A Conference that Ended in a Standing Ovation, Thanks to WPI!

How often have you experienced a standing ovation at the end of a conference?

I must admit that I had, for the first time, such an experience on June 2, 2023, at the outstanding Innovations in Immigration Analytics Conference at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, Massachusetts. Kudos to the conference organizers: Dr. Geri Dimas (who will be an Assistant Professor at Bryant University, starting this Fall), and WPI Professors Andrew Trapp and Daniel Reichman.

The program, which can be viewed here, brought together faculty, practitioners, as well as students, who are very much engaged in issues of migration and immigration.

The format, consisting of individual presentations, lightning talks, as well as a panel, was excellent, and with coffee breaks and a delicious buffet lunch provided. And there were no registration fees!

The conference opened up with remarks by the WPI Provost Winston "Wole" Soboyejo, who set the stage for the importance of the issues and challenges that we discussed at the conference including: refugee resettlement, dynamic migrant flows and operational responses, matching refugees to employment opportunities, strategic border resource deployment challenges, and even the modeling of US immigration courts using discrete-event simulation.

My presentation was entitled, "Refugee Migration Networks with Regulations," and it has been posted on the Supernetwork Center site at the Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst. 

The presentation was based on a paper published in the Springer Nature Journal of Global Optimization and was co-authored by Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania and Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford. 

I also spoke in my presentation on recent work on investing in immigration to alleviate labor shortages in supply chains and coalition formation among countries to address migrant issues. The former topic is a chapter in my latest book, "Labor and Supply Chain Networks," with info on the book here.

The latter topic was explored in a recently published paper that I co-authored with Professors Passacantando and Raciti and is available open access!

It was terrific to meet conferees with the passion and focus to address one of the greatest challenges of our time with 103 million people around the world having been forced to leave their homes. I was deeply touched to hear, time and time again, Ukraine mentioned at this conference and the impacts of Russia's war on it, including by Dean Debora Jackson of the WPI Business School in her brilliant closing remarks. Research matters and making it accessible to organizations, nonprofits, and governments can create positive change and truly benefit humanity. 

Below, I have posted a collage of photos from the conference. 

Many thanks to the organizers: Dr. Geri Dimas and Professors Andrew Trapp and Daniel Reichman for bringing us together in such a warm and engaging event. Much work remains to be done but, together, we can accomplish much good and we will.

And for those who are interested in additional work of ours on human migration networks, a topic that we have been researching for several decades, have a look at my post.

Terrific Talk on Location Equilibria and Networks by Basilio Gentile of ETH in Switzerland

This past Friday, we were delighted to be able to host Mr. Basilio Gentile of ETH in Zurich, Switzerland in our INFORMS Speaker Series.

His talk was on: Distributed Dynamics to Achieve Location Equilibrium.

He had come to Massachusetts for about one month and had spoken at Harvard and will be speaking at MIT at LIDS tomorrow. He had reached out to me in mid March asking whether he could visit my research group. I was delighted that we could arrange for him to give a talk. His doctoral dissertation supervisor at ETH is Professor John Lygeros, who was educated at Imperial College in London and also UC Berkeley.

His presentation was on recent work that he has done with with Dario Paccagnan, Bolutife Ogunsola, and Professor John Lygeros.  That work was inspired by my work on migration equilibrium and variational inequalities, which is gratifying. I had blogged about migration equilibrium because of the refugee crises. 

Basilio described an elegant framework for what he is calling location equilibrium, consisting of a model and a novel algorithm, supported by theory. The framework has potentially a wide range of exciting potential applications. Location equilibrium can be viewed as a type of migration equilibrium in which the costs of migration between locations are not flow-dependent, as in my work with collaborators, but are fixed. One is interested in determining, given a fixed population in the economy or network, the equilibrium population distributions at the nodes. He mentioned some very nonobvious interesting applications from taxi distributions in Hong Kong to computer server allocations.

The audience benefited greatly from the clarity of his presentation on a fascinating subject, with an excellent overview also of variational inequalities, and nice network visuals. We were especially grateful that he was able to inform the audience, consisting of researchers from the College of Engineering and the Isenberg School of Management, also on the relationships of some of the most
important equilibrium concepts from Wardrop to Nash and their linkages to location and migration equilibrium! It was terrific that some of the graduate students who had taken my variational inequalities, game theory, and networks seminar got to hear more on the subject and from a speaker from Switzerland.  Basilio is originally from Italy and has met my wonderful collaborator and Supernetwork Center Associate, Professor Patrizia Daniele.

After the talk, joining us for lunch at the University Club were: Professor Eric Gonzales, one of my colleagues in Transportation at UMass Amherst, who is a UC Berkeley PhD, and two UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Officers: Pritha Dutta, who is the President, and Ekin Koker, who is the Vice President and Webmaster.

Then I had a chance to speak more with Basilio in my office and to show him my Supernetworks Lab.

Time flew by very quickly and he caught the bus back to Boston from UMass Amherst.

We thank Basilio Gentile for coming to speak at the University of Massachusetts Amherst!

Being a Globalist but Not Homesick and Migration Networks

I am now completing my second week as a Visiting Professor of Operations Management at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and I have been writing about my experiences in this blog.

I will continue to return to this wonderful city during my sabbatical from the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst over the next year.

While in Gothenburg, I have learned a lot about academic traditions, including departmental ones, which include, in our transport and logistics group with a few finance colleagues as well, the following:

• a basket of fresh fruit arrives on Tuesdays,
• pea soup and pancakes (a national dish) are served in the cafeteria every Thursday (I sampled this delicious combination last week),
• on Thursdays at 3PM there are some sweet treats that everyone gathers to consume,
  
• when someone gets a paper published there is a cake to celebrate, and
• when the weather is warm and sunny (as it has been on many days since my arrival) faculty like to meet and have coffee on the veranda outside our departmental offices.

I have also been a visiting faculty member at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden and at the SOWI Business School in Innsbruck, Austria and have spent weeks at a time in Umea, Sweden and in Catania, Italy, as well as in Bellagio, Italy. at the Rockefeller Foundation Center there. Sometimes I had my family with me and sometimes not.

As an academic, I definitely feel as though I am bicontinental.

Susan J. Matt wrote an interesting OpEd piece, The New Globalist is Homesick, in The New York Times, which I found to be provocative. However, I don´t fully agree with some of the points that she made. I think that whether or not homesickness becomes a part of your global travel and living abroad experiences depends very much on your sense of adventure and willingness to explore, as well as on your ability to establish some set of routines and traditions. Of course, it also depends on whether you are alone (or not) and for what length of time you are in another country.

I was born in Canada to Ukrainian immigrants/refugees so I have not lived in the same country all of my life.

In reading Matt's OpEd, I was reminded of research that we had done on migration networks, in which we included explicitly the costs associated with migration. We had published a series of models in economics and operations research journals and I had also included a chapter on migration networks in my Network Economics book. More recently, along with Dr. Christian Mullon of France, we have been using such ideas to explain the concentration of predators and prey in ocean systems.

Then again, I know that, unlike certain migrants, I can go home again.