The Dynamics of Disasters Conference in Greece and Multidisciplinary Perspectives

After the fabulous EURO Conference in Dublin, Ireland, which I wrote about in my previous blogpost, I journeyed to Kalamata, Greece with a stopover in London and then Vienna.

Along with my outstanding colleagues, Professors Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida and Ilias S. Kotsireas of Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, I had organized another Dynamics of Disasters conference in Kalamata, Greece, July 1-5, 2019.  I'd like to also take this opportunity to congratulate Professor Pardalos on his receipt of the Humboldt Research Award. He was recently recognized in a ceremony with other Humboldt recipients in Berlin by Angela Merkel and the President of Germany!

The importance of multidisciplinary perspectives in all phases of disaster management from preparedness and mitigation to response was vividly illustrated at this conference by speakers from many different countries.

Kalamata is located on the Mediterranean sea and it is not an easy location to get to, but the beauty of the venue, as well as the fascinating scientific exchanges and discussions on a theme of great importance, made the travel worthwhile for everyone. The conference took place at the Elite Resort hotel in Kalamata. Below are some photos taken at the conference site and the immediately surrounding area. The local organizer was Sofia Papadaki, to whom thanks are extended!

The two previous such conferences that I also co-organized with Pardalos and Kotsireas resulted in two edited volumes published by Springer. Many of the chapters are enjoying multiple downloads and I have used several in the course: Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare that I teach at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst.

The delegates at this Dynamics of Disasters conference came from the USA, Canada, Greece, Italy, Poland, Germany, Korea, Japan, Russia, and Nepal, resulting in a very international experience and also an intense one since there is only a single track of talks. Below is a group photo taken at the conference venue of the delegates.

Professor Stephan Pickl of Germany, who is Chair of Operations Research at the Universität der Bundeswehr München, delivered an excellent lecture on a Smart Optimization Framework SARA, emphasizing the hyperconnectivity of critical infrastructure networks and stochastic elements. He is a renowned disaster management expert and involved in policy making as well in Germany.

Dr. Matsuno of Japan presented an excellent talk on the use of gaming on smart phones to inform and educate about disasters in Tokyo, including floods. There was also an excellent presentation on a course on emergency management developed by Dr. Assael, a chemical engineer from Greece, with input from students, and presentations on elegant network models for evacuation by Dr. Urmila Pyakurel of Nepal and colleagues and by her student Hari Nandan Nath. The use of DEA in regions for Russia for coping with disasters was presented by Sergiy Demin on work done with Dr. Fouad Aleskerov, and a description of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University in Massachusetts was described by Dr. Steven Flynn. A talk on disaster management at mass gatherings with a focus on the Athens Marathon was delivered by Dr. Angeliki Bistariki.

Professor Theodore Trafalis of the University of Oklahoma delivered an outstanding tutorial on machine learning for imbalanced data with applications to severe weather predication, including tornadoes.

It was a pleasure to listen to the very innovative and important research being conducted by colleagues in Italy, including that of Dr. Ugo Fiore and Salvatore Scognamiglio and colleagues, on the prevention of geological disasters, with even the use of a large-scale dataset on China.

The audience was very engaged and new friendships made and networks established.

It was fabulous to meet Dr. Steven Flynn, the founding director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University in Massachusetts.

Another wonderful, unexpected delight was to hear Dr. Angeliki Bistariki speak. She is a nurse and a PhD and, in her presentation on mass gatherings and the Athens Marathon, she had a video from our local news station in western Massachusetts - WWLP, moderated by Barry Krieger on how MEMA prepares for the Boston Marathon!

I mentioned in our discussions that I had hosted a MEMA official in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class last semester, Ms. Sara Zalieckas, who was responsible for safety at the 2019 Boston Marathon. My blogpost on her brilliant guest lecture can be viewed here.

It was also terrific to hear the talk by Dr. Georgios Tsaples and colleagues on system dynamics modeling of the consequences of extreme weather conditions on traffic in the city of Thessaloniki, Greece. There were even insights as to modal choice and use (or not) of public transportation following.

Stamatis Papangelou reported on his research on land property data logging on a blockchain ledger, which is very innovative and enables the assessment of land property for the risk of natural disasters.

Below are photos taken with Professor Pardalos and his son, Akis (whom we have had the pleasure of seeing at numerous conferences around the globe), and with Professor Ilias Kotsireas and the "other" Professor Nagurney - my husband, along with conference assistants.

The structure of the conference included time for coffee breaks, nice meals, some touring, and a banquet with a view of the Mediterranean Sea.

This was our third time in Kalamata, Greece, and we were quite impressed by how much the surrounding area seems to have improved economically with new shops, restaurants, and many happy families strolling in the evening when the ocean breezes from the Mediterranean cooled off the area. Nice to even see bicycle lanes downtown.

I would be remiss not to mention the quality of the food in Kalamata - the fruits and vegetables are some of the most delicious ones I have ever eaten!

I have made my talk on game theory and disaster relief, co-authored with my doctoral student Mojtaba Salarpour and Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania, available for download to further discussions.

And, today, we took another group photo of those who were still able to be with us.

Special thanks to Professors Pardalos and Kotsireas as well as to Sofia Papadaki, and to all the delegates to our Dynamics of Disasters conference, for making it such a success. Best of luck with your continuing research!

Crisis in Greece but Dynamics of Disasters Conference Goes On!

The debt crisis in Greece is top news all around the world. The past two evenings, for example, BBC had over 30 minutes of coverage on the topic beginning at 10PM. The New York Times even has an article on the brain drain in Greece, which I am well aware of, given the outflow of professionals, including academics.

This is also the period that our Dynamics of Disasters conference is taking place in Kalamata, Greece. I thank all of my OR/MS colleagues for messages of concern. It has been a very interesting time (and I have been to Greece for conferences both last summer and the summer before).

It has been fascinating to be in Greece during this crisis. We have walked from ATM to ATM since they have been emptied out with Greeks faced with a limit of 60 euros per card per day since Sunday. I was reminded of Dr. Radhika Kulkarni's (VP of R&D Analytics at SAS) presentation at the Isenberg School of Management this past spring, which included her work on where ATMs should be refilled!The queues at the ATMs with funds are long as the photo we took below reveals.

The conference has been great. I posted some commentary in my previous post along with photos and below I add to the photos and discussion.

Today, in addition to a talk by  a political scientist, we have had presentations from a physicists, from engineers, and also from operations researchers and management scientists. Clearly, we are seeing a need for holistic, systematic perspectives and approaches that can benefit practitioners and disaster management professionals. Today we heard talks ranging on such topics as narrative retrospection - explaining Danish and Swedish political dynamics in wake of the 2004 tsunami (in which 600 hundred Swedes and Danes perished in Thailand - the biggest such loss of life in years of Swedes in a natural disaster, albeit far from home) by Dr. Oliver Rubin, how to model pandemic dynamics by Dr. Edward Thommes of GSK  with Professor Monica-Gabriela Cojocaru (I was pleased to see my research cited here on projected dynamical systems), horizontal cooperation among humanitarian organizations with a focus on the UN (by Professor Fuminori Toyasaki of York University with colleagues), and even tornado detection from radar data with the use of machine learning (of course, presented by a colleague from the University of Oklahoma, Professor Trafalis), and even network criticality and disaster response with results for the 2007 Peloponnese wildfires, given by Professor Mitsakis of the Hellenic Transport Institute. Professor Mitsakis with his collaborators has been applying the Nagurney and Qiang network efficiency/performance measure to identify the importance of links (such as roads) and their rankings. It was great to see how the work that Patrick Qiang and I did is being used now in many different applications and countries. Our Fragile Networks book, which summarized many of our papers on the topic.

It was also great to hear Professor Sakis Migdalas, who is Greek, and is now a Professor at the University of Lulea in Sweden, one of the most northern universities on the planet, talk about transportation and distribution models.

Of course, Distinguished University Professor, Panos M. Pardalos was amazing in presenting his latest work on evacuation networks and centrality measure.

Below are photos of presenters, the audience, and more, that were taken today.

I thank my co-organizers, Professor Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida and Professor Ilias Kotsireas of Wilfrid Laurier University, for such a stimulating conference during a historic (and unplanned) debt crisis in Greece. It was wonderful to work with them on this conference. We are looking forward to getting together a very nice conference volume proceedings.

Tonight is the conference gala dinner, which we are all very much looking forward to. As the Prime Minister of Greece Tsipras said the other day on BBC news, the sun will shine again.

Travel Disrupted but Talk Will Take Place

Yesterday, the East Coast was feeling the aftereffects of the horrific tornadoes and storms that struck the South, especially Alabama, with estimates of as many as 300 deaths.

I was at Bradley airport, waiting for my flight to Philly, with a connection to Ithaca, where I was to attend and speak at the Walter Isard Symposium. Then the notice went up that my flight was delayed, but the estimated time for departure made it still feasible for me to catch my connecting flight. You can guess what happened -- after several hours at the airport my flight was cancelled (and the flight from Philly to Ithaca later that day, which I had been told was sold out, was also). Flights were being cancelled to Dulles, DC, Chicago, Newark, Philly, etc. and the gate agent told me of planes that were hours behind schedule. He said that traveling would not be a pleasant experience given all the storms even if you could get on a flight (which I couldn't).

I felt like Steve Martin in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles."

I was terribly disappointed since I so much wanted to pay tribute to the founder of regional science and to see colleagues and friends who were coming for the memorial service and symposium.Professor Isard died last Fall at the age of 91.

Times like these call for resiliency. I contacted Professor June Dong, my collaborator, who was going to the symposium and who lives only about an hour away by car from Cornell and she agreed to give my presentation -- so the talk will go on. Appropriately, she is even in a photo that I had put into the presentation in which she is seated right next to Professor Isard, who came to the talk that I gave at Cornell on April 1, 2009.

I have been told that both the memorial service and the symposium will be videotaped, and posted, which is wonderful.

As Professor David Boyce emailed me this morning, "The weather has been a major problem for this event."

As for two of my doctoral students, they made it to the POMS conference in Reno, Nevada, and are giving their presentations now.