Faces at INFORMS Conference in Buenos Aires

Today was the first day that I could catch my breath since arriving in Buenos Aires, Argentina last Saturday to attend the ALIO-INFORMS conference. The conference was a whirlwind experience with about 1,000 conferees in attendance and just over 100 from the US. Giving a talk, taking part in a panel on international collaborations, plus attending an editorial board meeting, and giving a tutorial on Fragile Networks, still left me some time to attend both plenary talks and keynote talks as well as another tutorial (besides my own).

What a colleague said to me yesterday, I agree with -- in addition to the scientific exchanges that take place at an international conference, what makes such events so special is the people that you meet from colleagues from around the world that you get to see again and to reconnect with to new friends that are made.

Above are some photos taken at some of the above conference events that I mentioned earlier.

More photos and reflections can be found in several of my earlier blogposts.

The atmosphere in Buenos Aires, with the beautiful pale blue sky and the fascinating architecture and boulevards, plus the fantastic food and elegant people (and numerous dogs and dogwalkers), all make for a truly unique and special conference venue.

Lectures on Fragile Networks

Below you will find the links to the lectures that comprised the invited tutorial on Fragile Networks that I presented with Dr. Qiang "Patrick" Qiang at the 2010 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, & Prediction (SBP10), which took place at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD, in March, 2010. The tutorial was delivered in three modules/lectures:

Module I - Module II - Module III

These lectures are in pdf format and should be of interest to anyone concerned about disaster and emergency preparedness as well as network vulnerability ranging from applications to transportation networks and the Internet to electric power grids and supply chains as well as financial networks. This tutorial is based on our book, Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, published by John Wiley & Sons.

The Fragile Networks Tutorial at NIH

Today, Dr. Patrick Qiang and I gave our tutorial on Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, which is also the title of our book published by John Wiley & Sons. The tutorial took place at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has a lovely campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The trees are blooming here and the tutorial was one of four delivered today. These tutorials precede the 2010 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling & Prediction (SBP2010), which begins tomorrow and at which about 500 delegates are expected. You may find our tutorial, which consisted of three distinct modules here.

Dr. Qiang and I had a wonderful time at our tutorial and the audience consisted of academics, consultants, and government employees, as well as researchers, and represented disciplines from computer science and applied mathematics to computational economics, medicine, and physics. The questions were great and the conversations truly stimulating. We met some marvelous people and saw some old friends. I am enjoying the collegial atmosphere and discussions tremendously. After our tutorial we had a wonderful dinner with a brilliant researcher who is trained as a physicist and who is now working in computer science and is from Hungary.

We are very much looking forward to hearing talks at the conference and Dr. Qiang and I will be giving a paper on Wednesday on knowledge collaboration networks. This paper is published in the conference proceedings volume, which we picked up today.

We thank the organizers of SBP 2010 for the opportunity to present the tutorial and for organizing such an exciting composition of speakers and presentations!

Boston, Cambridge, and Upcoming Conference in Buenos Aires

I was in Boston and Cambridge this past week where the roads and streets were clear of snow, unlike the Washington DC area, which is being pummeled by a huge snowstorm that has grounded travel to a halt.

Having spent a year as a Science Fellow at Harvard in 2005-2006 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, I like to go back fairly regularly. Cambridge and Boston are two magnificent locations in my state of Massachusetts and I get my muse in those places (among others).

While in Cambridge, I met the Executive Director of the Latin America Research Center of the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard University, who is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Buenos Aires is the venue for the ALIO-INFORMS Conference that is taking place in early June, 2010. At the conference, I will be giving a tutorial, Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain Age. Additional tutorial topics and plenary lectures can be found here. The New York Times had a recent article on Buenos Aires which highly recommended it as a fascinating destination.

At the ALIO-INFORMS conference, which will bring operations researchers and management scientists from around the globe to discuss their latest research, I will also be taking part in a panel on International Collaborations, a topic that I have been writing about on this blog recently. The panel is organized by WORMS, Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences, a fora of my professional society INFORMS. The convener of this panel is Dr. Sadan Kulturel, a Professor at Penn State Berks. Joining me on the panel will be: Drs. M. Gulnara Baldoquin, Karla Hoffman, and Lorena Predanas. The panel will focus on different means of international collaborations such as funded projects, international research and teaching projects, sabbaticals, etc. The panelists will discuss their unique perspectives on issues affecting the success of women in academic positions in the US and in Latin American countries. I am very much looking forward to being on this panel, giving my tutorial, and to going to the ALIO-INFORMS conference.

Above I share with you some photos of the intellectual capitals of the universe (Boston and Cambridge) taken this past week (including photos of Harvard Yard and Radcliffe Yard, with a recent sculpture, and where I had my office as a Science Fellow). I could not resist also including a photo of the bronze sculptures of the ducks made famous in the book, Make Way for Ducklings, on the Boston Common. Note the absence of snow although it is February!

2010 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction

Dr. Sun-Ki Chai, the program co-chair of the 2010 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction (SBP 2010), has announced that the conference program is now online. Registration for this conference as well as the tutorials prior and the workshop after is free! The conference takes place at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, March 30-31, 2010 and registration is required.

Information on the conference and the agenda are available here.

Dr. Patrick Qiang and I will be giving one of the four invited tutorials prior to the conference, on March 29, 2010, on the theme of our Fragile Networks book.

The growing number of disasters globally has dramatically demonstrated the dependence of our economies and societies on critical infrastructure networks. At the same time, the deterioration of the infrastructure from transportation and logistical networks to electric power networks due to inadequate maintenance and development as well as to climate change, has resulted in large societal and individual user costs. This tutorial will focus on recently introduced mathematically rigorous and computer-based tools for the assessment of network efficiency and robustness, along with vulnerability analysis. The analysis is done through the prism of distinct behavioral principles, coupled with the network topologies, the demand for resources, and the resulting flows and induced costs.

This tutorial will be taught in three modules. More information on all the tutorials can be found here.