On Giving Plenary Talks - Off to Canada for Analytics Day!

Conferences are essential to scientific exchanges and also to networking. Plus, one gets to reconnect face-to-face with colleagues from around the globe and to make new contacts and even friends. Travel to new locations is always interesting and revisiting even places where you have been before can be quite informative and pleasant.

In most conferences there are usually special talks given by plenary (or keynote) speakers. Such speakers typically will have a longer time slot in which to present their work and the speakers are selected by conference organizers to draw interest to their events. I enjoy listening to plenary speakers and also enjoy being one.

Whenever I get a notice for a conference, I usually check whether there will be a female plenary speaker. Some may not notice such things, but I do, and it is important to have diversity represented even at the highest levels.

Tomorrow I will be flying to Toronto, Canada, since on Friday, April 15, I will be giving a plenary talk at Analytics Day at the University of Waterloo. This university is renowned for research in optimization and, coincidentally, I gave an invited seminar there in Management Sciences almost exactly 5 years ago!

Analytics Day was organized by Professor Fatma Gzara and it will bring together academics and practitioners as well as students. The program is online.

I presented Professor Gzara with several topics and she selected: Predictive and Prescriptive Models of  Cybercrime and Cybersecurity Investments Under Network Vulnerability.  Cybersecurity is a very hot topic and I have given recent talks on this theme at the MITRE Corporation and also at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University.

It will be exciting to be back in Canada, the country of my birth.

I have given plenary talks in some fabulous locations and thank the organizers of various conferences for these great opportunities. Last summer, for example, I traveled to Colombia, to speak at a conference in Bogota and had such a magical time that I had to blog about it.

One year ago, I was in Berlin, Germany, to address the largest physics conference in Europe.  Clearly, research on networks, which has always been my passion, has no disciplinary boundaries. It's also terrific to see operations researchers welcomed by different disciplines and, in a sense, at the highest levels.

I also very much enjoyed giving a plenary talk in Rome, Italy,  and even in Auckland, New Zealand. I posted some photos from the New Zealand experience here. I wrote a blogpost about my experiences in Rome which can be accessed here.   I remember fondly getting lost while taking a long walk in Rome and seeing quite a few nuns (I suspect it may have been the delicious but very spiked dessert I had consumed) and glorious architecture and sites. I also remember (not so fondly) almost getting run over by the vehicles (almost saw my life pass by) while trying to cross the streets.

I thoroughly loved speaking in Paris at the NetGCoop conference in 2011 in October. Professor Asu Ozdaglar of MIT was another female plenary speaker at this conference focusing on networks, which was extra special.

I do believe that female researchers should accept invitations to deliver plenary talks at conferences since it is important for  students (male and female)  and others to see the great opportunities that the academic life provides. 

And seeing is believing.

Insights from Meningitis Outbreak at Princeton University and How it Was Managed

Last Thursday, after teaching my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class and holding office hours, which went overtime  because of a great discussion with one of my students who has spent time in Haiti on multiple service trips post the earthquake, I grabbed a quick lunch and then ran in the rain to the UMass Amherst Campus Center.

I had been invited by Mr. Jeff Hescock, who is the Director of Emergency Management and Business Continuity  at UMass Amherst to view an emergency dispensing exercise and to also hear a presentation by Robin Izzo, who is the Director of Environmental Health and Safety at Princeton University.

Mr. Hescock has spoken in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class and I have, along with several students,  also had an opportunity to take part in a previous year at a mass sheltering exercise at the Mullins Center.

Ms. Izzo was speaking on the meningitis B outbreak that took place at Princeton University not that long ago and the challenges with vaccination, so this was a presentation that I did not want to miss. Plus, nursing students and others were to then take part in a training exercise and simulation associated with a mass vaccination at UMass. A co-organizer of this event was  nurse Ann Becker of the Medical Reserve Corps. Masslive.com posted a nice article and interview with Becker online.

Izzo is also the incident manager at Princeton and is responsible for communications and logistics in emergencies. The first case of meningitis B struck Princeton University in March 2013 and the student who had been on spring break in Florida went right home so he had not been on campus for 9 days. Princeton has about 5,200 undergraduates and 3,000 graduate students.  A few weeks after a 17 year old high school student who had spent time in one of the dorms contracted meningitis B, which is transmitted primarily through saliva.  Afterwards there was a case of  a Princeton student on campus who then attended a wedding in NYC.  Three cases signified that there was a cluster and there were more than three cases in three months.

The health department was notified as well as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).  Given that almost all the Princeton students live on campus in dormitories and housing, this provided a perfect environment for contagion. Ultimately there were 9 cases, including a Drexel University student who had spent time at Princeton and who then died of this disease, which was quite terrifying. This death made national headlines.

Plus, at that time, there was no licensed vaccine for meningitis B, although Europe and Australia  had a vaccine that it was using.

Pursuing a mass vaccination campaign with an unlicensed vaccine, which was suggested by the CDC,  HAD NEVER BEFORE BEEN DONE IN THE UNITED STATES! Luckily, the FDA quickly approved this vaccine, known as Bexsero, and the first day of vaccinations took place on December 9, 2013. Two doses of this vaccine were needed per patient and, interestingly, it is only for those aged 10 to 25, so many faculty and staff were obviously very apprehensive.

Izzo stated that over the Thanksgiving of 2013 many parents were telling their children at Princeton not to come home since they were so worried about infection. According to Izzo, even if you do get vaccinated, you can still be a carrier for 6 months. Also, among the 8 cases at Princeton, there was no temporal connection.

She described Princeton as being a "really, really scary place" and I know of several faculty who teach there and also students from western Massachusetts who were there during the outbreak.

Information was disseminated to parents and many events during the 2013 - 2014 period were held but with extra care taken. Challenges included big events and reunions. Princeton students who were taking part in study abroad programs went with Cipro, a powerful antibiotic, and were told to look for tell-tale signs of meningitis B, including a rash.

Rizzo also began a mass communications campaign with student videos to emphasize that one should not be sharing drinking cups (although she shared with us that based on a survey 70% at Princeton said that it would be rude to not accept a drink from someone who has used the same cup or glass!).

The campaign included the bright cups below, which had "Mine Not Yours" on them.  She also emphasized the importance of peer pressure in getting the community vaccinated and protected.

She emphasized that it was important to manage the severity and fear but at the beginning the meningitis B was not feared enough.

She urged that the university, health department, and CDC should always speak "with one voice" in such emergencies.   After the first clinic was held,  96-100% of the students received a dose o fthe vaccine.

During the spring and summer of 2014 no overnight guests were allowed in Princeton dorms.  In October 2014, the FDA cleared a new vaccine, made by Pfizer, which requires 3 doses.

On March 13, 2015, Princeton University was considered no more likely than another college as a site for meningitis B.   Interestingly, she noted that there are areas of the US where this contagious bacterial disease is endemic, including parts of the Pacific Northwest and in the past several years there have been other cases at other universities.

During the Q&A I asked her whether Princeton ever considered closing and she said no. Clearly, there are students from around the world there and they may not be able to go home but there are several colleges this past year alone that closed due to norovirus outbreaks. This enabled the institutions to be thoroughly cleaned and sanitized but I suspect that meningitis B that can lurk in one's body for half a year may be another matter entirely.

I have done research on pharmaceutical supply chains with my students, and there is a lot of interest in the Operations Research community on the modeling of vaccine programs, so this was a very educational and timely event.

Many thanks to both Jeff Hescock and Ann Becker for their efforts! Special thanks to Ms. Izzo for her leadership and insights.

Great Time Speaking at Carnegie Mellon University Where Operations Research Rocks!

On Sunday, when the snow was starting to fall (and that was April 3) in Amherst and the winds were blowing at about 50 miles an hour we lost electric power. I was finishing up packing up and heading to Carnegie Mellon University where I was to give a seminar the next day. Since it was a while before I had to head out to the airport, my husband and I went to investigate what was the cause of the power outage. As you can see from the photo below a tree had snapped and fallen on a power line. There was a Channel 40 news crew there and since my husband is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, when asked, he agreed to be interviewed and the interview aired that evening.

After a two-legged flight to Pittsburgh on Southwest (I had deja vu since on Mach 10 I had to fly through Baltimore also on Southwest to get to Buffalo where I was speaking), I made it to Pittsburgh, where it was very chilly but I was delightfully surprised by the blooming trees and flowers as well as the architecture. I had spoken previously at the Tepper Business School at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and also at the University of Pittsburgh but this was the first time that I was speaking at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon.

 

 

I had been invited to speak at CMU back in August by Dean Ramayya Krishnan, who is an INFORMS Fellow, an invitation I could not refuse. I had presented my hosts with a list of possible topics and the one that they selected was: Predictive and Prescriptive Models of Cybercrime and Cybersecurity Investment and Network Vulnerability.

Given CMU's renown in Computer Science and Engineering as well as in Cybersecurity, this choice was not so surprising and I was looking forward to feedback on our work in this area.

Just this past Friday and Saturday, CMU had been the site of a very special event, which I wish I had known about sooner -   a symposium honoring Professor (and former Dean) Al Blumstein and his 50 years of contributions to public policy! The list of speakers and panelists was outstanding. Just to start (and we have hosted both in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series): Professor Dick Larson and Professor Arnie Barnett (also INFORMS Fellows) from MIT.

I  saw Professor Al Blumstein in the Heinz building before my talk and gasped. Yes, Operations Research colleagues can inspire awe and deservedly so. Plus, he came to my talk, which I will always remember. As an aside, Professor George Dantzig, a founder of Operations Research, came to my talk at the Mathematical Programming Symposium at MIT the first year after I received my PhD and sat in the first row. That memory is always with me and especially his warm words afterwords on my presentation. We are lucky t have in our profession true GREATS!

The Heinz building (which is named after the Heinz family and Theresa Heinz is the wife of John Kerry, our former Massachusetts senator and now Secretary of State). The building used to be the Bureau of Mines and the copper doors are stunning.

My flights to Pittsburgh were quite bumpy because of the fierce winds but the stay at the Wyndham hotel was very pleasant. The Heinz College had prepared a nice itinerary for me (many thanks to Natalia), and I was picked up early on Monday by Professor Pedro Ferreira who drove me to the Heinz College for my first meeting. My talk was scheduled for noon till 1:30PM so I got a chance to have meetings both before and after.

I first met with Professor David Krackhardt and we went over time since he is renowned in Social Network Analysis and loves networks as much as I do  and was at the forefront of  developing visualization software for network analysis.

He kindly presented me with a copy of Linton Freeman's book, which I asked him to sign, and which I began reading on my flights back to Massachusetts.

It was great to also meet Professor Chris Hendrickson, who I know from way back, because of our mutual interest in transportation and environmental issues. He was elected into the National Academy of Engineering a few years back. He shared with me some of the work that is being done at CMU in transportation - over 40 projects and these are being done by interdisciplinary teams. Time and time again, I was so impressed as to the freedom of intellectual exchanges at CMU and many multidisciplinary projects and teams. Of course, given the excellence of Operations Research there, we can break boundaries across disciplines with our models, tools, mindset, and expertise.

I continue to be very impressed by the caliber of research at CMU and also by the friendliness of everyone.

I very much enjoyed speaking with Professor Zhen (Sean) Qian, who received his PhD from UC Davis, and is doing very innovative work in transportation science in terms of stochastic models. He said that my "Network Economics: A Variational Inequality" book is his bible. Professor Christakis, the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, where I spoke on February 17, also had this book on his bookshelf.

It was an honor to meet with Dean Ramayya Krishnan, under whose leadership the Heinz College continues to thrive making breakthrough in both public policy and information management, He became a chaired professor the same year that I did - in 1998 - and we also reminisced about the great Professor Bill Cooper, who sent us both letters of congratulations from the University of Texas Austin. He passed away at 97 and left a tremendous legacy and I will always remember his thoughtfulness. Dean Krishnan is doing fascinating research using transportation (taxi) datasets from Shenzen, China, and his energy is inspiring. I also enjoyed speaking with Professor Martin Gaynor, who is a health economist!

And speaking of energy and Operations Research, Tepper  doctoral student Thiago Serra, who is also the President of CMU's INFORMS Student Chapter,, who kindly took the photo of me below during the presentation, told me that his advisor, Professor Egon Balas, at age 94 continues to play tennis and to take long walks. Thiago is doing great things for the student chapter in bringing in speakers as well as holding regular research and social events. Kudos to him and also to Alex Kazachkov for establishing the chapter.

I enjoyed giving my presentation very much and garnered great research ideas because of the visit. Thanks also to Professor Mike Trick and to Thiago Serra for doing such a great job tweeting during my talk.

My full presentation can be downloaded here. It was extra special to be at CMU since John Nash received two degrees in Math (a Bachelor's and a Master's) from what was then the Carnegie Institute (and now CMU) before heading to Princeton for his PhD. I had a photo of Nash in my presentation because both of the noncooperative and cooperative game their models that we have been developing for cybersecurity investments utility his concepts.

Afterwards,  a student named Kara, came up to me to let me know that she is an NSF CyberCorps Scholar under its Scholarship for Service (SFS) program, which was exciting, since UMass Amherst recently received a $4.2 million NSF grant under the SFS program to educate both undergraduate and graduate students in cybersecurity. I was a Senior Personnel member on this grant and we now have a new Cybersecurity Institute, which is very exciting.

My host at lunch at a Middle Eastern restaurant was none other than INFORMS Fellow, and NAE member, Professor Jonathan Caulkins, whose work in drug policy and Operations Research has not only garnered numerous accolades but has also had wide impact in practice! The second edition of his book will be out next month and is being published by Oxford University Press. Chris Hendrickson told me that he has a Master's from Oxford, which made me feel great because within a month I will be there as a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College.

After lunch I met with Thiago Serra and the IFORS President, Associate Dean at Tepper, plus one of the greatest ambassadors that INFORMS and Operations Research has, Professor Mike Trick, who is an INFORMS Fellow and social media communicator extraordinaire!

I think that they both look very sharp in the photo above.

And through the window I got to see the site for the over $200 million new Tepper Business School building.

I had to have a photo taken with Thiago since great students are the future of our profession!

Thanks to the Heinz College and colleagues at CMU as well as students and staff for the great hospitality extended to me. It was a wonderful experience.

I got back to Amherst at 11:30PM Monday night from Carnegie Mellon and was greeted by a blanket of 4 inches of snow and 19 degree temperatures. Before 8AM the next morning I was back at the Isenberg School of Management getting ready to teach. Some ask me is the travel worth it and I reply - most definitely!

Internet of Things, Network Economics, and Operations Research

Next week, while I will be speaking on cybersecurity at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, my collaborator on our NSF ChoiceNet project, and now NSF EAGER project, Associate Dean in the UMass Amherst College of Engineering Professor Tilman Wolf, will be flying to Berlin, Germany, to present our invited paper at the 1st IEEE International Conference on the Internet of Things Design and Implementation.

The title of our paper is below and it will be published in the Proceedings of the First IEEE International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI), Berlin, Germany, April 2016.

The abstract is as follows: Many solutions to important societal problems relating to the environment, health care, transportation, etc. seek to utilize the promises of the Internet of Things (IoT), where sensing, computation, and actuation merge the physical world with the computational world. To date, many such solutions have focused on a single problem domain and require dedicated sensor and actuator infrastructure. This vertical integration makes the development of innovative, novel solutions costly and difficult to deploy. An architectural approach to addressing this challenge is to enable horizontal integration, where sensors and actuators from different applications can interconnect with any computational IoT application. In order to isolate complexities and to support heterogeneous systems and software, it is necessary to provide clear abstractions. We present such abstractions in the form of a layered protocol architecture that describes the necessary interfaces. Beyond technical challenges for horizontal integration, this paper also addresses network economic considerations since the various entities owning and operating sensors and actuators need suitable economic motivation to participate in such an approach. We believe that this work provides a conceptual foundation for future, scalable IoT solutions.

In quantifying the synergy associated with horizontal integration, we have assumed that system optimization, in the form of total cost minimization, is the desired criterion. This reflects centralized decision-making. Earlier applications of synergy measures that I have done research on were in the context  of supply chain networks and included a means of evaluating mergers and acquisitions.

Since the costs on the links prior to horizontal integration in the Internet of Things (IoT) and post correspond to generalized costs, this gives us the flexibility to include risk measures, emission measures (if there are environmental concerns), and other relevant criteria, and, with appropriate extensions, even time.

Below are the networks corresponding to two applications prior to integration in our IoT framework that includes ideas from network economics and operations research.

 Also, we may have different degrees of horizontal integration:

The synergy measure is calculated as follows:

Interestingly, in supply chain network applications, thus far, the network topologies (see the references in a prior blogpost) have been less expansive than in the IoT context revealed here. Also, the added links in the horizontal integration cases corresponded to transportation activities and not data transfer activities as in the above network figures.

Wishing everyone at the IEEE conference in Berlin, Germany a very rewarding time!

On Military Logistics for Humanitarian Relief

On Thursday, March 24, 2016, the students in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class and I were honored to have Lt. Col. James Bishop, who is the Chief of Public Affairs at Westover Air Reserve Base, MA, come to speak. In addition, we had Matthew Durham, Director for Public Affairs of the Air Force Special Operations Command,  and Kenneth Hundemer, Director of Operations, Denton Amendment Program, Skyping in. Many thanks to our great Technical Support Specialist, Emid LaClaire, for standing by throughout the class to help out with technology issues.  Both Bishop and Durham had spent time in Afghanistan.

Lt. Col. James Bishop also wrote for the At War blog for The New York Times and you can read just one of his blogposts here.


I urge you to read more of them.

Since one of the students in the class is in the military and is pursuing an MBA from the Isenberg School of Management, this made for a very special class session, indeed. He had also served in Afghanistan.

Mr. Durham, who was a bit delayed since there was a major accident on his commute that morning, focused on the opening up by the Air Force Special Forces team of the Port-au-Prince airport in the aftermath of the Jan 12, 2010, earthquake. Some information on this important operations can be accessed on the following link.  http://www.afsoc.af.mil/News/ArticleDisplay/tabid/5003/Article/162960/combat-controllers-crucial-to-haiti-earthquake-relief.aspx

He told us that one of the big challenges was to decide where to park all the planes, which were bringing in personnel and materiel into Haiti. A plane was landing every 2 minutes we were told. He also mentioned how the military assisted in opening up the New Orleans airport post Hurricane Katrina. He noted how many supplies were airlifted by helicopters but also mentioned that when it was considered to airlift 10,000 soccer balls to Haiti years before with Aristide's face on them,  it was ultimately decided, after a physics calculation,  that soccer balls falling out of the sky could injure civilians, so that plan was scrapped.

He also mentioned that post the Haiti earthquake, a videographer was sent out by the military since the media coverage is so omnipresent post disasters and quality coverage is important.  He mentioned that many were just 9 meals away from dying.

There are Special Operations folks in 40 countries but they can only go where they are invited.

Mr. Hundemer, in turn, discussed how humanitarian donations are transported through the Denton Amendment program:
http://www.charleston.af.mil/library/factsheets/factsheet_print.asp?fsID=4140&page=1 
Ken Hundemer appears, on page 2 in the above article as the Director of Operations.of this important, but it seems not widely known, humanitarian relief program.

Mr. Hundemer has worked for 16 years for the Denton Amendment Program, which moves humanitarian donated cargo to countries by the US military as part of the US Transportation Command. Such transports have to be approved by the State Department, USAID, and DOD. The NGO is responsible for delivering the cargo to specific military sites and must guarantee that there is a consignee upon delivery to the respective country. Interestingly, most of such cargo now goes to Haiti, the Honduras, and Nicaragua! The cargo is transported on any defense transport asset.

He emphasized that they try to do mostly airlifts since there can be problems with corruption at seaports and there is better cargo visibility during airlifts from origin node to the consignee.  There have been shipments of relief supplies to Afghanistan since 2002.

Interestingly, the size of the cargo has both lower and upper bounds in that, at minimum, 2,000 pounds can be airlifted at a time with a maximum of 100,000 pounds. Some NGOs consolidate their shipments so that they have a sufficient amount. The average time for delivery from the time that the relief items are dropped off is 36 days. The military also does its inspections and worries about the perishability of cargo.


We presented Lt. Col. James Bishop with a Professor for the Day certificate and a gift from the Isenberg School.  When I asked him how he managed in Afghanistan he said that it was through: chapel, the gym and that we had each other. I told him that will be the title of his future best-selling book.

Many, many thanks for the US military who are also so essential to humanitarian relief around the world. Your courage, strength, and stamina are simply incredible.

Cybersecurity Workforce Optimization

This afternoon we had the great honor and pleasure of hosting INFORMS Fellow Dr. Les Servi of the MITRE Corporation who spoke in the UMass Amherst  INFORMS Speaker Series, which is organized by our magnificent UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter.

Dr. Servi has two degrees in Applied Math from Brown University and a PhD in Engineering from Harvard. He has had a terrific career, having worked at Bell Labs, GTE (now Verizon), MIT Lincoln Labs, and now MITRE.  He is a champion of Operations Research and our professional society INFORMS and he is a good friend. Les is the Group Leader of the Decision Analytics Group at MITRE. (A disclaimer - he hosted me for my talk at MITRE on March 14).

Joining Les were: Brian Kulig, who is a UMass Amherst alum, and also Ken Kato, both of MITRE.

I hosted the lunch in his honor at the University Club, where the service was great and the food very good. We arrived at 11:30AM to make sure that we would have enough time to eat before his talk at the Isenberg School at 2PM. Joining us were Associate Dean of Engineering Tilman Wolf, Professor Eric Sommers of Math/Stats, and Professor Weibo Gong, of ECE, who shared the same advisor at Harvard with Les - Dr. Ho, who is still publishing at age 82.

The Title of Les's talk was: A Two-Stage Stochastic Shift Scheduling Model for Cybersecurity Workforce Optimization with On Call Options.

We took a photo when we arrived at the Isenberg School for his talk.

His presentation was very interesting and clear. He explained both stochastic programming and column generation in a very accessible way. I was very impressed and intrigued by the possibilities of Operations Research and Optimization in workforce optimization in this challenging sector. The model was for scheduling over a two week period three shifts of workers with quite interesting constraints and uncertain demand with the option of calling in more workers. The three classes of cyber workers included an expert group (which someone caught did not want to work the night shift).  He even compared the results of the stochastic model with a deterministic model and presented quite extensive computational results.

I was very pleased that, although it was a holiday weekend, the audience had undergraduate students, PhD students from Engineering, Math, and the Isenberg School, and even MBA students. Two of the latter have internships at MITRE in Bedford this summer, so the talk was perfectly timed.

And, as always happens after a great presentation, the audience members enjoy milling around, sampling refreshments, networking, and chatting.

Afterwards, I was very pleased that Professor Brian Levine of our Computer Science Department, who is the Director of the new Cybersecurity Institute at UMass Amherst, and the PI on the $4.2 million NSF Scholars for Service (SFS) grant, could meet with Les and MITRE colleagues in my office.

Les has spoken in our series multiple times and he always impresses, whether he is speaking on tracking pirates, extracting information and emotions from social media, including Twitter, or on cybersecurity workforce optimization!

In April, he will be heading u to Montana to investigate research on rural healthcare and then will be off right afterwards to the INFORMS Analytics conference in Orlando!

Many thanks to Dr. Les Servi for coming out to UMass Amherst and speaking in our series today. Special thanks also to MITRE colleagues, Brian Kulig and Ken Kato, for joining in and making the visit very rewarding for students and faculty alike!

Professor Joe Sussman of MIT Speaks on High Speed Rail at UMass Amherst

Today, after hosting Lt Col James Bishop of the Westover Air Reserve base in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class, meeting with collaborators, and having such pleasant office hours that they ran over by an hour, I managed to head to the UMass Mullins Center where a special event was taking place.

The event was organized to celebrate Transportation Professor John Collura's illustrious career at UMass Amherst. The program, featured below, which continue tomorrow morning is wonderful.

And at 3PM today I had the pleasure of hearing Professor Joe Sussman of MIT give the plenary talk which was on High Speed Rail. Professor Sussman had met with me and came to my talk last December at MIT so, of course, I had to return the favor.

Professor Sussman began his presentation by  introducing CSTSs, complex socio technical systems. He noted both nested complexity as well as evaluative complexity, where different stakeholders may measure performance of a system differently. For example, some may care about environmental justice, whereas others may care about social justice. His presentation was very clear, interesting, and well-done.

He emphasized that high speed rail is a CSTS and economic, environmental, and equity criteria all come to bear in this. He noted, which I liked very much, that "sustainability should be the overall design principle" in complex systems. He spoke of the concept of sustainable mega regions supported by high speed rail and brought out that when he received his chaired professorship at MIT in 1991 it was funded by Japanese Railways. When a group from JR landed in JFK and then took the "high speed" Acela from NY to Boston, he knew that their experience was not quite like the Japanese truly high speed rail, the Shinkansen.

He emphasized the importance of high speed rail connecting urban centers and noted that the sweet spot was for distances between 200 and 600 miles. For distances greater than 600 miles it was preferable to fly and for distances less than 200 miles it would be better to use road transport.

He brought out high speed rail in France (I have had the pleasure of riding the TGV there) and  in Germany,   He noted that the Japanese built their first high speed rail in 1964! They needed the capacity and then innovated accordingly and continue to do so.

He mentioned the political gridlock in the US as well as the capital costs associated with high speed rail although projects are under discussion in Florida, Texas, and with Chinese involvement, a link between LA and Las Vegas.

The audience very much enjoyed his presentation.

I had the opportunity to have a photo taken with Professor Sussman and with Professor John Collura, which was a special highlight for me.

I plan on attending the session tomorrow morning with speakers from Virginia Tech and Purdue. The focus will be on critical infrastructure. Thanks to my colleagues in the Transportation program for a special tribute to Professor John Collura, who is now, unbelievably, a Professor Emeritus, but still very active and busy with exciting new professional endeavors, including a big project on aviation in Westover.