Supernetwork Center Associates to Present Supply Chain + Future Internet Papers at POMS Atlanta

It is the first day of May and, although the academic semester is over in terms of teaching, faculty and doctoral students are, nevertheless, very busy getting ready for a new cycle of conferences.

This is exciting!

The Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) is holding its 25th Annual Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, May 9-12, 2014.

And, although I will then be speaking at a fascinating workshop in Erice, Sicily - Italy, the work conducted by Supernetwork Center Associates will be highly visible at POMS. .

One of my doctoral students, Dong "Michelle: Li,  who recently received a 2014Outstanding Doctoral Student Researcher Award from the Isenberg School,  will be presenting our joint paper, Equilibria and Dynamics of Supply Chain Network Competition with Information Asymmetry in Quality and Minimum Quality Standards, which has been  accepted for publication in the journal Computational Management Science We have prepared this POMS presentation:

Two other supply chain papers that I co-authored with Supernetwork Center Associates, both of whom were my former doctoral students, and are now thriving as Professors, will also be presented: One is: An Integrated Disaster Relief Supply Chain Network Model with Time Targets and Demand Uncertainty, co-authored with Professors Amir H. Masoumi and Min Yu,  and the other: Competitive Food Supply Chain Networks with Application to Fresh Produce, which was published in the  European Journal of Operational Research 224(2): (2013) pp 273-282.

Center Associate Professor Patrick Qiang will be presenting his latest work on supply chains and sustainability: The Closed-loop Supply Chain Network with Competition and Design for Remanufacturability. Dr. Qiang was also my doctoral student in Management Science at the Isenberg School of Management. He has done pioneering work in network vulnerability and performance assessment.


Finally, Doctoral Student Center Associate Sara Saberi will present a paper co-authored with Professor Tilman Wolf and me on work funded by the Future Internet Architecture (FIA) program at the National Science Foundation (NSF). The title of that paper is: A Network Economic Game Theory Model of a Service -Oriented Internet with Price and Quality Competition in Both Content and Network Provision. Our POMS presentation can be downloaded from the supernetworks site.

Networks can really take you places!

Photos from Inspiring 2014 UMass Amherst HONORS Dinner

Yesterday was a perfect day, except, possibly, for the cool weather!

I had the pleasure of listening to the final set of presentations in both my undergraduate and graduate class and the professionalism of the student presentations and the excellent content was so very gratifying. We lingered after both my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class with hugs and took photos and after my Network, Game Theory, and Variational Inequalities class. Hard to believe that the semester is over with the exception of grading and graduations!

Yesterday was also Founder's Day at UMass Amherst and we celebrated 151 years throughout the day, culminating in the 2014 UMass HONORS Dinner at the Campus Center that I attended with my husband. 

It was the perfect ending to a great academic year - the food was extra delicious and the ambience elegant and warm. But, best of all, was the celebration of extraordinary achievements of our faculty in terms of research, teaching, and outreach. 

 

Chancellor Subbaswamy was a wonderful emcee and I LOVED his  speech in which he shared stories of UMass Amherst Deans, including our Isenberg School of Management Dean, Dr. Mark Fuller, and their reflections on their first research experiences.  Our Chancellor also noted how he, in 1972, as a young graduate student from India at Indiana University, and was inspired by Physics Professor Larry Shuman, who was working on Catastrophe Theory. And, when asked why is a physicist working on catastrophe theory, which was new and novel then (and I still find the subject fascinating), he answered because it was fun! Yes, knowledge-driven research is the kind of research that elevates, energizes, and leads to true innovation!

 

I so enjoyed seeing many colleagues from the College of Engineering, Natural Sciences, and Humanities and Fine Arts at the dinner and reception that preceded it.

I am so proud to be associated with such great minds and such special people and institution.

The Chancellor was assisted with the emceeing by Provost James Staros and our Vice Chancellor for Research and Engagement Mike Malone. 

 

 

 I also very much enjoyed hearing excerpts from  letters written in support of this year's Conti Faculty Fellowship recipients - the geoscientist, Dr. Robert DeConto, the computer scientist, Dr. Andrew McCallum, whose work has been cited over 35,000 times (and who spoke in our INFORMS Speaker Series at the Isenberg School), and the historian, Dr. Marla Miller.

Congrats and thanks to all the faculty who make UMass Amherst such a special place to conduct research at and to teach at.

I received a Conti Fellowship as an Associate Professor and spent that year as a Visiting Scholar in Management Science at the Sloan School at MIT. And, amazingly, last evening I was seated next to Ms. Susan Coltrane Lowance, who is married to Professor Lowance of the English Department. She  was in the second class of MBA recipients at Yale, went on to become the Director of the Management Program for women executives at Smith College and then became the first female Director of the Sloan Fellow Program at MIT.  It was so great to reminisce about my colleagues in operations research and management science there and about MIT and even Harvard, since Professor Lowance knows the President of Harvard, Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, who was the Dean of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard when I was a Science Fellow there.  And, would you believe, Ms. Lowance told me that she attended the previous Harvard President's inauguration (Dr. Larry Summers') and even met a couple standing by the wayside with Summers name tags - yes, they were his very proud parents!

Needless to say, what a perfect evening with such interesting people in attendance and such great stories! There is always serendipity in showing up as I tell my students.

Multidisciplinary Multiinstitutional Teaching Panel Today at UMass Amherst

This is a VERY busy time of the semester in academia and the academic year with many deadlines but also celebrations.

Nevertheless, when the invitation came from Professor Ana Muriel of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at UMass Amherst to take part in a Faculty Teaching Panel, I had to say, "Yes!"

Because where would we be without our students?!

Do join us this afternoon, if you can (and I will try to write up some highlights on this blog afterwards for those who can;t make it) , for an event that I am sure will be very informative and interesting for all those grad students who are interested in pursuing an academic career and will be teaching soon, if they are not already. We can learn so much from one another.

Hope to see some of you there!

Isenberg Celebration of Scholarship Recipients and Their Benefactors

Last evening I had the pleasure of attending the 2014 Isenberg Scholarship Celebration, which took place off-campus at the Log Cabin.

The venue was beautifully decorated with flowers and balloons, in maroon and white, of course, the UMass Amherst colors.

We had been attending this special spring recognition ceremony, which for many years had taken place at the UMass Campus Center.

Yesterday's event was extra special because my family and I had been giving over quite a few years towards an endowment established to create a scholarship for a student and, yesterday, we had the joy of seeing the first Nagurney Scholarship awarded to an undergraduate Operations & Information Management student, who is both a scholar and a true gentleman.

The hor d'oeuvres were elegant and the desserts sumptious but the best part was seeing the student scholarship recipients and their many benefactors, who include alums, members of the community, as well as faculty.

Education, as was emphasized yesterday, especially by our Dean, Mark Fuller, is the greatest gift that one can get and receive. Our Associate Dean Dr. Linda Shea further emphasized that scholarships enable our students to realize their dreams.

All the presentations were wonderful, including the student and alum ones, and I enjoyed hearing our Development Officer, Andrew Clendinneng, who is Canadian (I was born up north there, too), speak of the friendships he has made with our great alums.

It was also terrific to have one of my doctoral students, Sara Saberi, present. She was there because she is one of the ten recipients of the 2014 Isenberg Scholar Award. Her concentration is in Management Science and she is working on our NSF-funded multiuniversity project on Network Innovation Through Choice.

 

Gene Isenberg, after whom our School of Management is named, would have been so proud to see the students, family members, faculty, benefactors, and staff present yesterday evening. Sadly, he passed away on March 16, 2014 but left a tremendous legacy.

The Isenberg School is truly on the rise and, best of all, we have tremendous students that we have the privilege to teach and to conduct research with.

Congratulations to all of the scholarship recipients - you make the donors and faculty proud!

Thanks also to our wonderful Isenberg Editor, Lou Wigdor and former Dean Dr. Tom O'Brien for all that they have done to get us to this point.

Celebrating 15 Years of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University

I received a stunning invitation in the mail yesterday, which brought back so many pleasant memories. The invitation was from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the invitation was for a celebration of  15 years since its founding and also 135 years of Radcliffe.

In 2005-2006, I spent a sabbatical at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and was one of 12 Science Fellows that year. I had an office in Putnam House on Brattle Street, one of my favorite streets in Cambridge, MA, because of its location next to Harvard Square and also its history. I loved working that year on my Supply Chain Network Economics book, talking with fellow residents of Putnam - an engineer, sister physicists, linguists, and a computer scientists, and a French mathematician (Pierrette and I still stay in touch). Radcliffe generously also supported two of my female collaborators that year for several months when they visited me.

I also so much enjoyed the lunches filled with conversation across disciplines because that year (and this is another aspect of the Radcliffe Institute experience that is so special) we had novelists, artists, historians, film-makers, a psychiatrist, and other trailblazers, among us. I also very much enjoyed the talks that the Fellows gave and the various formal and informal get-togethers around Harvard and Cambridge.

Radcliffe is very special and its Institute for Advanced Studies is a true gem of scholarship and collegiality.  ORMS Today featured my essay on that very special year - thank you, INFORMS, for the great support of your members! Dr Elane Chew, then of USC, followed in my footsteps, a few years after my Radcliffe year, and I believe that we are the only operations researchers to have been Science Fellows, thus far, and I hope that there will be many more!

Some of you may know that the present President of Harvard, who is also its first female President, Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, was the Founding Dean of the Radcliffe Institute and she was its Dean when I was there. Dr. Barbara Grosz, a renowned computer scientist, was the Science Dean then.

To mark 15 years of the Radcliffe Institute and 135 years of Radcliffe,  there will be a celebration on May 30, 2014.  Also, Drew Gilpin Faust will be receiving the 2014 Radcliffe Medal.

I RSVPed my regrets - I will be in Sweden during Radcliffe Day 2014 - but through this post I wanted to reflect and reminisce and also to thank Radcliffe and the Institute for its support of interdisciplinary scholars and its vision!

Wishing everyone at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study much continued intellectual discourse and discoveries and, again, thanks for such a great year and for the friendships made!

Sustainable Supply Chains for Sustainable Cities, Earth Day, and Erice

Today is Earth Day on which we celebrate planet earth and the environment.

I have been hard at work on a presentation, Sustainable Supply Chains for Sustainable Cities, which I will be presenting at a fascinating workshop, which will take place in early May, at the Ettore Majorana Scientific Center in Erice, Sicily. I had been then before, back in 2006, and it was a fitting ending to not only my year as a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard but also to the World Cup (Italy beat France and we were in Italy).

The title of the Workshop that I will be speaking at is given below.

      ERICE INTERNATIONAL SEMINARS ON PLANETARY EMERGENCIES

47th Session
Erice, 11 –15 May 2014

THE ENERGY PLANETARY EMERGENCY

Workshop on Energy, Cities, and the Control of Complex Systems.

I received the formal invitation from the Director and Chairman of the Ettore Majorana Scientific Center, Professor Antonino Zichichi. The workshop is organized by Professor Adlison Motter of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern University,

http://dyn.phys.northwestern.edu/  and by Dr. Robert Schock, Center for Global Security Research, Energy Permanent Monitoring Panel, World Federation of Scientists:

http://www.federationofscientists.org/PMPanels/Energy.asp.

The list of invited participants is below.

 

The full workshop program can be downloaded here.

In my presentation I will present both a supply chain network design model with a focus on frequencies, which is in press in the journal Environment & Planning B and will discuss highlights of a model developed with Drs. Min Yu and Jonas Floden on sustainable supply chain network competition and game theory with frequencies of supply chain activities as strategic variables and product path flows. This paper was recently published in the journal Computational Management Science in a special issue devoted to Planet Earth.

Phishing is Like Fishing - A Fitting Finale to Our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series

Where has the academic year gone?

We are now in the final weeks of a very busy semester and yesterday we had the pleasure of hosting my colleague, Dr. Ryan Wirght, of the Operations & Information Management Department, in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series, which the students of this award-winning chapter, help me to organize.

This year we hosted 6 speakers, including Dr. Michael Fu of the Smith School at the University of Maryland, Dr. Les Servi of MITRE (both of whom I saw at the recent INFORMS Analytics Conference in Boston), as well as Dr. Mary Helander of IBM (who, coincidentally, was involved in helping to organize the same conference in terms of speaker selection), as well as Dr. Eric Gonzales, a recent great addition to the UMass Amherst faculty, who had been at Rutgers,and Dr. Adams Steven, another colleague of mine, who received hid PhD from the Smith School last year.

Yesterday, was the grand finale, since it was the last speaker of our academic year!

Dr. Wright's talk was on: “Towards a Behavioral Model of Online Deception Detection."

The audience consisted of students from the Isenberg School of Management and the College of Engineering as well as faculty. Dr. Wright began his lecture with an overview of the cybersecurity failures at both Target and Adobe and associated financial and reputational costs and took us on a journey of how to build a human firewall to combat such attacks. 

He shared with us his research, which is behavioral, and includes experiments (often with undergraduates as subjects),  and findings, published in top IS journals, on phishing and human susceptibility and vulnerability, along with effective response training, including mindfulness training. The insights garnered are fascinating. Needless to say, the audience had many questions, always a sign of an outstanding speaker and presentation. 

Top lesson:  be aware and think before you click on a "suspicious" link. Don't use technology mindlessly.

I took the following photos of  Dr. Wright lecturing yesterday and with some of the audience members. Given that it was a Friday, and Monday is Patriot's Day here is Massachusetts, which is a holiday, plus the day of the running of the Boston Marathon, we were so pleased that the talk attracted a standing room only audience.

And, yes, the second photo below, illustrated an analogy between phishing and fishing - think of that url as a "hook."

I always say, you have a great topic and speaker, you promote it appropriately, and we did, and they will come!

I have written tips on organizing a successful Speaker Series, which you can accessed here.