How to Build a Great Model -- Insights from Hal Varian

I have chaired 16 doctoral dissertation committees and tomorrow my 17th doctoral student will be defending his dissertation. In academia, we sometimes refer to the chair of a student's doctoral dissertation committee as his/her "advisor."

So, necessarily, a conscientious advisor offers advice to students during his/her doctoral studies especially when it comes time to doing research for the dissertation. Here one may help in selecting the topic, suggesting related problems, assisting a student in getting papers out for publication in journals, listening to a student give a talk/seminar, etc.

It is rewarding, as a faculty member, to see a student's progress and the greatest moment comes after the dissertation is successfully defended and the student receives the diploma wearing the cap and gown. Having a student get a really nice job is also important (to the student and his family and also to the advisor who has also invested a lot of time).

I regularly offer my students advice -- even what publications they should read and send them links to interesting articles -- these can be in newspapers or magazines or journals or even working papers.

Of course, it also is very helpful to read articles on how to do great research and to write papers.

Hal R. Varian who needs no introduction to many and is now the Chief Economist of Google and an emeritus professor at UC Berkeley, having been the founding Dean of the School of Information there, wrote a piece, "How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time," which is very useful not only to economists, but to operations researchers, and mathematical modelers, in general. An aside, my first book, "Network Economics: A Variational Inequality Approach," appeared  in 1993 was the first volume in the Advances in Computational Economics series by Kluwer (now Springer), and then appeared in revised form in 1999. And, Hal Varian was on the editorial board as was Dan McFadden, who has since received the Nobel Prize. Plus, Hal will be giving a plenary talk at EURO -- INFORMS, in Rome, Italy, July 1-4, 2013.; the link to the conference website is here.

His advice:

• Look for ideas in the world, not in the journals. (especially The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist -- all personal favorites of mine, as well)
• First make your model as simple as possible, then generalize it and you may go back and forth. (Try out simple examples.)
• Look at the literature later, not sooner.
• Model your paper after your seminar. (Here he emphasizes the importance of presenting your work to an audience. He also suggests setting your paper aside for awhile and then going back to it.)
• Stop when you've made your point.

I loved how he compared developing a model and the associated creative process to sculpting. I take great pleasure in my research and do get a thrill like when I paint or look at art when the model makes sense, is elegant, and also abstracts something relevant and interesting in the real world.

According to Hal Varian: This back-and-forth iteration in building a model is like sculpting: you are chipping away a little bit here, and a little bit there, hoping to find what's really inside that stubborn block of marble. I choose the analogy with sculpting purposely: like sculpture most of the work in building a model doesn't consist of adding things, it consists of subtracting them. This is the most fun part of modeling, and it can be very exciting when the form of the idea really begins to take shape. I normally walk around in a bit of a daze at this stage; and I try not to get too far away from a yellow pad. Eventually, if you're lucky, the inner workings of your model will reveal itself: you'll see the simple core of what's going on and you'll also understand how general the phenomenon really is.

Dream Course

The invitation came through email from a chaired professor and I was very intrigued.
 

The invitation stated: It is our pleasure to invite you to participate in the Presidential Dream Course titled “Understanding and Engineering Systems”.  

Dream Courses at the University of Oklahoma (OU) were initiated beginning in 2004 by President David L. Boren. The Dream Course program provides extra resources to enhance educational aspects of certain courses, in part for use to invite distinguished external speakers to campus. OU is particularly interested in courses that cover important topics for concerned and engaged citizens in the 21st century.

Recognizing the increasing importance of systems, our School has recently re-configured itself to become a School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. This lecture series will help us to focus attention on systems and systems engineering. 

We expect attendees to include students and faculty from various colleges from the OU Norman and Tulsa campuses.   We expect between 20 to 50 people to attend this lecture.

On behalf of the course coordinators it is my pleasure to invite you to be one of the key note speakers. 

In addition, we invite you to offer a lecture to the public during your stay with us.  We expect between 50 and 100 people to attend this lecture, including faculty, students, and the interested public, with backgrounds in engineering, economics, business, political science, humanities, and business. If time and travel constraints allow, these lectures are often accompanied by a reception and are covered by the daily university newspaper.

The invitation came from Professor J. K. Allen, who is also the Chair of the Dream Course Committee. She is an MIT grad and a UCBerkeley PhD and had previously been at Georgia Tech -- a great role model!

Since I work on network systems, the theme of the Dream Course was perfect and, since I have never, ever been to Oklahoma, this was a great opportunity. 

I also commend OU and its President for such a wonderful initiative!

 

In doing some additional research, I found that Dr. Boren has been President of OU since 1994 and he has had an amazing professional career, having graduated from Yale and then going on to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, after which he obtained his law degree. He has been a Senator and has advised President Obama, among others.

Of course, I said yes to the invitation and, in early April, after returning from Sweden, I will give a lecture in Professor Allen's Dream Course entitled: Grand Challenges and Opportunities in Supply Chain Networks: From Analysis to Design. My public lecture will be on: Assessing the Performance and Vulnerability of Networks from Transportation to the Internet, Financial Networks, and Supply Chains: What Nodes and Links Really Matter?

I am very much looking forward to this speaking engagement.

Interestingly, President Boren is also on the Board of Directors of Mayor Bloomberg's Foundation.  Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of NYC, and his philanthropy, especially to his alma mater, the Johns Hopkins University, were the subject of my most recent post.

How Much Would You Give to Your College or University -- Mayor Bloomberg of NYC Has Given Over $1 Billion to His

I am a big fan of NYC and also of its long-serving mayor, Michael Bloomberg, under whose leadership such changes to NYC (now permanent) as the closure of Broadway from 42nd Street to 47th Street to traffic and conversion to pedestrian plazas, have taken place. This was a subject of my interview for the  America Revealed video with Yul Kwon.

On the front page of today's New York Times, there is a terrific article on Bloomberg's love for his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, to which, with his latest promised gift, he will have donated $1.1 billion dollars, with his first gift, upon his graduation in 1964, being a donation of $5.

Coincidentally, my doctoral dissertation advisor at Brown University, Stella Dafermos (as well as her husband), had matriculated at Johns Hopkins University for their PhDs in 1964.

The article is a great read and I was informed that Bloomberg was an engineering major (actually electrical engineering) and had gone to Medford High in Massachusetts, where he was very bored. I located an earlier article on Bloomberg and Medford which stated that he had been President of the Medford High School slide rule club (all the engineers of a certain age out there will appreciate this).

Bloomberg attributes some of his leadership skills to his alma mater, where he was President of his fraternity and President of his senior class. 

The Times article also speaks to Bloomberg's love of his alma mater, and what his incredible financial contributions have built -- he has bankrolled and molded the handsome brick-and-marble walkways, lamps and benches that dot the campus; has constructed a physics building, a school of public health, a children’s hospital, a stem-cell research institute, a malaria institute and a library wing; has commissioned giant art installations by Kendall Buster, Mark Dion and Robert Israel; and has financed 20 percent of all need-based financial aid grants to undergraduates over the past few years.

 I very much appreciate his appreciation of and emphasis on art and on aesthetics. The children's hospital at Hopkins is named for Bloomberg's mother, Charlotte,  and the exterior was inspired by Monet's paintings. Since I was in NYC earlier this month and went to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), I managed to snap the photos below.

I wonder how much Bloomberg has given to Harvard, where he received his MBA?

The residential college experience can be life-transforming as Bloomberg's experiences at Johns Hopkins University clearly show.

I wonder what percentage of college graduates give back financially to their institutions?

Are Your Students Getting Jobs at the Best Companies to Work for?

Have you ever envisioned your dream job?

I regularly ask my students where would they like to work after graduation and I ask this question of both my undergraduate and graduate students.

Some have geographical preferences (don't we all, in a sense) whereas others look for "name" companies and/or those that provide certain benefits.

Ultimately, employees will stay with an organization (company or, in the case of certain PhD graduates, a university or college) if they feel appreciated and are "happy."

Fortune has released its list of top 100 companies to work for  and what really pleased me was the list included so many companies that our graduates in Operations Management (undergrads)  and Management Science (PhDs) have been or are presently employed by. Note the majority of our PhD graduates from the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst do enter academia.

At the top of the list was Google (not surprising) but second on the list was SAS, where one of my former PhD students, Dr. Padma Ramanujam,  works.  I had blogged about visiting her there last year while at the SAMSI workshop and being hosted by Dr. Radhika Kulkarni, who is a fellow recipient of the INFORMS WORMS Award. The cafeteria reminded me of places in Sweden, which I regularly write about. I had been on a dissertation committee of a PhD student at UMass in computer science and he is employed by Google.

Dr. Davit Khachatryan, who also received a PhD with a concentration in Management Science from the Isenberg School of Management, recently gave a talk at the Isenberg School, in our Meet a PhD Alum initiative, works at Price, Waterhouse, and Coopers, which is 81 on the list.

And our most recent PhD recipient in Management Science, with an official PhD receipt of February 1, 2013, is Dr. Milad Ebtehaj, whose new position is with Fedex, number 98 on the list. I have had former undergrads in Operations Management also work for Fedex, as well as for Deloitte, number 47 on the list. Ernst&Young is number 57 on this latest ranking, and one of our former Jack Welch scholars is employed by this company in Boston. I have a warm spot for Ernst&Young because of the recognition that I received from them for my mentoring activities (Thanks!).

I could list more connections between our graduates and the best companies to work for but I will stop here.

Congrats to all the companies that made the list, which, even if they do not employ our graduates now,  they may do so in the future. In any event, it is clear that being good to employees is good for business! Have you ever seen an unhappy employee at Whole Foods?

Happy Birthday to Grand Central Terminal in NYC and Model Trains

Who doesn't love trains?

Just two weeks ago, we were in NYC and took the MetroNorth Train from New Haven to Grand Central Terminal, which, as always, was majestic.

The New York Times yesterday (Sunday edition) had a wonderful multipage article with large color photo on the Grand Central Terminal, which I will share with my students in the Transportation & Logistics class that I teach in the Fall. The building of it was quite the engineering and construction marvel and soon we will be celebrating its 100th  birthday. The article was by Sam Roberts, whose new book, "Grand Central: How a Train Stations Transformed America," will be out soon. The Times also has a nice video by Mr. Roberts.

While passing through Grand Central Terminal we also stopped by the New York Transit Museum Gallery & Store there and the photos below were taken of the model train exhibit there, which delighted train lovers of all ages.

 

 And, since I could not resist, and we now only have the memories and photos, below is a video of the models train that provided enjoyment during the holiday season in our home.

And, for some previous posts on real trains and model trains click here and here.

Are You Up to the Challenge? Big Data and SBP 2013 Conference in DC

For the past several years I was on the SBP (Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction) Conference Committee and enjoyed working with a great group of colleagues with the grand finale being the conference itself. I had been responsible for the tutorials  and also helped to identify several keynoters over the years. Together, with Dr. Patrick Qiang, I also gave a tutorial. at SBP 2010.

This year, since I am on sabbatical and have been and will be out of the US a lot, I stepped down from the committee.

The SBP 2013 Conference will take place in Washington DC, April 2-5, and the keynoters are wonderful: Dr. Bernardo Huberman of HP, Dr. Michelle Gelfand of the U. of Maryland, and Dr. Myron Gutman of NSF. The tutorials should also be great.

But what really caught my interest, and the news is starting to circulate via various e-lists, is the Challenge Problem. with assistance from none other than Dr. Alex (Sandy) Pentland of MIT, who was one of the tutorial givers that I had invited for the  SBP 2011 Conference. He also was one of the plenary speakers at the Northeast Regional INFORMS Conference at UMass Amherst that I was involved in (and, I do admit, it was wonderful). Dr. Pentland had also spoken in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speakers Series.

The deadline for the challenge problem is January 31, 2013, so time is tight!

Challenge Problem

Internationall Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction

SBP is offering a challenge problem for the second time in 2013. We organize this challenge to encourage researchers to combine the power of big data and the power of systems thinking in the field of social computing, behavioral-cultural modeling, and prediction. These datasets are brought to you by the MIT Human Dynamics Laboratory, with special thanks to professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland and his research team.

Problem Description

Cell phones afford a convenient platform to advance the understanding of social dynamics and influence, because of their pervasiveness, sensing capabilities, and computational power. Many applications have emerged in recent years in mobile health, mobile banking, location based services, media democracy, and social movements. With these new capabilities, we can potentially identify exact points and times of infection for diseases, determine who most influences us to gain weight or become healthier, know exactly how information flows among employees and how productivity is affected in our work spaces, and understand how rumors spread.

There remain, however, significant challenges to making mobile phones the essential tool for conducting social science research and also support mobile commerce with a solid social science foundation. Perhaps the greatest challenge is the lack of data in the public domain. There is a need for data large and extensive enough to capture the disparate facets of human behavior and interactions. Another major challenge lies in the interdisciplinary nature of conducting social science research with mobile phones. Software engineers need to work collaboratively alongside social scientists and data miners in various fields.
In an attempt to address these challenges, we have worked with the MIT Human Dynamics laboratory to release several mobile data sets in "Reality Commons" that contain the dynamics of several communities of about 100 people each. We invite researchers:

• To propose and submit their own applications of the data to demonstrate the scientific and business values of these data sets,
• To suggest how to meaningfully extend these experiments to larger populations, or
• To develop the math that fits agent-based models or systems dynamics models to larger populations. The problem itself will be open-ended and encourage approaches from different disciplines, encompassing a range of applications using this data, including:
• Social network analysis
• Data visualization
• Simulation studies
• Predictive modeling
• Qualitative studies to supplement existing quantitative work
• Creative new applications of the data

The DataSet

Data center dynamics: The data contain the performance, behavior, and interpersonal interactions of participating employees at a Chicago-area data server configuration firm for one month. It is the first data set to contain the performance and dynamics of a real-world organization with a temporal resolution of a few seconds. The sensor data were collected by Daniel Olguin, Ben Waber, Tamie Kim, and Alex Pentland in 2007 using Sociometric Badges.
Social Evolution in an undergraduate dormitory: The data contain surveys and sensor data about the diffusion of political opinions, diet, exercise, obesity, eating habits, epidemiological contagion, depression and stress, and political opinions from 70 residents of an undergraduate dormitory. These residents represent 80% of the total population.
Friends and Family dataset: The Friends and Family experiment was designed to study (a) how people make decisions, with emphasis on the social aspects involved, and (b) how we can empower people to make better decisions using personal and social tools. The subjects were members of a young-family residential living community adjacent to a major research university in North America. All members of the community are couples, and at least one person in each family is affiliated with the university. The community is composed of over 400 residents, approximately half whom have children. The sensor data in this data set were collected using the funf open-source sensing platform for Android phones.
Reality Mining dataset: Data contain the dynamics of 75 students/faculty in the MIT Media Laboratory, and 25 incoming students at the MIT Sloan business school adjacent to the Media Laboratory. The Reality Mining experiment conducted in 2004 was the first to study community dynamics by tracking a sufficient amount people with their personal mobile phones and resulted in one of the most complete mobile data sets with rich personal behavior and interpersonal interactions. Prior to this experiment, cell phones were not powerful enough to track people.

Data access

Data is accessible from realitycommons.media.mit.edu
Users will be asked to fill out a short form and agree to privacy and data use restrictions.

Submission and Evaluation

Submissions Submissions will be evaluated based on theoretical grounding as well as use of evidence. Winners will be selected by an interdisciplinary committee of researchers and will be recognized at the conference with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prizes. The winners will introduce the idea briefly at the conference to the audience and/or give a quick demo. Challenge organizers intend to organize winning entries into a special issue of an appropriate journal.
The submissions (6 pages) should be formatted according to the Springer-Verlag LNCS/LNAI guidelines. Sample LaTeX2e and WORD files are available from http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0.. Submissions for the challenge can be made here.

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: January 31, 2013 (23:59 PST)
• Notification of Winners: March 2, 2013

Challenge Problem Co-chairs

Nitin Agarwal, University of Arkansas, nxagarwal@ualr.edu
Wen Dong, MIT Media Lab, wdong@media.mit.edu

Prior work using this data

A bibtex file of references to prior publications using this data is available for dowload (righ-click to 'save as'): sbp2013challenge.bib
BibTeX files can be read by most bibliographic software packages well as LaTeX. Many free converters are available.

2012 challenge problem winners

Congratulations to winners of the first SBP challenge problem:

• Matthew Lease, School of Information, University of Texas at Austin "Discovering and Navigating Memes in Social Media"
• Masoud Makrehchi, Research Scientist, Thomson Reuters, Toronto, Canada "Conflict Thermometer: Predicting Social Conflicts by Analyzing Language Gap in Polarized Social Media."

Academic Blogging as Outreach -- Celebrating 4 Years

This week, I am marking  4 years of writing on this blog with my first post back in January 19, 2009 noting the new Presidential administration and my Letter to the Editor published in The New York Times about teaching my undergrads. My Fragile Networks book, with Dr. Qiang, was then in production and was published that June.

I have tried to keep true to the themes of this blog: Research, Education, Networks and the World and writing posts and receiving feedback has been a terrific journey, I must say.

My fellow bloggers in Operations Research / Management Science, led by Dr. Thaddeus Sim, started a very interesting discussion with his post: Academic blogging: teaching, research or service?  that I kept on coming back to and ruminating about.  (You can find a list of our community of bloggers at the OR Social Network Users Directory).

One might wonder, how can a Professor, with all of the commitments to research and publishing, teaching, and professional service, plus having a personal life and a heavy travel schedule, find time to keep up a blog, which now numbers over 1,000 posts? Also, as Dr. Sim and company noted, how does doing so even count or matter in academia?

Besides being a high energy individual, with a lot of discipline and focus, there are many topics that I am passionate about and I view blogging as outreach. In writing about matters of research, education, and what is happening in the world, whether in one's courses and classrooms to major events, I try to communicate and to inform.

So many schools and colleges have now sadly dropped their emphasis on communications with fewer glossy reports and publications and magazines and even cutbacks on what is posted on websites (with social media being the exception). Plus, the fact that the news media is deemphasizing articles on research and science is well-known, so we need to fill the voids.

I like to celebrate the accomplishments of my students, to recognize great achievements, to highlight research advances, to thank outstanding speakers, to describe travel adventures, to recognize the special communities that we are part of, and, also, to offer advice.  I also write about leadership and acknowledge role models.

Blogging provides a record of impacts of events and milestones.

Whether one's academic institution recognizes blogging (I have yet to report any posts on my Annual Faculty Report but have gotten numerous thank you's even from alums for my postings as well as former administrators and students and readers from around the globe)  when I have helped to further research or practice, to put a smile on someone's face, to make someone think differently, to support students either directly or indirectly and the same goes for others, or even to elicit some positive change (I have some great examples of this), then I know that  it has been worthwhile.

And yes, academic blogging may include all three facets of research, teaching, and service but in sharing our experiences and insights we are also reaching out as a public service.

And, now four years later, President Obama is reelected and my new book will be out soon!