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!

International Collaborations and Innovation as a Contact Sport

Dr. Indira V. Samarasekera, the President of the University of Alberta in Canada, wrote an article, "Universities Need a New Social Contract," that was published in Nature, as an opinion piece in the November 12, 2009 issue. The eloquent piece had numerous excellent ideas including that leaders from major government funding agencies from across the world -- particularly from North America, Europe, India, and China should be brought together to help to define a funding model designed to award interdisciplinary, inter-institutional and international projects. She argued that many of the most pressing problems that we are faced with today are global from international security to energy, environmental sustainability, and economic recovery. The present funding models are stuck in inertia and to solve the critical problems, international collaborations are needed.

I have had the benefit of one National Science Foundation grant through the International Programs Office to work on a project with Sweden, have benefited from two international collaborations through the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center Program, and have been on two thoroughly rewarding Fulbright adventures. I have also held other visiting positions outside of the US.

My university, UMASS Amherst, has now created a website for international research activities. I am very pleased that the center that I direct, the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, is one of the affiliated centers. This new website has a link to Fulbright scholars that have come to UMass Amherst as well as Fulbrights awarded to faculty and students. Finally, it also includes a list of recent funded research projects with an international component and I am very pleased to see that the Humanitarian Logistics: Networks for Africa conference that I organized is also on the list.

Dr. Samarasekera said in her Nature article that innovation is a contact sport and funding agencies need to work across disciplinary and national boundaries to bring researchers together who can make the greatest discoveries through intense collaborations. I fully concur!

The Pooling of Resources for Humanitarian Operations

The New York Times has a very interesting, provocative article on the pooling of resources for humanitarian operations and, in particular, as applied to Haiti, but the topic is broader and relevant in other disaster and humanitarian relief contexts. The article is focused on the pooling of financial resources and notes that the Red Cross, although it did not have a large presence in Haiti prior to the earthquake, because of its brand name recognition, has received many more financial donations than has Partners in Health, which has had a large presence in Haiti, even before the earthquake struck on January 12, 2010.

The issue of financial donations to relief organizations and providing stakeholders with proper accounting of donations is an important one and two of my former doctoral students, who are now professors, Dr. Tina Wakolbinger and Dr. Fuminori Toyasaki, are actively researching this topic.

I would argue that cooperation among humanitarian organizations in relief operations is critical and I have written on this topic earlier in this blog. In particular, as was evident in Haiti, there were numerous demand points (and there still are) for such products as water, food, medicines, and tents and the networks of different organizations were not working together in a synergistic manner. Some of the issues were obviously ones of lack of communication and coordination. Nevertheless, when it comes to the pooling of resources, including financial ones, by being able to represent the various activities of the humanitarian organizations as networks, one can actually quantify the synergistic gains from cooperation.

In joint work with Dr. Trisha Woolley and Dr. Patrick Qiang, we have developed a synergy measure that can be used to assess the benefits of cooperation by sharing of network resources. The work is documented in a study entitled, "Multiproduct Supply Chain Horizontal Network Integration: Models, Theory, and Computational Results," which is in press in the journal International Transactions in Operational Research. I presented this work earlier at the humanitarian logistics conference that I had organized, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, that took place at its Bellagio Center.

What a Transportation Symposium!

I returned from Northwestern University early this morning after a landing on a delayed United flight from Chicago O'Hare to Bradley airport in Hartford/Springfield that was preceded by an announcement by the pilot that we will be experiencing "extreme turbulence." My trip began about 5:30AM Thursday morning when I was picked up by a van service in Amherst only to have the shuttle to which the other passengers and I were to then be moved to get a flat tire right in front of Mount Holyoke College in the dark of night. Luckily, our shuttle was still in good condition so we did a swap and arrived at the airport in time for our flights. Travel is never dull and especially in the midst of a frigid winter.

My destination was Northwestern University, where its Transportation Center, directed by Professor Hani S. Mahmassani, was hosting a Symposium on Transportation Network Design and Economics. The symposium was to mark the visit of Professor Martin Beckmann (who was on my doctoral committee at Brown University) and the complete symposium agenda can be found here.

The symposium was outstanding and brought together researchers in engineering, economics, operations research, regional science, and even physics. I especially appreciated the attention to detail in the organization of this symposium with sufficient time scheduled for many exciting discussions, wonderful coffee breaks, and a delicious free lunch. Professor Beckmann had arrived on Wednesday having traveled first from Providence to NYC, where he saw an opera and visited museums. He had taken an Amtrak sleeper car from NYC to Chicago (he believes in experiencing many different modes of transportation) and told us that the service was great but his sleeping compartment was rather cold. He is traveling back to Providence also on Amtrak (but through Washington DC).

Professors Mahmassani and David E. Boyce are to be congratulated as well as the staff of the Transportation Center at Northwestern for organizing an exceptional venue and very stimulating symposium program! The discussions that took place germinated numerous research questions and ideas on a topic of great relevance regionally, nationally, and globally. The audience included faculty, students, and practitioners. There were participants from Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Urbana, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Purdue University, Roosevelt University, Loyola University, and UMass Amherst, as well as individuals from the Chicago Transportation Authority, Cambridge Systematics, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, and several independent consultants.

The symposium was a perfect way in which to honor the lasting contributions of Professor Martin Beckmann to the economics and science of transportation networks! It was thrilling to, once again, see Professor Beckmann, who is 85 years old, and whose wit and brilliance still astound.

The photo above of Professor Beckmann with me was taken at the lovely dining hall at the Allen Center at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University on January 28, 2010.

Adaptive Network Design, Biology, Railroads, and Operations Research

What can biology teach us about adaptive network design? That is the question underlying an article in The New York Times that is reporting on the paper published in Science by Tero, Takagi, and co-authors, entitled, Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design. The article appears in the January 22, 2010 edition of Science, pp. 439-442. The Times article with the catchy title, Slime Mold Proves to be a Brainy Blob, intrigued me so I also read the scientific article that it was based on.

Interestingly, the researchers, based in Japan and England, used amoeba to "reproduce" the rail network of Tokyo and also developed a basic mathematical model for adaptive network design.

They, however, do not cite any literature prior to 1996 and, coincidentally, as I have been writing in this blog, Northwestern University is hosting a Symposium on Transportation Network Design and Economics this coming Friday to mark the visit of Professor Martin Beckmann who co-authored a landmark book on transportation, which discussed decentralized versus centralized behavior, with mathematical models, in 1956!

Nevertheless, I was pleased to see that the authors of the Science article cited (as their earliest reference) a paper published in 1996 in the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR), which I am on the editorial board of, and which is now edited by Celso Ribeiro of Brazil. That article, Heuristics from Nature for Hard Combinatorial Optimization Problems, was authored by Colorni, Dorigo, and others, who are based in Italy.

Interestingly, the ecology community, led by Mullon and colleagues in France, which is also part of the biology community, is now also applying concepts of network equilibrium from operations research and economics, as their work on (with special relevance to fisheries) demonstrates. Indeed, my Network Economics book has inspired, in part, their work and they acknowledge accordingly.

Academics, Athletics, and Haiti

The Boston Globe has a wonderful article on Vladimir Ducasse, a UMass Amherst football lineman, who is trying out on the Gulf Coast for the Senior Bowl with dreams of being selected by the National Football League (NFL). The article traces the history of this star athlete and discusses his focus and discipline in light of the earthquake and devastation in his birthplace, Haiti.

The article notes that Ducasse selected UMass Amherst, first and foremost, for its academics, and, next, for its athletics -- football. It talks about the trust that he has earned and his love and respect for the coaches as well as his abilities to concentrate on the tasks before him, given the immense distractions of the events in his home country.

We wish Vladimir Ducasse as well as his countrymen all the best as they begin to rebuild and reconstruct Haiti.

You're Only as Good as Your Last Student

Frank Carroll, the coach of several Olympic figure skaters, including Evan Lysacek and Michelle Kwan, said it well: You are only as good as your last student. The New York Times had a recent terrific interview with him in which he was asked whether having one of his students get a gold medal at the 2010 Winter Olympics (in this case Evan Lysacek) would be meaningful to him -- something that has eluded him.

I do think that his quote has relevance also to a professor and especially when one considers one's most recent PhD student to graduate. My most recent PhD student, who received his PhD in May 2009 was Dr. Patrick Qiang. Above is an announcement for an upcoming talk of his at the university where he is now a faculty member.

Interestingly, another former PhD student of mine who received his PhD in 2006 from UMass Amherst, Dr. Dmytro Matsypura, also has some great news to report. He has received tenure from the University of Sydney in Australia where he has been on the Faculty of Economics and Business for the past 3 years. He is in the Discipline (something like a Department in a US-based university) of Operations Management and Econometrics. Plus, he has been granted a sabbatical. He will be coming back to his alma mater as a Visiting Scholar.

Being a professor is like being a coach and Frank Carroll said it brilliantly!