My Student, the President

In 1997, I co-authored with Dr. Stavros Siokos, the book, Financial Networks: Statics and Dynamics, and financial networks are very hot now as both a topic in research and practice due to the financial crisis.

Dr. Siokos had been one of my doctoral students, and I had chaired his dissertation in Operations Research. I am a faculty member in the Isenberg School but have also supervised several doctoral dissertations in the College of Engineering, since I hold courtesy appointments in two departments there. Dr. Siokos is originally from Greece and he needed to complete his dissertation in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst (rather than in Management Science) in order not to serve in the Greek army. The title of his dissertation was: International multi-sector, multi-instrument financial modeling and computation: Statics and dynamics, Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1998.

Together we had co-authored papers which had appeared in such journals as Networks and Annals of Operations Research.

He has had a meteoric career in finance and serves as a Center Associate of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I direct at the Isenberg School of Management.

Dr. Siokos has now been appointed President of Sciens Fund of Hedge Funds Management (which is a fund of funds) and had previously served as a non-executive member of Sciens. This reminds me of supernetwoks, which are "networks of networks."

Dr. Siokos served for many years as the Managing Director within the equities division of Citigroup in London, where he was Global Head of Alternative Execution Sales (program trading, algorithmic trading, Direct Market Access), Global Head of portfolio trading strategies as well as head of the company's pension funds and insurance companies equity structured solutions in Europe. He, since April 2008, until now, was the Deputy General Manager & Head of Asset management, Private Banking, Private Equity & Alternative Investments of Piraeus Bank in Athens, Greece. He has been top ranked in most of the major European Investment and Alternative Execution surveys in the quantitative services sector over the last nine years.

Several of my former doctoral students have achieved the rank of Full Professor as academics and I can now say that a former doctoral student of mine is now a President!

I could not be prouder and like to think that it is the methodologies that he learned and advanced in operations research and the management sciences that have enabled him to flourish in financial services at the global level and to be responsible for a fund worth billions of dollars.

The SBP 2011 Tutorial Presentations Are Now Online!

If you missed the three excellent tutorials that were delivered this past Monday, as part of the Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction (SBP) 2011 Conference at the University of Maryland College Park, you may access the presentations online!

Tutorial 1: Toolkits for Computational Social Science: Using Honest Signals to Predict and Shape Human Responses

Alex `Sandy' Pentland, MIT

Tutorial Slides: funf Mobile Sensing System

Tutorial Slides: Influence Model

Tutorial 2: Social Network Analysis of Personal and Group Networks

Allen Tien, Medical Decision Logic

Chris McCarty, University of Florida Survey Research Center

Eric C. Jones, University of North Carolina-Greensboro

Tutorial Slides

Tutorial 3: Understanding Social Media: Tools, Applications, and Processes

Nitin Agarwal, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Tutorial Slides

The above photos were taken at these tutorials.

Thanks again to the outstanding presenters and to the audiences for the great questions and discussions! Also, thanks to the tutorial presenters for making their lecture slides available!

The Braess Paradox, Broadway, and Basketball

This blog post is being written as part of the monthly INFORMS blog challenge with the March challenge being "O.R. and Sports."

On March 15, 2011, after many discussions with a Public Broadcasting System (PBS) TV team about transportation, I ended up on Broadway in NYC for an interview and filming. A high level "script" had been prepared, which addressed not only a broad sweep of transportation and policies to alleviate congestion dating back to ancient times, but also more recent policies in Mayor Bloomberg's administration, including the removal of roads to traffic and the creation of pedestrian plazas as on Broadway from 47th Street to 42nd Street (see photos above). The script also included the meaning and importance of the Braess paradox, its relevance to the NYC transportation policies, and how this paradox continues to fascinate.

I was being interviewed and filmed for the PBS TV series: America Revealed, which will have segments on transportation, energy, and food, along with additional online video clips.

A few days before the video taping on Broadway, I was asked whether I could also comment on the relevance of the Braess paradox to basketball! Of course, it was March Madness time, and, although my interview will not be airing until next Fall, since this PBS production is an educational one, it is important to engage the audience, which is expected to include students from middle school, high school, and beyond, as well as the interested public, on related topics that might interest them.

To add to the excitement, at the lunch with the producer before the filming was to take place, I was told that my interviewer was Yul Kwon, the winner of the TV reality show, Survivor, in 2006. As I noted in an earlier post, he attributed his winning of the million dollar prize to his knowledge of game theory. He has degrees from Stanford and Yale, and was fantastic.

Now back to what the Braess paradox may have to do with the sport of basketball.

Recall that in the classical Braess paradox example, the addition of a new link to a transportation network, in the case of user-optimizing (selfish behavior), resulted in an increase in the travel time (cost) for all travelers in the network. Hence, in certain networks, the removal (or closure) of a road can actually improve travel time.

In the basketball world, according to Bill Simmons of ESPN, there is the Ewing Theory. According to Simmons: The theory was created in the mid-'90s by Dave Cirilli, a friend of his who was convinced that Patrick Ewing's teams (both at Georgetown and with New York) inexplicably played better when Ewing was either injured or missing extended stretches because of foul trouble. Simmons has a primer, Ewings Theory 101, which lists examples in basketball history where the removal of a top player (paradoxically) results in a better outcome for the basketball team.

Brian Skinner, a physicist at the University of Minnesota, wrote an article, "The Price of Anarchy in Basketball" in which he developed an analogy, through a model, between certain basketball plays and the Braess paradox, in order to further explore the Ewing Theory. You may find the preprint of the article here. You can also read a discussion of the specific play(s) on Skinner's blog.

How nice to be able to talk about game theory, the Braess paradox, and the relevance to even basketball, on Broadway, and to also get a chance to promote O.R.! The original Braess article was written in German, and, due to popular demand, Professor Braess, Dr. Tina Wakolbinger (who was then my doctoral student at the Isenberg School), and I did a translation of it to English, which was published in the INFORMS journal, Transportation Science in 2005!

Below is a photo of Professor Dietrich Braess with Tina and me in the Supernetworks Lab at the Isenberg School with the translation.

Professor Dietrich Braess visited us in April 2006 and also spoke in our Speaker Series.

Coincidentally, Tina, after receiving her PhD at UMass Amherst, joined the faculty of the University of Memphis, and when I gave talks there, I had the pleasure of meeting also with Coach John Calipari (Coach "Cal" had been the men's basketball coach at UMass Amherst in the 1990s and we have mutual friends). He is now Kentucky's men's basketball coach and his team, along with UCONN's, VCU's and Butler's have made it to the 2011 Men's Basketball NCAA Final Four!

Note the photo below with Coach Cal in his Memphis office back in the Fall of 2008 where he had a lot of UMass Amherst memorabilia. In fact, one of his daughters graduated from UMass and another one is still a student here.


As for Dr. Tina Wakolbinger, she will be joining the faculty of the Vienna University of Economics and Business as a Full Professor on May 15, 2011, and she received her PhD in 2007!

It will certainly be interesting to see who wins the 2011 NCAA basketball championship (both men's and women's)!

SBP 2011 Conference Highlights Through Photos

The SBP 2011 conference has been a huge success from the outstanding tutorials and great keynotes, as well as paper presentations (with a refereed proceedings volume), plus social activities.





One of the absolute highlights was sponsorship of 30 students to attend this conference!

Many, many thanks to the sponsors: NSF, NIH, ONR. AFOSR, and ARO for bringing together computer scientists, social scientists from economists to anthropologists, operations researchers and management scientists, applied mathematicians, biologists, medical professionals, cognitive scientists and psychologists, as well as engineers and network scientists!

Special thanks to the Conference Co-chairs, Professor Dana Nau of the University of Maryland and Professor Sun-ki Chai of the University of Hawaii, and to the Program Co-Chairs: John Salerno of the Air Force Research Lab and Professor Jay Yang of the Rochester Institute of Technology for such an excellently organized conference, the terrific venue, and so many stimulating discussions plus such a delicious set of lunches and coffee breaks!

Special thanks also to the Conference Committee:

Huan Liu, Arizona State University
John Salerno, Air Force Reasearch Laboratory
Sun Ki Chai, University of Hawaii
Patricia L. Mabry, Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, National Institutes of Health
Dana Nau, University of Maryland
V.S. Subrahmanian, University of Maryland

It was an honor to be on this team as the tutorial chair!

Would Proper Risk Assessment and Management Have Minimized the Damage to Japan?

The New York Times in a provocative article is raising the question of whether attention to risk assessment for nuclear power plants in Japan might have reduced the scale of the damage from the triple earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster. The article even highlights that Japanese engineers focused on deterministic as opposed to probabilistic approaches in determining the safety of the associated engineering structures. According to the article, over the decades, preparedness against tsunamis never became a priority for Japan’s power companies or nuclear regulators. They were perhaps lulled, experts said, by the fact that no tsunami (itself a Japanese word) had struck a nuclear plant until two weeks ago. Even though tsunami simulations offered new ways to assess the risks of tsunamis, plant operators made few changes at their aging facilities, and nuclear regulators did not press them.

Also, engineers took a similar approach with earthquakes. According to Masaru Kobayashi, an expert on quake resistance at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Japan’s nuclear regulator, "When it came to designing the Fukushima plant, official records dating from 1600 showed that the strongest earthquakes off the coast of present-day Fukushima Prefecture had registered between magnitude 7.0 and 8.0." We all know that the earthquake that struck Japan on March 11, 2011, has now been upgraded from an 8.9 earthquake to a 9.0 one.

The Times article stated: For whatever reasons — whether cultural, historical or simply financial — Japanese engineers working on nuclear plants continued to predict what they believed were maximum earthquakes based on records. Those methods, however, did not take into account serious uncertainties such as faults that had not been discovered or earthquakes that were gigantic but rare, said Greg Hardy, a US-based structural engineer.

Indeed, in the West, risk management and assessment has become a focus not only of engineering studies and analyses but also a critical component of business decision-making. Drawn from techniques in finance, probability, and, I would add, optimization and decision-making under uncertainty, risk management has been integrated with design and analysis with a notable body of literature now in existence especially in the area of global supply chains (clearly also impacted by the Japanese set of disasters).

As a faculty member in the Department of Finance and Operations Management at the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst, I have been researching, along with my students and associated colleagues, risk management in different network systems from transportation and logistic ones to economic and financial ones. Our research on the integration of risk management and decision-making under uncertainty with complex networks began over half a decade ago and has yielded publications such as:

Supply Chain Networks, Electronic Commerce, and Supply Side and Demand Side Risk
Anna Nagurney, Jose Cruz, June Dong, and Ding Zhang, European Journal of Operational Research 26: (2005) pp 120-142.

Multitiered Supply Chain Networks: Multicriteria Decision–Making under Uncertainty
June Dong, Ding Zhang, Hong Yan, and Anna Nagurney, Annals of Operations Research 135: (2005) pp 155-178.

Global Supply Chain Network Dynamics with Multicriteria Decision-Making Under Risk and Uncertainty
Anna Nagurney and Dmytro Matsypura, Transportation Research E 41: (2005) pp 585-612.

Financial Networks with Intermediation: Risk Management with Variable Weights
Anna Nagurney and Ke Ke, European Journal of Operational Research 172: (2006) pp 40-63.

Modeling of Supply Chain Risk Under Disruptions with Performance Measurement and Robustness Analysis
Qiang Qiang, Anna Nagurney, and June Dong, in Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability: Tools and Methods for Supply Chain Decision Makers, T. Wu and J. Blackhurst, Editors, Springer, Berlin, Germany (2009) pp 91-111.

Supply Chain Outsourcing Under Exchange Rate Risk and Competition
Zugang Liu and Anna Nagurney, Omega 39: (2011) pp 539-549.

Risk Reduction and Cost Synergy in Mergers and Acquisitions via Supply Chain Network Integration
Zugang Liu and Anna Nagurney, to appear in the Journal of Financial Decision Making.

Supply Chain Network Design for Critical Needs with Outsourcing
Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, and Qiang Qiang, Papers in Regional Science 90: (2011) pp 123-142.

Only with the right methodological and analytical tools can we assess risk and prepare appropriately for emergencies and disasters!

Hope to See You at the Northeast Regional INFORMS Conference at UMass Amherst!

The program with schedule for the First Northeast Regional INFORMS Conference, which will take place at UMass Amherst, May 6-7, 2011 is now searchable online! Feel free to search for your favorite "key word" to see the list of exciting presentations.

With three outstanding plenary speakers: Dr. Brenda Dietriich of IBM, Dr. Alex "Sandy" Pentland of the Media Lab at MIT, and Dr. Simchi-Levi of MIT, plus two terrific tutorials: by Greg H. Parlier and Tom Donnelly, and three panels: The Academic Job Search Process, Research in Academia and Industry, and How to Run a Successful INFORMS Student Chapter, and with dozens of invited and contributed sessions with papers on topics ranging from supply chains to health care and even social networks, it will be a very exciting and informative conference.

The early registration deadline is April 8, 2011.

The Conference Committee has worked very hard to provide an excellent set of presentations as well as social events. We acknowledge financial support from the Isenberg School of Management, the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst as well as from the Vice Chancellor for Research and Engagement at UMass Amherst!

Also, special thanks go to the INFORMS folks who have been so wonderful in supporting the General Chair, Dr. Hari Balasubramanian, the Program Co-Chairs, Drs. Les Servi and Tamas Terlaky, and the Program Committee.

We look forward to welcoming you to UMass Amherst in early May!

Meet the Ford Executive

I am delighted that we will be hosting Mr. Kevin Koswick of Ford in our next "Meet the Executive" event at the Isenberg School of Management. Mr. Koswick will be speaking on Friday, April 15, 2011 at 11AM in ISOM Room 128.

This series is organized by the award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter.

Mr. Koswick is the Executive Director of North American Fleet, Lease and Remarketing Operations. In this role, Koswick oversees the largest commercial and government operation in the industry, as well the remarketing of all Ford Vehicles in North America. In addition, he has brand responsibilities for all Ford Commercial Vans, Chassis Cabs, Police Vehicles, Taxis, Limousines, Livery and Recreational Vehicles.

Beginning his career with Ford Division in 1985 as a Sales Representative for the Philadelphia Region, Koswick has held several managerial roles in Ford Division, Marketing Sales and Service including Regional Market Representation Manager for the Northeast, National Contest & Incentive Coordinator, General Zone Manager for the Cincinnati Region, and Regional Marketing Manager for the Southwest Region --where he developed and implemented plans contributing to Ford’s truck leadership.

In 1996, he became Regional Operations Manager for the New York Region, and in 1998 became Regional Sales Manager for Washington D.C. Region. Kevin was appointed Ford Division Manager of Commercial Trucks in 2001, a position he held prior to his appointment to the Executive level in the Ford Motor Company.

Mr. Koswick has held several executive positions with Ford dating back to December 2002, including General Sales Manager of Ford Division, General Sales Manager of Ford and Lincoln-Mercury, and Chairman of the Ford Motor Company Dealer Policy Board.

He was born in Washington DC, and raised in the New England. Koswick graduated in 1983 with a bachelor's degree in marketing and business administration from Western New England College in Springfield, Mass. He completed his MBA in 1985 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.