Fragile Networks -- Our Book is Off to the Publisher!

Today, we shipped our book, "Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World," to John Wiley & Sons, Inc. The book is about 350 pages in length and we submitted it in camera-ready form. Qiang "Patrick" Qiang and I have been working on this book for the past year and it is based on many years of research. Wiley has already begun to publicize/market the book, which should be out in late Spring/early Summer. We were asked to choose the cover for the book out of three that Wiley had designed for us. I canvased faculty, administrators, staff members, graduate and undergraduate students, as well as friends and neighbors as to their favorite. Interestingly, the cover that undergrads uniformly liked was different from the cover that doctoral students all unanimously picked. We provided feedback to Wiley and will see what the ultimate cover design will be.

For now, I have been busy starting to disseminate the great news that the book will be out soon and have noted its upcoming publication in talks that I have given this year in Dallas, Vienna, and Ithaca. Next week, I will be giving a big talk in Minnesota and will also mention our new book.

Chasing Tornados and Searching for a Dean

Photo - Tornado from Vortex - courtesy NOAA

This year my husband is on sabbatical at the NSF (National Science Foundation) ERC (Engineering Research Center) at UMass Amherst, known as CASA, which stands for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere. The Center's Director is Dr. David McLaughlin, a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UMass Amherst. This center involves other universities, including University of Oklahoma and the University of Puerto Rico, that conduct research in the science of the atmosphere and in the prediction of weather, including tornados. Today's Boston Globe had a feature article on the science of predicting tornados, which noted the work at UMass Amherst; see:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/04/08/scientists_hoping_for_better_look_at_twisters/

I enjoy hearing the stories that my husband comes home with -- from the students driving the truck with the radars from Amherst to Oklahoma and back -- to the logistics involved in finding housing for the researchers as they literally chase tornados in real-time. The research that is conducted under the auspices of this ERC is critical and is fascinating from scientific and practical perspectives. Weather affects everything that we do and the precise prediction of dangerous weather can literally save lives. Plus, the decision-making surrounding extreme weather events involves many stakeholders from government planners to news agencies to citizens. Hence, projects that CASA undertakes also stimulate research in optimal distributed/decentralized decision-making and networks, which is one of my research passions.

As academics, we teach, we conduct research, and we do service to our universities and professions plus communities. This semester I am serving on the Search Committee for the new Dean of the Isenberg School of Management. Dr. Tony Butterfield has been serving as the Interim Dean of the Isenberg School for the past two years and the school is poised for new levels of achievement in research and education. The Search Committee has members not only from the Isenberg School but also from other departments at UMass Amherst, as well as administrators, students, including one of my doctoral students, Patrick Qiang, and a representative from our Business Advisory Council, Mr. Paul McDonald, who is also an alum. The committee is chaired by the Dean of the College of Engineering, Dr. Mike Malone. The committee is terrific and we have been very busy identifying finalists for the position who have already started to come to campus to meet with the students, faculty, staff, members of the Business Advisory Council, and committee. We are all very excited about identifying our new Dean and leader.

Going Back to My Alma Mater -- Brown University

This past weekend I spent at Brown University, my alma mater, which is in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown University is one of the oldest universities in the United States and had the first undergraduate engineering program in the country. I have four degrees from Brown and my husband has two. Brown's President is Dr. Ruth Simmons, who is the first African American female to lead an Ivy League University. Her story is truly amazing -- the daughter of Mississippi sharecroppers, she is one of eleven children. She has been the President of Brown since 2001 and, under her leadership, Brown has reached new heights in scholarship and education.

For once, I was the "trailing spouse." My husband was invited to be on a career panel, organized by the Department of Physics at Brown. The Saturday program brought back alumni of the Physics Department, from undergraduates through doctoral alumni. The program was the initiative of President Simmons, who also made an appearance, and declared that the physics career event was one of the most successful ones to-date. Alumni from industry, including IBM, and from academia, including Williams College and Johns Hopkins University, spoke on their experiences to an audience of students, faculty, and administrators. Physics Brown alums that returned to campus and participated in this special event also included venture capitalists, employees of national research labs and of financial firms on Wall Street. My husband discussed his experiences, as a tenured professor at the University of Hartford in the College of Engineering.

Of course, a visit to Brown enabled me to see my former dorms, from Andrews Hall on the Pembroke Campus, to Diman House next to the Sharpe Refectory, to the Russian House. Brown has expanded its medical school and Life Science building and its athletic facilities but has managed to preserve its historical buildings and unique layout and design. Walking on the East Side of Providence, where Brown is located on College Hill, brought back so many wonderful memories. Coincidentally, yesterday, April 5, 2009, was the anniversary of my doctoral dissertation advisor's death. My advisor, Dr. Stella Dafermos, was the first female to hold an appointment in the Divisions of Applied Mathematics and Engineering at Brown. I was her first doctoral student. She passed away in 1989 and her work continues to be cited to this day and to make an impact in fields from transportation science to computer science. We stopped by the Swan Point Cemetery on Blackstone Boulevard, where Stella is buried, to pay our respects.

Walking through the Brown Green, I visited the statue of the Brown mascot, the Brown bear, with the inscription that contains the terrific phrase: "To Symbolize those Qualities of Strength, Courage, Endurance, which go Far to Make Men Invincible."

Brown and Providence have changed since I graduated but the beauty of the architecture and landscaping, plus the friendliness of the people remain! As for the food -- it is hard to top an Italian meal on Atwell's Avenue in the Federal Hill district of Providence!

Dr. Alex Pentland and "Honest Signals"

Yesterday, we had the distinct honor and privilege of hosting Dr. Alex "Sandy" Pentland of the Media Lab at MIT. Dr. Pentland spoke in the Spring 2009 Speaker Series in Operations Research / Management Science that is organized by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. I am the Faculty Advisor of this student chapter which is based at the Isenberg School of Management. Dr. Pentland's talk was on "Honest Signals," which is the title of his latest book published by MIT Press. Dr. Pentland discussed his research on mining honest signals, that is behaviors that are sufficiently expensive to fake that they can form the basis for a reliable channel of communication. Examples of such signals are: influence, mimicry, activity, and consistency. By wearing a device known as a sociometer data can be captured on these signals, digitally processed, and then analyzed. The beauty of the research and technology, which has been called by Technology Review as "A technology poised to change the world," is that dyadic interactions between people can be measured and quantified. The datasets generated are massive since they are over space and time. Groups from students to back office workers to bank employees and poker players have worn sociometers and their interactions codified. Scenarios from sales and negotiations to dating and hiring have been analyzed and signaling has been found to accurately predict "who will succeed, and who will not."

Pentland spoke on how these signals date to primates who interact in groups and the signals are objective and essentially impossible to fake. His book, which I could not put down and finished in one reading, contains footnotes and citations to the scholarly literature. In it, he discusses the value of brainstorming and how enthusiasm can be spread by "social circuits," plus the importance of enthusiasm and charisma (and how it can be quantified and measured). The animations in his presentation included the flows of email versus face-to-face communication of employees in an organization as well as the movements of people in San Francisco. He has also studied interactions of humans in a hospital setting.

How often can one say that a book can change the way one looks at the world?! If you read "Honest Signals" you will become more aware of human interactions and you will look at human communication in a deeper way. This is a book that I will return to in order to further plumb its pearls of wisdom and terrific and provocative phrases such as: "honest signals combine to characterize social roles - leading, teaming, listening, and exploring;" "conversation is biologically expensive," and "the signals are a reading of basic brain functions." One of my favorite quotes from the book is: "If you go to a session at the United Nations, say, you will see a person present written speeches in a designated order, and most people listen to a translator rather than the speaker themselves. The result is that while influence due to signaling has been reduced to near zero, the experience is also terminally boring."

The audience for Dr. Pentland's talk included faculty and students (from undergraduate to PhD) from the Isenberg School, from Engineering, and Computer Science as well as an economist from the University of Vermont, among other guests. The University Bookstore was kind enough to have copies of Pentland's book available for purchase and signing.

The lunch at the Chancellor's Room at the University Club at UMass Amherst was, as always, delicious, but it was the conversations that the students and I had with Pentland that we will always treasure. Pentland is a genius and I don't use that word lightly. As his talk, book, and our conversations signalled, "face-to-face communications will not be replaced by virtual communications, since the former change both the messenger as well as the receiver."

And, of course, there is another "Amherst is the Center of the Universe" moment here -- Pentland holds the same chaired professorship that the founder of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Dr. Marvin Minsky, held. Dr. Minsky's daughter, Margaret, who has a PhD in Computer Science from MIT, is a neighbor of mine in Amherst.

Cornell University,Regional Science, and the Flights Back

I would like to thank Dr. Kieran Donaghy, the Chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University, for being such a wonderful host during my visit to Cornell. I was really thrilled to have Professor Walter Isard, who will be 90 years old in a few days, and who is the founder of the field of Regional Science, attend my talk yesterday. Plus, Professor Sid Saltzman also came to my talk. Professor Saltzman is in his late 80s, and is the father of Matt Saltzman, who is well-known in the Operations Research community and is a Professor at Clemson University. Having Professor Tim Mount of Agricultural Economics in the audience also brought such wonderful memories of collaborations with Cornell folks on spatial price equilibrium problems, ad valorem taxes, and applications to the dairy industry.

We had dinner last night in Ithaca and Dr. June Dong and Professor Mark Turnquist joined Professor Kieran and me at "Willow," a restaurant that alone is worth the travel to Ithaca, New York! Nothing like a great conversation about transportation, regional science, and the state-of-our universities over a delicious meal! The stories that we shared were terrific and, of course, we had to mention my dissertation advisor at Brown University, Dr. Stella Dafermos, who died almost exactly 19 years ago. Her first academic appointment after receiving her PhD was at Cornell. Dr. Mark Eisner, who also attended my talk, came up to me afterwards and told me how he, George Nemhauser, and Stella had worked together when she was at Cornell.

What would a speaking engagement be without another travel/transportation adventure?! Today I woke up at 5:30AM (I do recommend the Statler hotel at Cornell -- great service and it is quiet) and caught the 6:00AM shuttle to the tiny Ithaca airport only to find out that the second leg of my USAIR flight from Philly to Bradley was cancelled. I was rebooked on a flight 2 hours later. Security at the Ithaca Airport took about 1 hour to process 10 people but the pain was mild since I saw Professor Linda Nozick of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell (a colleague of Turnquist's) ahead of me in line. We talked through the 1 hour delay in Ithaca and got front row seats on the flight to Philly. Another case of having an ideal "seatmate" to fly with. Our discussions ranged from infrastructure management and systems engineering, to teaching, to research, to having kids! Nozick was flying to DC to give a presentation at the Department of Energy and I was trying to make it back to UMass Amherst for an exit interview with a Dean's candidate (I did not make it).

Talk at Cornell University

Today I will be speaking at Cornell University and will be hosted by Dr. Kieran Donaghy. I will be speaking in the Regional Science and Policy seminar series. My talk will be on global supply chains and the associated vulnerabilities and synergies today. My host I have known from the Regional Science community and I hope to also be able to connect with faculty and students in Operations Research and Civil Engineering at Cornell.

My dissertation advisor at Brown University, Dr. Stella Dafermos, who was the second female in the world to receive her PhD in Operations Research was at Cornell after receiving her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. She, with her husband, then moved to Brown University. Stella Dafermos died at the age of 49 and she was one of the few honored with an obituary in the journal Operations Research (which I wrote).

I used to serve on the Cornell Supercomputer National Allocation Committee and would fly regularly to Cornell and stay at the wonderful Stadtler hotel. I am very much looking forward to seeing Cornell again.

Amherst as the Center of the Universe and Powerful Women

On Friday, March 27, 2009, the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter had the pleasure of hosting Professor June Dong. Her talk on supply chain disruptions generated numerous questions and brought issues such as traceability in food supply chains to the fore. In addition, she emphasized that the framework today that needs to be captured is that of supply chain versus supply chain competition. She also identified how the work that we had done regarding the Nagurney-Qiang measure could be applied to identify the most important nodes and links in supply chains and the impact of their "removal." What a pleasure it was to host one of our former PhDs -- Dr. June Dong received her PhD from UMass Amherst in 1994 and is a Full Professor at the School of Business at SUNY Oswego. She has held the prestigious Chow Fellowship and various appointments in China.

One brilliant female speaker would have sufficed but we were being "spoiled." Late that afternoon, Sheila Bair, the Chairperson of the FDIC, spoke at the Isenberg School. As I had mentioned in an earlier post, she is a colleague of mine and on leave from the Isenberg School. The Flavin auditorium was filled and even retired faculty and numerous students attended. Along with Dr. June Dong, and another colleague, Jennifer Taub, we found seats towards the front of the auditorium and enjoyed Sheila's presentation immensely. It was on-point, articulate, and punctuated by jokes from her recent experiences. The Q&A was dynamic, illuminating, and very interesting. In my discussions with Taub and Dong we came up with that toxins in food supply chains that Dong had remarked upon in her talk (from the infant formula poisoning in China to the salmonella in the peanut plant in the US) are similar to the toxic financial assets that Bair had talked about. Nothing like network theory to help to identify similarities and differences between applications!

Yesterday (Saturday), as we were catching our breaths from a week that included a PhD dissertation defense, distinguished speakers, and deadlines for proposals to book chapters and paper revisions, we decided to have dinner in downtown Amherst. Sitting in Amherst Chinese Foods, which is owned by Dr. Chang, who also runs his own farm in Whately, my daughter looks out of the window and exclaims: "there is Sheila Bair with her daughter and some friends and I think that she is coming to this restaurant." Indeed, that was the case. Sheila Bair owns a home on Main Street in Amherst and it was a delight to see her and her daughter the day after her presentation at the Isenberg School.

As we left the restaurant we chatted and strolling back to our car I heard a "Hello Professor Nagurney -- how are you?!" Lo and behold, it was one of my undergraduates who had taken my Transportation & Logistics class last semester. He was standing in front of his place of work (yes, we do have a wine/liquor store in downtown Amherst). I informed my family that this student was a Commonwealth College student at UMass Amherst and last semester traveled to St. Andrews, Scotland, to visit his girlfriend. Later in the evening, I pick up my New York Times and there is an article on and photo of Dr. Louise Richardson, the President (first female) of the University of St. Andrews! The article noted that she was one of seven children and that she had received her PhD from Harvard and had been a faculty member there. However, it missed that she had been Executive Dean of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University where I had been a Fellow in 2005 -- 2006. I know Louise from my time at Harvard and she is an expert on terrorism and just a delightful person with an accent that sings!