Giving a Plenary Talk in a New Country

Today I am flying to Bogota, Colombia where I will be giving a plenary talk at the conference: II Congreso Internacional Industria y Organizaciones.

Colombia is a "new" country for me since I have never been there. It will be about the 50th country that I have been to. I will be the only female international plenary speaker so it is important to show up and to present!

David Simchi-Levi of MIT was a plenary speaker at the same conference last year and enjoyed it so much that he highly recommended that I accept the invitation to present.

I will be hosted, in part, by Professor Javier Orjuela, whom I met at the recent EURO2015 conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

It will be great to see many operations researchers there whose research focuses on logistics including my fellow plenary speaker, Teo Crainic from Canada,  who is well-known through his INFORMS activities.

The title of my plenary talk, which I have just gone over and am very much looking forward to presenting,  is: Sustainable Supply Chain Networks for Sustainable Cities. I will be overviewing some essential supply chains to cities (energy and food ones) and  going deeper into a model that I developed with Professor Min Yu of the University of Portland and Professor Jonas Floden of the University of Gothenburg. The model includes product differentiation and competition and frequency of supply chain activities, along with emissions generated and different weghts assigned by supply chain decision-makers to the latter.

Also, I will be seeing one of my former Isenberg School of Management MBA students who is an executive in Bogota.

I am sure that it will be an exciting adventure experiencing a new country, especially given that Bogota is 8,000 feet above sea level.

I am brushing up on my Spanish. Hasta luego!

Networks: Energy, Cities and the Control of Complex Systems

Last May, I had the pleasure of speaking in warm and beautiful Erice, Sicily on Sustainable Supply Chain Networks for Sustainable Cities, as part of the Workshop on Energy, Cities, and Control of Complex Systems organized by Drs. Adilson Motter and Robert Schock.

The workshop was the 47th Session of the International Seminars on Planetary Emergencies Energy, Cities, and the Control of Complex Systems,

I posted some photos of the venue at the Ettore Majorana Scientific Centre, the workshop participants, and the sights (and even food)  along with some reflections on this blog.

Now, I am very pleased to share with you that, through the efforts of Dr. Schock and Dr. Motter, the report on the workshop findings is now posted. Also, all the presentations are also posted. Thanks to the organizers of this great workshop as well as to the Energy Permanent Monitoring Panel, which is part of the  World Federation of Scientists, for providing a homebase for our report and all the presentations.

A direct link to my presentation is here.

I guess the audience enjoyed my presentation (and I certainly did theirs) since I was invited to speak on the topic again in Berlin, Germany next month.

We are having discussions on a possible follow on workshop, which is certainly needed, so stayed tuned and stay warm!