It took my husband 45 minutes to drive the last two miles to his university today because of the flash floods.
It took one of his colleagues 90 minutes to drive his daughter to school, a trip that usually takes 10 minutes.
I am not even speaking about Hurricane Irene and what it did to our area of western Massachusetts; for an update on its ramifications you can read my post where photos are also included.
After being pummeled by Hurricane Irene 11 days ago, we are now experiencing the aftereffects of Tropical Storm Lee.
Just have a look at the flash flood in one of the parking lots at the university where my husband teaches. He called to tell me that one of his students was surprised by her parents with a brand new car this past weekend with only 100 miles on it and, yes, it got washed away. Needless to say, she is distraught.
Areas of the northeast have barely had a chance to recover and to rebuild and now we are faced with more rain and flooding and folks even had to be rescued today in a neighboring area.
Emergency notification systems must be in place as we deal with more extreme events at greater frequencies.
One of my students in my Transportation & Logistics class this morning who lives close to the Connecticut River told me that she could see from her house refrigerators, cars, and detritus floating by -- not a natural set of events.
The flooding in Pennsylvania and middle New York state is now resulting of the evacuation of 100,000!
A very sad and scary state of affairs and so few in the northeast hold flood insurance, as the head of The Bement School, where my daughter went to elementary school, recently noted in a letter to the community of the hardships suffered because of Hurricane Irene and the flooding in Deerfield.
Now if only we could somehow transport all the excess water in the Northeast to the dried out and burning parts of Texas.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Monday, September 5, 2011
The Supernetwork Center is Marking Its 10th Anniversary -- See Our Fall Newsletter
This Fall we will be marking the 10th anniversary of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, which was established at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst on November 21, 2011. As the Founding Director of this Center, I have had the privilege to work with outstanding Center Associates, including graduate and undergraduate students, as well as faculty at universities on four different continents, and leaders in industry. In our 2011 Fall newsletter, The Supernetwork Sentinel, I reflect on some of the notable achievements of the past decade as we mark this milestone.
The full newsletter can be downloaded, in pdf format, here.For all the published issues of our newsletter, see our newsletter page.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Isenberg School and the College of Engineering Will Partner on a New Collaborative NSF Grant: Network Innovation Through Choice
Our project on Collaborative Research: Network Innovation Through Choice" has been funded by the National Science Foundation in the amount of $2.732 million ($909, 794 to UMass Amherst) for three years starting on September 15, 2011. This is a collaborative project among the University of Massachusetts (Tilman Wolf and Anna Nagurney), the University of Kentucky (Jim Griffioen and Ken Calvert), RENCI (Ilya Baldine), and NC State (Rudra Dutta, George Rouskas).
Dr. Tilman Wolf is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering and I am at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass (but also hold courtesy appointments in two engineering departments).
Yesterday, our multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research project group had our first video teleconference, and we began to outline both short-term and long-term goals. I am very excited to be working with such a great group of researchers.
Dr. Tilman Wolf is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering and I am at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass (but also hold courtesy appointments in two engineering departments).
Yesterday, our multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research project group had our first video teleconference, and we began to outline both short-term and long-term goals. I am very excited to be working with such a great group of researchers.
Abstract:
Computer networks, in particular the Internet, represent essential infrastructure for business, government, military, and personal communication. Several recent trends in technology and network use have pushed the capabilities required of the Internet beyond what can be provided by the currently deployed infrastructure. To address these limitations, the network community has developed a variety of technologies to adapt the functionality of network protocols and services. A critical question that remains unanswered is how to integrate these technologies into an ecosystem that involves users, service providers, and developers in such a way that new ideas can be deployed and used in practice.
Market forces have had a drastic effect on the shape of services and applications at the edge of the network. Our research proposes a transformative shift in the design of networks that enables sustained innovation in the core of the network using economic principles. We believe that supporting choice is the key aspect of a network architecture that can adapt to emerging solutions for current and future challenges. Choice implies that users can select from alternatives that can be deployed dynamically into the network and reward those that address their needs. We use this interdependency between technological alternatives and economic incentives to create a competitive marketplace for innovative solutions that address current and future challenges in networking. Our proposed work describes fundamental research aimed at the design, development, and prototyping of aspects of a next-generation network architecture where such choices and competition drive innovation at all layers of the protocol stack.
The proposed network design is based on three tightly coupled principles. Our ChoiceNet system aims to (1) encourage alternatives to allow users to choose among a range of services, (2) let users vote with their wallet to reward superior and innovative services, (3) provides the mechanisms to stay informed on available alternatives and their performances. We propose a number of fundamental research problems that address the design of building blocks to provide alternatives in the network, the economic framework for incentives, the necessary monitoring and management components, and the prototyping, education, and outreach efforts. Overall, our work does not aim at reinventing technical solutions to networking problems, but at developing a comprehensive system where these solutions can be deployed and compete to allow the network to adapt to current and future challenges.
Intellectual Merit: Our project addresses one of the key problems in the current Internet – how to design a network that ensures long-term innovation inside the network core. The proposed research will provide solutions to fundamental questions on how to enable choice among different service alternatives, how to develop marketplace for incentive-based competition, and how to handle explicit control and management. The development of a prototype allows for realistic experimentation that includes community involvement and educational uses.
Broader Impact: Our project will contribute to enhancing the functionality and usability of the nextgeneration Internet, which will become an important piece of infrastructure. Our project also integrates research and education of graduate and undergraduate students at the participating organizations, where we will continue with our current involvement to integrate underrepresented minorities. Results from our work will be disseminated in the form of an open-source prototype and publications.
Friday, September 2, 2011
The Resilience of New Englanders
Although my heritage is European and I was born in Canada, I consider myself very lucky to be living in such a historic part of the US, that is, in New England.
Indeed, when not living in such great places as Sweden and Austria and even Cambridge, Massachusetts or traveling far and wide, Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, with such great towns as Amherst, Deerfield, and others, has become our home.
Since our daughter has gone to elementary school at The Bement School, in Old Deerfield, and is now at Deerfield Academy, located just down the street from Bement, both in a truly historic and beautiful part of Massachusetts, we have come to know many families from New England (and even across the globe since Deerfield Academy is primarily a boarding school).
What has struck me most after Hurricane / Tropical Storm Irene hit New England last Sunday is how the neighbors and communities pulled together (with some great help from the National Guard I might add and local emergency responders plus electric power folks from far and wide).
After the torrential rains had subsided, a neighbor's son showed up at our door with a chainsaw and chipper ready to clean up our front yard on which two big trees had fallen. We appreciated his offer but declined since he is a minor. A local crew showed up on Monday morning to do the job and we were just thrilled. A DPW worker arrived yesterday in his free time to chop up the logs and piled them into his pickup truck to use as firewood (a win-win situation since he gets fuel for the winter and this cost us nothing and we enjoyed talking to him).
I have written about and posted photos of Deerfield after Irene and what has been called a once in 500 years flood. The cleanup operations continue and Historic Deerfield will reopen tomorrow (but the lovely Deerfield Inn will remain closed for an unknown amount of time).
One day after the flooding, my daughter was back at her summer job as a tour guide at Deerfield Academy and this week, despite the flooded fields and neighboring farmlands, gave tours to prospective students and their families not only from California but from as far away as Korea and Turkey. She did not show the flooded areas, which today, 5 days after the hurricane, remain covered in thick, gooey mud.
Her elementary school, The Bement School, had had to have families evacuated and a gorgeous new dorm has had to have its flooring entirely replaced and other damage recovery done. The head of the School, Ms. Shelley Borror Jackson, wrote a wonderful, poignant message of how the flood surrounded her home and the waters filled the basement and moved up the stairs. Her message can be read here. A neighboring school, The Eaglebrook School (you may not know but the present King of Jordan went to both Eaglebrook and Deerfield Academy) provided refuge for both the Jacksons and some other evacuated families.
Our neighbors just north of Deerfield, from Greenfield to Brattleboro, Vermont, and further up sustained much damage and it will take years for Vermont to recover and to repair its devastated roads and bridges whose destruction isolated communities before help, ranging from hikers to state troopers to military in Chinook helicopters arrived to deliver necessary water, food, and medicines to stranded folks.
And the good news arrived, in the form of an email message today, from the President of Historic Deerfield that said:
Just in time for Labor Day Weekend, Historic Deerfield museum will again welcome visitors to its world-class collections and historic houses on Sat., Sept. 3 at 9:30 a.m. The reopening marks a return to some semblance of normalcy and a chance to refocus on the fall season at hand after seven days of forced closure to the public due to infrastructure damage caused by flooding from Hurricane Irene.
"Now that we can guarantee the safety of our visitors and our collections we will gladly reopen," said Philip Zea, President of Historic Deerfield. "We're very grateful for the heroic efforts of staff, volunteers, and vendors who have helped us prepare for and recover from this crisis."
Visitors will find almost all museum offerings intact. The two exceptions will be the continued closure of the Sheldon House and the Channing Blake Meadow Walk.
Indeed, when not living in such great places as Sweden and Austria and even Cambridge, Massachusetts or traveling far and wide, Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, with such great towns as Amherst, Deerfield, and others, has become our home.
Since our daughter has gone to elementary school at The Bement School, in Old Deerfield, and is now at Deerfield Academy, located just down the street from Bement, both in a truly historic and beautiful part of Massachusetts, we have come to know many families from New England (and even across the globe since Deerfield Academy is primarily a boarding school).
What has struck me most after Hurricane / Tropical Storm Irene hit New England last Sunday is how the neighbors and communities pulled together (with some great help from the National Guard I might add and local emergency responders plus electric power folks from far and wide).
After the torrential rains had subsided, a neighbor's son showed up at our door with a chainsaw and chipper ready to clean up our front yard on which two big trees had fallen. We appreciated his offer but declined since he is a minor. A local crew showed up on Monday morning to do the job and we were just thrilled. A DPW worker arrived yesterday in his free time to chop up the logs and piled them into his pickup truck to use as firewood (a win-win situation since he gets fuel for the winter and this cost us nothing and we enjoyed talking to him).
I have written about and posted photos of Deerfield after Irene and what has been called a once in 500 years flood. The cleanup operations continue and Historic Deerfield will reopen tomorrow (but the lovely Deerfield Inn will remain closed for an unknown amount of time).
One day after the flooding, my daughter was back at her summer job as a tour guide at Deerfield Academy and this week, despite the flooded fields and neighboring farmlands, gave tours to prospective students and their families not only from California but from as far away as Korea and Turkey. She did not show the flooded areas, which today, 5 days after the hurricane, remain covered in thick, gooey mud.
Her elementary school, The Bement School, had had to have families evacuated and a gorgeous new dorm has had to have its flooring entirely replaced and other damage recovery done. The head of the School, Ms. Shelley Borror Jackson, wrote a wonderful, poignant message of how the flood surrounded her home and the waters filled the basement and moved up the stairs. Her message can be read here. A neighboring school, The Eaglebrook School (you may not know but the present King of Jordan went to both Eaglebrook and Deerfield Academy) provided refuge for both the Jacksons and some other evacuated families.
Our neighbors just north of Deerfield, from Greenfield to Brattleboro, Vermont, and further up sustained much damage and it will take years for Vermont to recover and to repair its devastated roads and bridges whose destruction isolated communities before help, ranging from hikers to state troopers to military in Chinook helicopters arrived to deliver necessary water, food, and medicines to stranded folks.
And the good news arrived, in the form of an email message today, from the President of Historic Deerfield that said:
Just in time for Labor Day Weekend, Historic Deerfield museum will again welcome visitors to its world-class collections and historic houses on Sat., Sept. 3 at 9:30 a.m. The reopening marks a return to some semblance of normalcy and a chance to refocus on the fall season at hand after seven days of forced closure to the public due to infrastructure damage caused by flooding from Hurricane Irene.
"Now that we can guarantee the safety of our visitors and our collections we will gladly reopen," said Philip Zea, President of Historic Deerfield. "We're very grateful for the heroic efforts of staff, volunteers, and vendors who have helped us prepare for and recover from this crisis."
Visitors will find almost all museum offerings intact. The two exceptions will be the continued closure of the Sheldon House and the Channing Blake Meadow Walk.
Fabulous New Speakers Added to Our INFORMS Speakers Program!
This year, I have the pleasure of chairing the INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Speakers Program. Professor Tim Lowe of the University of Iowa and Dr. Les Servi of MITRE are my committee members.
Not only has the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, that I serve as the Faculty Advisor for, availed itself of some of the wonderful speakers in this program (Professor John Birge and Professor Sheldon Jacobson, only to start) but I have also given talks through this program, since I am on the list of speakers.
I'll never forget the talk that I gave at the Dallas/Fort Worth INFORMS Chapter, with the meeting taking place at SMU, at which I arrived, after 11 hours of travel, with only 10 minutes to spare. The discussions that followed after my talk were terrific and I especially enjoyed having industry reps as well as academics and students take part. It was a wonderful experience. I have also given a talk at the Boston INFORMS Chapter (with my great host being Dr. Les Servi from Mitre), and at universities, including the University of Pittsburgh, through this special program.
Instructions as to how to request a speaker can be found on the INFORMS Speakers Program homepage. The interest this year in our program has been great from both companies and universities, especially with our energized focus on analytics.
Now, for the drumroll, I am delighted to announce that the new additions to our Speakers Program are:
Professor Aruna Apte of the Naval Postgraduate School
Professor Margaret Brandeau of Stanford University
Professor Ann Campbell of the University of Iowa
Dr. Brenda Dietrich of IBM
Dr. Radhika Kulkarni of SAS
Dr. Les Servi of MITRE
Professor Alice Smith of Auburn University
Professor Mike Trick of Carnegie Mellon University.
INFORMS will be updating information over the next couple of weeks on the Speakers Program website, so please continue to check back.
In the meantime, please feel free to contact either Barry List, the Director of Communications at INFORMS, or me, if you have any questions.
Not only has the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, that I serve as the Faculty Advisor for, availed itself of some of the wonderful speakers in this program (Professor John Birge and Professor Sheldon Jacobson, only to start) but I have also given talks through this program, since I am on the list of speakers.
I'll never forget the talk that I gave at the Dallas/Fort Worth INFORMS Chapter, with the meeting taking place at SMU, at which I arrived, after 11 hours of travel, with only 10 minutes to spare. The discussions that followed after my talk were terrific and I especially enjoyed having industry reps as well as academics and students take part. It was a wonderful experience. I have also given a talk at the Boston INFORMS Chapter (with my great host being Dr. Les Servi from Mitre), and at universities, including the University of Pittsburgh, through this special program.
Instructions as to how to request a speaker can be found on the INFORMS Speakers Program homepage. The interest this year in our program has been great from both companies and universities, especially with our energized focus on analytics.
Now, for the drumroll, I am delighted to announce that the new additions to our Speakers Program are:
Professor Aruna Apte of the Naval Postgraduate School
Professor Margaret Brandeau of Stanford University
Professor Ann Campbell of the University of Iowa
Dr. Brenda Dietrich of IBM
Dr. Radhika Kulkarni of SAS
Dr. Les Servi of MITRE
Professor Alice Smith of Auburn University
Professor Mike Trick of Carnegie Mellon University.
INFORMS will be updating information over the next couple of weeks on the Speakers Program website, so please continue to check back.
In the meantime, please feel free to contact either Barry List, the Director of Communications at INFORMS, or me, if you have any questions.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
A Black Bear in Our Backyard
My daughter had just sat down to breakfast consisting of yogurt and honey, rice cakes and peanut butter, and then said, "There is a black bear in our backyard," and, indeed, there was. He/she was beautiful and was lumbering through, en route to our Town Manager's yard, with probably a stop at a wonderful vegetable garden of another neighbor.
I was mesmerized by the beauty of this animal with the glossy fur (thoroughly washed by the downpours of Hurricane Irene) but my daughter reacted quickly and scooped up her smartphone and took the photo above as he marched on.
I contacted many of our neighbors (some of whom were running and taking walks outside) and even reached 911 and was told that the environmental police will be tracking this animal.
We have had deer visit us, numerous turkeys, foxes, raccoons, and even a large turtle, but this is the first time that we saw a big black bear right in our own backyard and in broad daylight! Moreover, the bear came through at a time, starting next week, when there will be many children waiting for the schoolbus on our street.
Perhaps the bear was off to one of the numerous college orientations taking place now in Amherst from UMass Amherst to Amherst College.
We Got the Grant and the Exciting Research Begins!
Writing proposals is a very time-consuming and challenging endeavor.
And, once a proposal is submitted to an organization or funding agency for peer review, ultimately getting funding to conduct the research described in the proposal, is far from guaranteed. In many competitive calls for proposals less that 15% of the proposals will get funded.
So why bother to take the time out of one's busy schedule to engage in such an activity, which does not guarantee a positive pay-off?
Moreover, why should faculty in business schools, who could be spending their time consulting, teaching in Executive Ed, etc., even bother to write proposals?
I write proposals because I truly believe in the research underlying the projects and much frontier research today is multidisciplinary, which means bringing teams together. This may be costly in the sense that there may be travel involved, a new cadre of students to engage in the research and to educate, plus equipment (at the very least, computers) to purchase. Plus, one must scope out the time to be able to do the collaborative research. Hence, to do multidisciplinary research, which crosses boundaries, often requires financial backing and funding.
Of course, one can just go with one's comfortable status quo but I refuse to not be growing and challenging myself, as well as my students and collaborators. Hence, I continue to write proposals and to plant my seeds wherever I can, and to see which ones germinate.
The receipt of a research grant, that has been subject to peer review (I am not talking about earmarked projects which I have never been the beneficiary of), provides a type of validation that is important both professionally and, to me, at least, personally. It means that the community of scholars believes in one's ideas and creativity. This type of recognition gives one an added push to do one's best to excel.
Moreover, it provides a type of freedom to conduct the research because one has attained both the backing of one's peers (who are always anonymous in reviewing the proposals) and the financial support to pursue new, challenging research topics. It also opens up new opportunities -- one may get invited to present the new research at workshops and conferences and to attend special meetings at the funding agency, etc., which can provide venues for additional intellectual exchanges and idea generation.
Plus, when the efforts of writing a proposal result in positive reviews (even after multiple setbacks, and I have had my share of those but I never give up or stop trying) and the funding agency decides to award the grant, one, literally, with all the project co-investigators, glows with happiness and with renewed energy.
We heard the wonderful news this week (and it came after the onslaught of Hurricane Irene). Our multidisciplinary research project consisting of a team of engineers, computer scientists, and me (I will be providing the management science and network economics perspective to the project) has been funded and it is a three year project. It involves multiple institutions and a colleague of mine in the College of Engineering and I at the Isenberg School of Management will be leading the UMass Amherst effort.
A brief abstract of our project, which is being funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is below.
And, once a proposal is submitted to an organization or funding agency for peer review, ultimately getting funding to conduct the research described in the proposal, is far from guaranteed. In many competitive calls for proposals less that 15% of the proposals will get funded.
So why bother to take the time out of one's busy schedule to engage in such an activity, which does not guarantee a positive pay-off?
Moreover, why should faculty in business schools, who could be spending their time consulting, teaching in Executive Ed, etc., even bother to write proposals?
I write proposals because I truly believe in the research underlying the projects and much frontier research today is multidisciplinary, which means bringing teams together. This may be costly in the sense that there may be travel involved, a new cadre of students to engage in the research and to educate, plus equipment (at the very least, computers) to purchase. Plus, one must scope out the time to be able to do the collaborative research. Hence, to do multidisciplinary research, which crosses boundaries, often requires financial backing and funding.
Of course, one can just go with one's comfortable status quo but I refuse to not be growing and challenging myself, as well as my students and collaborators. Hence, I continue to write proposals and to plant my seeds wherever I can, and to see which ones germinate.
The receipt of a research grant, that has been subject to peer review (I am not talking about earmarked projects which I have never been the beneficiary of), provides a type of validation that is important both professionally and, to me, at least, personally. It means that the community of scholars believes in one's ideas and creativity. This type of recognition gives one an added push to do one's best to excel.
Moreover, it provides a type of freedom to conduct the research because one has attained both the backing of one's peers (who are always anonymous in reviewing the proposals) and the financial support to pursue new, challenging research topics. It also opens up new opportunities -- one may get invited to present the new research at workshops and conferences and to attend special meetings at the funding agency, etc., which can provide venues for additional intellectual exchanges and idea generation.
Plus, when the efforts of writing a proposal result in positive reviews (even after multiple setbacks, and I have had my share of those but I never give up or stop trying) and the funding agency decides to award the grant, one, literally, with all the project co-investigators, glows with happiness and with renewed energy.
We heard the wonderful news this week (and it came after the onslaught of Hurricane Irene). Our multidisciplinary research project consisting of a team of engineers, computer scientists, and me (I will be providing the management science and network economics perspective to the project) has been funded and it is a three year project. It involves multiple institutions and a colleague of mine in the College of Engineering and I at the Isenberg School of Management will be leading the UMass Amherst effort.
A brief abstract of our project, which is being funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is below.
Computer networks, in particular the Internet, represent essential infrastructure for business, government, military, and personal communication. Several recent trends in technology and network use have pushed the capabilities required of the Internet beyond what can be provided by the currently deployed infrastructure. This project develops a transformative shift in the design of networks that enables sustained innovation in the core of the network using economic principles. The core idea is that supporting choice is the key aspect of a network architecture that can adapt to emerging solutions for current and future challenges.
The network architecture designed and prototyped in this work aims to:
(1) encourage alternatives to allow users to choose among a range of services,
(2) let users vote with their wallet to reward superior and innovative services,
(3) provides the mechanisms to stay informed on available alternatives and their performances.
Solutions are approached from different directions reflecting the team’s multidisciplinary expertise in computer networking, network systems, management science, and network economics.
The broader impact of this project contributes to enhancing the functionality and usability of the next-generation Internet, which is expected to become an important piece of infrastructure. The project also integrates research and education of graduate and undergraduate students at the participating organizations, where current efforts to integrate underrepresented minorities are continued. Results from this work are disseminated in the form of an open-source prototype and publications.
Now the exciting research begins.
What wonderful news to receive just in time for the new academic 2011-2012 year!
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