Great Data Science Center Launch at UMass Amherst Today with Photos

Today was a jampacked, fabulous day (although we did wake up to a blanket of snow and ice and it is April 9)!

Today was the Data Science Center launch at UMass Amherst with a terrific program, many friends in attendance, and great talks and panelists.

The venue was the 6th floor of the new Life Sciences Lab building at UMasss Amherst and there were refreshments upon our arrival.

The first one I saw was Professor Andrew McCallum of the Computer Science Department, who is the Director of the new Data Science Center (and we hosted Andre in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series a while back).

He was a terrific master of ceremonies and the visionary and leader behind this endeavor as our Provost, Dr. Katherine Newman emphasized in her remarks. I snapped the photo of them hugging below.

I got to chat with our Vice Chancellor for Research and Engagement Dr. Mike Malone and Professor David Jensen of Computer Science, who also spoke in our series.

It was great to see my colleagues from Civil and Environmental Engineering, Professors Eleni Chritofa and Eric Gonzales, fellow transportation researchers.

Our Chancellor, Dr. Kumble Subbaswamy and Provost Dr. Katherine Newman had opening remarks as did Professor McCallum.

The keynote was given by Distinguished University Professor Jim Kurose, who is now serving in the CISE Directorate at NSF. He remarked how warm and lovely it was in DC with the cherry blossoms in bloom and then he landed in Bradley Airport and drove to Amherst through a hailstorm. He, as always, had some good jokes including his first presentation as an NSF program officer during which he did not thank the most important person (but thanked others).

I left the event for 2 hours since one of my doctoral students, Sara Saberi, was defending her doctoral dissertation proposal (she passed, so congratulations are in order) and the photo below is of her with the dissertation committee: Professor Adams Steven, Tilman Wolf, and Michael Zink.

 I then came back for the poster session with my doctoral student Shivani Shukla and got to see more colleagues from the College of Engineering and the Isenberg School as well as meeting a professor from Smith College and talking with more Comp Sci professors. Another highpoint was seeing Chris Hill of MIT who came up to me to reminisce about when we were at the U. of Illinois' Supercomputing Center one summer for several weeks - this was very special and I have fond memories of (massively) parallel computing, which I loved to do! Once a programmer, always a programmer!

As Professor Kurose said in his remarks, Congratulations to the Data Science Center,, and on a great launch event.

Co-Organizing Dynamics of Disasters Conference

Together with great colleagues, Distinguished University Professor Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida, Gainesville, and Professor Ilias S. Kotsireas of Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, I am co-organizing the International Conference on Dynamics of Disasters.

The poster for the conference is displayed below.

The conference will take place June 30-July 2, 2015 in Kalamata, Greece.

The program committee has representatives from numerous countries.

Information on paper submissions and deadline is available here.

Below are the conference themes:

Conference Themes

• Disaster communications and social networks
• Healthcare issues and disaster relief
• Disaster team coordination, integration, and synergies
• Humanitarian logistics and relief supply chains
• Advances in methodological tools for emergency preparedness, response, and risk mitigation
• Performance metrics for disaster response
• Critical infrastructure protection and resiliency
• Financial funding for disaster relief
• Learning from disasters and response
• Cooperative game theory
• Dynamical systems
• Decision-making under risk and uncertainty
• Spread of diseases and contagion
• Modelling and mathematics of disasters.

I am presently teaching a course on Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare so a conference such as the Dynamics of Disasters one is very synergistic.  There is a tremendous amount of work that remains to be done so I hope that some of you can join us for what should be a very stimulating and engaging plus timely conference.

Sustaining Supply Chains in Disasters -- Podcast and Poster

I had the pleasure of being interviewed recently by Mr. Michael Breen of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) for the series Mathematical Moments.

Mr. Breen had attended my presentation at the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting last February in Washington DC. I had the honor of speaking on the Mathematics and Collective Behavior panel that was organized by Dr. Warren Page.

The interview is on Sustaining the Supply Chain and focuses on the research of my team on humanitarian logistics and disaster management.

The interview is now featured on the AMS website, along with an accompanying poster.

The link to the poster is at:
http://www.ams.org/samplings/mathmoments/mathmoments

and you can directly access the podcast interview at:
http://www.ams.org/mathmoments/mm90-relief-podcast

The Isenberg School has made a note of the podcast on its homepage.

The series Mathematical Moments highlights, in a graphic and informative way, the myriad ways in which mathematics illuminates our world and contributes to society. Plus, through such a series, one can engage others, including students, as well as the public, on timely topics.

You may find information on our relevant publications here.

Some of the outcomes of the workshop on Humanitarian Logistics:Networks for Africa, funded through the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center Program, and that I organized, which I noted in the podcast interview, can be found on a companion website.