Looking forward to the Vulnerability and Resilience of Supply Chains Workshop in Zurich

The other day I saw a colleague of mine and asked him what was he looking forward to, given that the new academic year was about to begin. 

The response surprised me -- he said "January."  He was serious and was not joking.

I know that, sometimes, perhaps, one may not feel valued by one's immediate organization and that can include one's school or university but one has to look at the bright side of things and make the most of any situation.

As an operations researcher and management scientist, I try to optimize the resources that I am given and to take advantage of any opportunities and, of course, make opportunities for students and colleagues (as much as is feasible).  One needs to be resilient!

I have written a lot on network vulnerability and robustness from supply chains to transportation networks and the Internet with fabulous former students, who are now great colleagues at other universities from Dr. Patrick Qiang to Dr. June Dong, as well as with my collaborators from Dr. Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy and Dr. David Parkes of Harvard University, among many others.

Besides getting ready for the new academic year, which begins at UMass Amherst next week, I am also working on a presentation for a workshop that I am very excited about. The workshop is on Vulnerability and Resilience of Supply Chains and it will take place at the ETH Risk Center in Zurich, Switzerland, September 12-13, 2013. Below, I have posted the agenda, which looks fabulous, and should be an outstanding workshop in terms of presentations and discussion -- so looking forward to it!

 More information on the workshop is available from the workshop website.

Many thanks to all those who have put the agenda and associated activities together!
 

Organizing Committee

• Dirk Helbing (ETH Zurich) 
• Wolfgang Kröger (ETH Zurich)
• Benno Keller (Zurich Insurance Company)

Organizing Team

• Petra Monsch
• Hilary Woodard
• Matthias Leiss

The Last Time I Saw Her -- Remembering Dr. Priscilla Clarkson, the Dean of Commonwealth College

This afternoon, I attended a lecture by Professor Ved Prakash, in the beautiful new Integrated Sciences Building at UMass Amherst, with one of my doctoral students who is from India. The lecture was on Indian Higher Education System and its Challenges in the Context of Globalization. I saw quite a few administrators in the audience, and our distinguished guest was hosted by our Chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy. The lecture was very interesting and well-attended and I took many notes. The reception that followed enabled further discussion. Since it was a nice day I walked home back from UMass through the woods and fields -- the locals know this pleasant route. Then, in checking messages I was stunned -- Dr. Priscilla Clarkson, an amazing researcher and the Dean of Commonwealth College, died yesterday of breast cancer, which she had been long battling. UMass issued a release on this very sad news, as did Commonwealth College. The lovely collage is from the Commonwealth College website. And just yesterday, my husband and I took a walk on the UMass campus specifically to see the beautiful new Commonwealth College buildings with classrooms, offices, and even dormitories. And, of course, we talked about Priscilla! The last time that I saw and spoke with Priscilla was on April 14, 2013, at the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society induction ceremony, which was led by Professor Don Katzner of the Department of Economics. Priscilla was recognized for her service with a lovely bouquet of flowers and also gave an award to Dr. Patty Freedson, the chair of the Kinesiology Department. April 14 was the birthday of my dissertation advisor at Brown University, Dr. Stella Dafermos, and she also succumbed to the same illness as Priscilla at age 49. The photo below I am including in this post since I still cannot believe this news. I will miss our conversations, Priscilla, as well as your leadership and kindness. Thanks for all that you have done for science, for women, and for students of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Dr. Priscilla Clarkson is seated in the front row with the bouquet. I was hoping to see Dr. Clarkson at some ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Commonwealth College new complex of buildings or at some pleasant UMass activity or event. Rest in peace, great one -- you made a difference and you will be missed!

Strength Through Professional Society Communities and Continuing Education

Everyone wants to and needs to be part of something bigger and to feel productive and be a recognized as a valuable contributor to an important organization.

When you wake up each morning, is it with a smile on your face and excitement, energy, and enthusiasm for the day and your projects? 

We are part of communities -- from the colleges and universities that we, as academics, teach and conduct research at to the companies that the practitioners and leaders in our profession in industries as varied as healthcare to transportation and logistics to financial services and high tech and consulting (to name just a few) contribute significantly to.

We are also, many of us, members of professional societies, which provide us with essential communities and from which we gain strength in so many ways.

With possible challenges in our immediate academic and corporate organizations due to continuing change, economic pressures, fluctuating perspectives in terms of  administration, and even our own values and dreams, professional societies can provide sustenance and support for our entire professional lives.

In addition to the camaraderie and networking opportunities, professional societies provide avenues for continuing education and personal and professional growth.

INFORMS, as the leading association for professional in analytics, operations research and management science, for example, has a plethora of communities that one can be part of, at different stages of one's careers:

From student chapters at various universities:

     End of the semester party of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter

to INFORMS regional chapters:

Trip with some of my students to the INFORMS Boston Chapter Meeting, Burlington, MA, November 23, 2010 - Link to my presentation


to societies within INFORMS:

Transportation & Logistics Society of INFORMS -- several Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award recipients

to fora, such as WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences):
 

Various WORMS activities at the Annual INFORMS Meetings

one receives continuing education in many forms -- information and knowledge from conversations with colleagues and from lectures and talks with additional resources provided by INFORMS such as podcasts and now even INFORMS TV!

And, of course, we gain and learn so much through the wonderful conferences:

from regional ones:

2011 Northeast INFORMS Regional Conference
UMass Amherst, May 6-7, 2011

to the annual national ones, which serve as reunions for many of us, as well as international ones, which take us to exotic locales:

ALIO-INFORMS Joint International Meeting
Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 2010

Moreover, through INFORMS membership, one can find out about new jobs and opportunities -- terrific for students and for those seeking greener pastures or just new challenges.


Finally, with INFORMS' new CAP (Certified Analytics Professional) program you can gain valuable new credentialing. And, one of the first to take the CAP exam, Dr. Irv Lustig of IBM, explains the benefits of this exam in his interview with Barry List, the Communications Director of INFORMS in the video below.




Irv, by the way, was an undergraduate at Brown University, when I was a PhD student there, and I was his TA for Professor Stella Dafermos' OR course (she was my advisor). Needless to say, Irv was very smart and went on to Stanford to get his PhD in OR with Professor George Dantzig, as his advisor.

And, in closure, I emphasize that learning and gaining strength from our professional society communities can also be a lot of fun!

Entrepreneurial Opportunities and Innovation Thanks to the National Science Foundation (NSF)

Robert Shiller, the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, wrote a wonderful OpEd in last Sunday's New York Times: "Why Innovation is Still Capitalism's Star," in which he spoke about the company he founded with Karl Case of Wellesley College (I used to attend seminars at Harvard when I was a Visiting Scholar and Associate Professor at the Sloan School and School of Engineering, respectively, at MIT, at which Karl would be present). The company was sold but its "products," now known as the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, are very often used and referred to.

In the OpEd, Shiller writes that his business made its mark without any help from the government but then writes the following:

Long before I started any commercial ventures of my own, I received some federal government support — in the form of National Science Foundation research grants, awarded to me decades ago as a young professor. They allowed me to do research, and though it was not directly related to my later business endeavors, the process developed my expertise and reinforced a sense of entrepreneurial opportunity.

These grants were awarded competitively, based on the quality of the proposals, and gave me experience with a system focused on creating opportunities for those who try hard. Later, from 1983 to 1985, I evaluated others’ proposals when I served on the foundation’s panel for economics. Observing the process from the government side convinced me that the foundation really works. Maybe it’s because the panelists are chosen from successful scientists, who serve anonymously out of public spirit.


The first year that I was at MIT, 1989-1990, I was funded by the National Science Foundation's Visiting Professorship for Women, and was based at the Center for Transportation in the Department of Civil Engineering (Building 1 for those of you familiar with MIT).  Besides teaching a course there and doing a lot of research, I also organized a Women in Operations Research (OR) Speaker Series, which took place at MIT's Operations Research Center, located on Amherst Street (which made me feel at home). I was following in the footsteps of my dissertation advisor at Brown University, Professor Stella Dafermos, who had also had an NSF Visiting Professorship at MIT,  a few years prior to me. My readers know that she was the second female in the world to received a PhD in OR!


The receipt of  that NSF grant, plus 3 more, early in the new millennium, including a large one with two females: professors,  June Dong and Patricia Mokhtarian, gave me the confidence needed to take risks with my research, and engendered an entrepreneurial spirit.

That large NSF grant, Decentralized Decision-Making in Complex Network Systems, along with two AT&T Industrial Ecology Fellowships, enabled me to establish the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management in 2001.

An additional stimulus behind the Supernetworks Center was the publication of  my book, with June Dong, Supernetworks: Decision-Making for the Information Age.

In 2003, under the leadership of our great Dean at that time, Dr. Tom O'Brien (with whom I had such a nice conversation the other day), I was given lovely space to create the Supernetworks Laboratory for Computation and Visualization. Our new Dean, Dr. Mark Fuller, now holds a Chaired Professorship in Tom's name.


And, just this past week, I received the letter from our Provost, James Staros, and our Vice Chancellor for research and Engagement, Mike Malone, that the UMass Amherst Evaluation Committee for Centers & Institutes has recommended the continuation of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks for another 5 years. The evaluation cited many of the activities of the Center and its Associates, which have even included undergraduates conducting research under NSF's Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program.


As I have written before, in the context of Steve Jobs, risk-taking is essential to innovation, and support, such as that provided by NSF, gives females concrete evidence and financing that they can lead and even establish a center. And, now, we are involved in another truly thrilling NSF research project, Network Innovation Through Choice.

Thank you, NSF, for supporting scientific research without boundaries and for recognizing also the contributions of females to scientific innovation and discoveries!

Terrific Interview with Dr. Len Kleinrock of UCLA -- Math Modeler, Computer Scientist, and Engineer Extraordinaire

Today, two of my female doctoral students, Sara Saberi and Dong "Michelle" Li, and the PI on our joint NSF grant, Professor Tilman Wolf, and I finished a paper: A Dynamic Network Economic Model of a Service-Oriented Internet with Price and Quality Competition, for the Network Models in Economics and Finance conference volume, Athens, Greece, edited by Professors Bautin, Rassias, and Pardalos, Springer, Berlin, Germany.

This research, was motivated, in part, by the Future Generation Internet(FGI), which will need to handle a spectrum of requirements of next-generation applications. In our model, both content providers and transport network providers have, as their strategic variables, the prices that they charge and their quality levels. And, in the paper, in order to model the quality of transport network service, we make use of the Kleinrock function, so that the greater the demand at higher quality, the larger the amount of bandwidth used.

And, just in time, the August 2013 edition of IEEE Computer magazine arrived at our door, which has a fabulous interview with none other than Dr. Leonard "Len" Kleinrock of UCLA, conducted by Charles Severance. The full interview, Computing Conversations, is online and I watched it this morning. Dr. Kleinrock is a recipient of the National Medal of Science and numerous other awards. He is also an INFORMS Fellow, for the OR/MS geeks out there.

In the interview (and hardcopy article of its highlights) Kleinrock speaks of how he needed to make a mathematical simplifying assumption of independence in order to make his queuing model of round-robin time-slicing for data communications in order to protect short messages from waiting behind very long ones now called "packet switching" tractable. This was his PhD project at MIT under the renowned Claude Shannon. Then he was worried as to whether the assumption skewed the theoretical results, in which case they might not be useful in practice (and he would not get his PhD). So, Kleinrock built simulation software (this was back in the early 1960s) which consisted of a 2,500 line assembly language program.

I, honestly, had a deja vu experience and remembered my first project in industry, writing AN/UYK assembly language code to assist in submarine transiting -- something I have written about.

He ran the code, tested it with and without the simplifying assumption, and the results were "amazingly close." He received his PhD in 1962 and McGraw-Hill published his dissertation as the book, Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Design, in 1964: ISBN 978-0486611051.

He noted in the interview that the book was a clear road map as to how to build the scalable shared wired and wireless networks we take for granted today... all that was needed was to get to work and build a network. And then, according to Kleinrock: But nobody cared. I went to AT&T, the biggest network of the time, and explained: "You guys ought to give us good data communications." The answer was, "What are you talking about?...and, finally, "Little boy, go away." And so little boy went away and with others developed this technology that ate AT&T's lunch.

Lincoln Labs supported him for his Master's and PhD and then, when he was expected to return there to work, was told that he should explore other options -- very generous of Lincoln Labs.

I am forever grateful to both Systems Consultants and Aquidneck Data Corporation in Rhode Island for supporting me while I pursued my Master's in Applied Math from Brown University (and also worked full-time and ran marathons). One of my projects at the latter was developing queuing models for local area networks of different topologies.

Kleinrock's application for a position at UCBerkeley was lost because there was a switch in chairmen but a professor on sabbatical at MIT suggested UCLA and he has been there for 50 years! His enthusiasm and wisdom shine through in his interview, and, at the very beginning, he even talks about planning to have his first child in 1958 -- how nice and thoughtful of him.

More info on Kleinrock can be found here.

Very Special Tribute to the Memory of an Operations Research Professor Even by a Nobel Prize Winner

Who has not been inspired, supported, or mentored by a special teacher or professor?

I will forever be grateful to my doctoral dissertation advisor, Professor Stella Dafermos, who gave me a lifetime of advice as my Professor at Brown University but who only lived until age 49.

About 3 years ago, I was asked to contribute to a volume in the Annals of Operations Research in honor of Professor Cyrus Derman, who was a leader in the rise of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University. The invitation came from Professor Michael Katehakis of Rutgers University.

However, during the preparation of the volume, Professor Derman passed away in April 2011 at age 85,  so the volume became a memorial volume, which has now expanded to two volumes.

I recently received the following message from Professor Mchael Katehakis, whose doctoral dissertation advisor was Professor Cyrus Derman.

We now have 50 (!) accepted papers and about 1000 pages. Contributors include: L. Shepp (Wharton), I. Olkin (Stanford), A.F. Veinott Jr. (Stanford), E. Denardo, (Yale), D. Bertsekas (MIT), A. Federgruen (Columbia), R.R. Weber (Cambridge), P. Kolesar (Columbia), P. Zipkin (Duke), H. Vincent Poor (Dean of Engineering School, Princeton Univ.), K. Sigman (Columbia), Flora Spieksma (Leiden) , L.C.M. Kallenberg (Leiden) M. Sobel (Case), Adi Ben Israel (Rutgers), S.M. Ross (Univ. of Southern California and emeritus of Berkeley), A.N. Burnetas (Athens Gr.) W. Powell (Princeton Univ.), Onésimo Hernández-Lerma (Mexico), Feinberg E. (SUNY) , C. Eaves (Stanford)   Melamed, Katehakis (Rutgers)  and many others.

The paper that we contributed to the volume, and that we worked very hard on, is: Supply chain networks with global outsourcing and quick-response production under demand and cost uncertainty, Zugang Liu and Anna Nagurney, in press  in the Annals of Operations Research. Our paper will appear in the first volume.

More information can be found in: Optimization under uncertainty: costs, risks and revenues-  Cyrus Derman memorial volume I Michael N. Katehakis, Sheldon M. Ross, Jian Yang,  who are the Guest Editors.

A very touching tribute to Professor Derman, also scheduled for the memorial volumes, and which contains photos, is:

 On the life and work of Cyrus Derman Michael N. Katehakis, Ingram Olkin, Sheldon M. Ross.

And, not to be missed, is the following: Some memories of Cy Derman by Alvin E. Roth.
 

Professor Roth, who was an Operations Research (OR) major at Columbia, and received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2012, along with Professor Lloyd Shapley, writes in the above essay:

In the manner of undergraduates, I didn’t have a clear idea of what my teachers did. But I recall admiring Cy Derman’s attitude: he seemed not to take himself too seriously. I recall he wore turtleneck shirts and talked about tennis, and summers at Stanford. When it came time to think about graduation, Cy urged me to think about grad school in OR, and volunteered to write a letter for me. Some time later, in a reflective moment, he said something to me like “I wrote you a very good letter. I’m not exactly sure why; you didn’t do all that well in your courses. But I have a feeling that you might be good at research.” Cornell and Stanford were the programs he recommended, and when I was accepted at both, his preference was clear, and I followed his advice, which set me on a path I’m still following.

We look forward to its publication, which I am told, should be soon!

Building Supply Chain Relationships Through Game Theory and Social Networks

I was contacted by a journalist recently from "Down Under" who was writing an article for manufacturing executives to introduce game theory. He had read my blogpost on sustainable fashion supply chains and game theory and  was interested in the following:

Specifically, there's one thing I'd like your expertise on: So many people think "using game theory" in negotiations is simply a matter of being as hard-nosed as you can to get the best deal. And yes, sometimes that's the route to go. 

But how would you advise manufacturers to use game theory in supply chain negotiations if they're genuinely interested in a long-term relationship with a supplier? Is it okay to leave some value on the table now if you're fairly sure it will pay off later?

I was very impressed that this journalist had realized that elationships are extremely important in supply chains (and, I might add, also in financial networks -- just think of Canada vs. the US in terms of the financial crisis of 2008 and how banks handled transactions with customers).

Two papers of ours address the integration of social networks with supply chain networks:

Dynamic Supernetworks for the Integration of Social Networks and Supply Chains with Electronic Commerce: Modeling and Analysis of Buyer-Seller Relationships with Computations, Tina Wakolbinger and Anna Nagurney, Netnomics 6: (2004) pp 153-185.
http://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/articles/socnetsupply.pdf
and
Financial Engineering of the Integration of Global Supply Chain Networks and Social Networks with Risk Management, Jose M. Cruz, Anna Nagurney, and Tina Wakolbinger, Naval Research Logistics 53: (2006) pp 674-696.
http://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/articles/intsocsup.pdf

In these game theory supply chain studies we capture the relationship production cost associated with different agents (say, manufacturers and retailers) who are interacting,  the value of their relationships, as well as the risk incurred that is associated with transactions, with the latter depending on the relationship levels. For example, if the relationship level is high (that is, the relationship is strong) then the risk associated with the transaction would be lower. Thus, firms, by investing in relationships may lower their transaction costs as well as the risks.

And, as the journalist surmised, there is an underlying dynamics to such interactions between and among the various decision-makers in a supply chain.

Through our game theory math modeling and associated algorithms and computations we can trace the evolution of the relationships and product flows along with the incurred profits until a Nash equilibrium is achieved, which gives us the  equilibrium (optimal) product flows and relationship levels.

Dr. Jose Cruz, my co-author and former doctoral student at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, has also assessed the vulnerability of supply chains based on our related work on relationships and supply chains:
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-84882-634-2_7

And, since I cannot resist, and the query and discussion arose because of our game theory work on sustainability, UConn, where Professor Jose Cruz teaches at the Business School, was named the #1 Coolest School by the Sierra Club -- quite amazing (UMass Amherst was #27 on the list). Some related work of his on sustainability, game theory, and dynamics of supply chains is:
 Dynamics of Supply Chain Networks with Corporate Social Responsibility through Integrated Environmental Decision-making
Jose M. Cruz,  European Journal of Operational Research 184: (2008) pp 1005-1031.