Greece, with Professors Ilias S. Kotsireas and Panos M. Pardalos, and Dr. Karagiannis was a speaker. We also hosted him for a seminar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Fall of 2015.

Dr. George Karagiannis is Greece's Deputy Secretary-General for Civil Protection, the US equivalent of Deputy FEMA Administrator. From 2016 to 2019, he was a Technical Officer at the European Commission Joint Research Center, where his area of expertise revolved around emergency management, critical infrastructure protection and hybrid threats. Prior to joining the Joint Research Center, he was a Disaster Management Consultant. He has worked in four countries, developed two strategic national risk assessments, organized over 60 exercises, led the development of a dozen emergency operations plans and responded to disasters in the field. He also was a Research Scientist at the Technical University of Crete in Greece, where he his interdisciplinary research lay at the intersection of systems engineering and disaster resilience. George earned his Doctorate in Environmental Science and Engineering from Saint-Etienne School of Mines in France. He also holds degrees in Civil Engineering and in Disaster Management and Business Administration, and is a Certified Emergency Manager by the International Association of Emergency Managers.

Dr. Karagiannis's presentation title in my course was, "Humanitarian Needs Assessment & Information Management." He zoomed in from Athens, Greece, which was lovely since the students in this class are physically located not only in Massachusetts but across the US, with a student even enrolled, who is now in Turkey.

Due to multiple inquiries and requests, Dr. Karagiannis has given me permission to post the slide deck of his excellent presentation.

So many excellent insights and recommendation are contained in his presentation, which I urge you to study. Some of the takeaways that very much resonated with me and also reinforced the material that we have been covering in the class and will be addressing in subsequent weeks are the following:

1. Help flows were there are cameras. This statement demonstrates the importance of media in getting the news out but also emphasizes that, at times, people who are victims of disasters may not get the help that they need.

2. Goods may be donated and delivered that do not help the victims - such as fur coats from Greece following the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006! The wrong goods create extra stressors (even if they are donated in good faith) since they require human resources to offload and also take up valuable storage space. In the case of the furs, they ultimately created a health hazard. I recall tuxedos being delivered to victims of Hurricane Katrina, and there are many other such incredible stories of the wrong goods.

3. When do you stop gathering data? How much data is "good enough" for needs assessment?

4. The recognition of the importance of time is paramount. If it takes a time t for needs assessment, it will take a time of 2t for making a decision.

5. One must distinguish primary data from secondary data.

6. Comparison over time is also essential in terms of the number of people displaced by the disaster.

7. One of the greatest challenges is learning to make decisions with only incomplete information when everything is at stake!

8. There is a shift of Emergency Management now in addressing infrastructure, which makes tremendous sense due to the negative impacts of climate change on infrastructure.

I very much like that he noted the UN Cluster Approach to support sector emergency functions, which we had emphasized in the course just a few days prior.

We also had a great discussion on how well Greece mitigated the spread of the coronavirus, starting their preparations already in early January! The country was very agile and reacted quickly.

The students were prepared with questions for the speaker. Dr. Karagiannis was so generous with his time - staying way past the class time window to answer questions.

And we honored him with a Professor for a Day certificate recognizing that his contributions.

Cybersecurity Research and the Isenberg School of Management

There is tremendous interest in cybersecurity issues at UMass as well as at the Isenberg School of Management.

For example, on December 2, 2014, there will be a Cybersecurity Network Workforce Summit taking place at UMass Boston with participation from the UMass system President Dr. Robert Caret and the UMass Amherst Chancellor Dr. Kumble Subbaswamy.

And, just this past September, along with my Isenberg School of Management colleagues, Professor Mila Sherman of Finance and Professor Senay Solak of my Operations and Information Management Department, we, together with Professor Wayne Burleson of ECE, organized, with help from Professor Andrew Lo of the Sloan School, a very successful cybersecurity workshop at MIT. This workshop was supported by the second grant that we had received from the Advanced Cuber Security Center (ACSC).

I have posted all the presentations from our Workshop here.

Since our workshop at MIT, my OIM colleague, Professor Ryan Wright, received an NSF grant, joint with his University of Oklahoma colleagues, entitled, Building the Human Firewall. Plus, we heard that one of our Management Science doctoral students, Yueran Zhuo, who is being supervised by Solak, had her poster, titled "Optimizing Cybersecurity Investments with Risk: Insights for Resource Allocation" tie for second place as voted by ACSC Annual Conference attendees as a Best Cyber Security Solution for 2014.  The $1,000 prize will be shared with the other second place winner "Authentication Using Embedded Logical Queries."

There is a lot of excitement on the UMass Amherst campus surrounding the possibility of a Cybersecurity Institute that would be across colleges and schools, which is terrific. 

My interests and research in cybersecurity center around the network economics of cyber crime and cybersecurity with additional foci on risk management, information asymmetry, information sharing and security investments, Internet vulnerability and resilience,  as well as supply chain aspects of security and vulnerability due, for example, to outsourcing. My latest paper on the theme is  A Multiproduct Network Economic Model of Cybercrime in Financial Services.

A video of my presentation on cybercrime and financial service organizations filmed at the INNFORMS Minnepolis conference can be viewed here.

The Operations and Information Management Major at the Isenberg School -- Why It Delivers

Since this is a blog about research, education, networks, and the world, I periodically write about exciting majors and curriculum issues.

College programs and areas of study must be continuously updated as a means of both energizing the course content and materials, and faculty and students alike.

Change may be hard but is a primary means of growth and dynamism. When it comes to education, growth in terms of new ideas, new modes of teaching and learning, and the inclusion of new topics and courses is essential.

I am passionate about the courses that I teach and the research that I do and am so grateful for the intellectual and personal rewards that being a faculty member bring. Life is never boring and no two days are ever alike!

At the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, I have been heavily involved in teaching at the undergraduate level in the Operations Management program and at the doctoral level in the Management Science program. These are housed in the Department of Finance and Operations Management (yes, we are the quant/techie types).

There is some very good news to report -- soon the official title of our undergrad major will be Operations and Information Management. We added several faculty in the information management area (always take advantage of arguing your case for new faculty slots and this was made possible through a proposal I co-wrote) and we hope to add more soon. We are also hiring faculty in the Operations Management/Management Science area.

The Chair of our department, as well as the faculty, have done a terrific job adding courses and, through the Career Center at the Isenberg School, our students have had wonderful internship opportunities and job placements. The list of offered courses in the new official major includes: Supply Chain Management, Introduction to Management Science, Enterprise Resource Planning, Business Intelligence, Logistics and Transportation, Business Process Simulation, Business Process Optimization, Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare, and Sustainable Systems.

The curriculum includes courses that satisfy the Information Technology Minor at UMass Amherst.

And, to whet your appetite further (it may make you want to be an undergraduate again): The internships and job placements of our students have included some of my favorite companies:

Consulting & Technology: Grant Thornton, IBM, and SAP

Manufacturing & Supply Chains: BOEING, Pratt & Whitney, UPS, Fedex, United Technologies Corporation, Bose, Avery Dennison, SABIC Innovative Plastics.

Retail Distribution: Macy’s, Frito Lay, C&S, Target, Staples, Kohl’s Department Stores, Lowe’s, Pepsi Bottling Group, Toys R Us

Financial Services: Hanover, Liberty Mutual, The Hartford, and Mass Mutual.