Pandemic Flu: Yes, We Can Do Something About It!

The emergence of influenza with virulence comparable to the famous 1918-1919 “Spanish Flu” has the potential to kill hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Should we find ourselves being forced to ‘live with the flu,’ it is imperative that we recognize that there are things that we can do – many simple – that may decrease the chance of our loved ones, our co-workers and ourselves becoming infected with the flu. The key is to decrease the number of new infections created by each newly infected person. And this relates to mathematical modeling of the disease, a very simple example of which is shown here

Holistic Trinity of Services Sciences: Management, Social, & Engineering Sciences

Services industries comprise about 75% of the economy of developed nations. To design and operate services systems for today and tomorrow, we need to educate a new type of engineer who focuses not on manufacturing but on services. Such an engineer must be able to integrate 3 sciences - management, social and engineering – into her analysis of services systems. Within the context of a new research center at MIT – CESF (Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals) – we show how newly emerging services systems require such a 3-way holistic analysis. We deliberately select some non-standard services, as many business services such as supply chains have been studied extensively

System Design and Architecture of an Online, Adaptive, and Personalized Learning Platform

The authors propose that personalized learning can be brought to traditional and nontraditional learners through a new type of asynchronous learning platform called Guided Learning Pathways (GLP). The GLP platform allows learners to intelligently traverse a vast field of learning resources, emphasizing content only of direct relevance to the learner and presenting it in a way that matches the learner’s pedagogical preference and contextual interests. GLP allows learners to advance towards individual learning goals at their own pace, with learning materials catered to each learner’s interests and motivations. Learning communities would support learners moving through similar topics. This report describes the software system design and architecture required to support Guided Learning Pathways. The authors provide detailed information on eight software applications within GLP, including specific learning benefits and features of each. These applications include content maps, learning nuggets, and nugget recommendation algorithms. A learner scenario helps readers visualize the functionality of the platform. To describe the platform’s software architecture, the authors provide conceptual data models, process flow models, and service group definitions. This report also provides a discussion on the potential social impact of GLP in two areas: higher education institutions and the broader economy

A Proposal to Improve the Health Care Systems for the Urban Poor in the Squatter Settlements of the Developing Countries

Rapid urbanization and large scale population movements from rural to urban areas have resulted in unprecedented health crises in the developing countries. In addition to communicable diseases, respiratory infections and malnutrition, psycho-social stresses due to marginalization and exclusion from social activities and employment prospects are also prevalent. Considering the rate of urban growth rate and the rapid increase in the percentage of the poor living in urban areas, the debilitating effects of health crises and urban poverty are going to exacerbate if no precautions are taken. In this respect, it is a critical point in time to come up with effective health care strategies for the urban poor. This document provides an insight into the reasons behind the current health problems of the urban poor and the determinants of health in developing countries, and proposes use of operations research to come up with handling strategies for the major subdivisions of the health problem in the developing world

STEM Crisis or STEM Surplus? Yes and Yes

Over the last decade, there has been significant concern regarding a shortage of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers to meet the demands of the labor market. At the same time, many experts have presented evidence of a STEM worker surplus. The literature tends to lean heavily in one direction or the other: one side proclaims an impending STEM crisis and the other side asserts a STEM surplus. This paper tries to reconcile the “STEM Crisis” vs. “STEM Surplus” debate by segmenting the STEM labor market into different industries, occupations, and skill levels. We conduct an in-depth analysis of the STEM labor market using a comprehensive literature review in conjunction with sources such as employment statistics, newspaper articles, and authors’ interviews with company recruiters. Our findings indicate a significant heterogeneity in the STEM labor market. While the academic sector is generally oversupplied, the government and government-related sector has shortages in specific areas such as nuclear engineering, materials science, and electrical engineering, as well as cybersecurity and intelligence. The private sector also has specific shortages for positions such as petroleum engineers, data scientists, and software developers. At the same time, there are surpluses for graduates in areas such as chemistry and physics. The demand and supply also vary according to location and U.S. citizenship. Based on our analysis, we discuss policies to address the STEM workforce demand and supply

Congestion Pricing: A Parking Queue Model

Congestion pricing imposes a usage fee on a public resource during times of high demand. Road pricing involves cordoning off a section of the city and imposing a fee on vehicles that enter it. Parking pricing increases the costs of on-street and perhaps off-street parking. Following an historical review, we develop a new queueing model of the parking pricing problem, recognizing that many urban drivers are simply looking for available on-street parking. Often, reducing the number of such “cruising drivers” would reduce urban road congestion dramatically, perhaps as effectively as cordoning off the center city

Strategies to Overcome Network Congestion in Infrastructure Systems

Networked Infrastructure systems deliver services and/or products from point to point along the network. They include transportation networks (e.g., rails, highways, airports, sea ports), telecommunication networks (by frequency-bounded airwaves or cables), and utilities (e.g., electric power, water, gas, oil, sewage). Each is a fixed capacity system having marked time-of-day and day-of-week patterns of demand. Usually, the statistics of demand, including hourly patterns (i.e., means and variances) are well known and often correlated with outside factors such as weather (short term) and the general economy (longer term)

Engineering Responses to Pandemics

Focusing on pandemic influenza, this chapter approaches the planning for and response to such a major worldwide health event as a complex engineering systems problem. Action-oriented analysis of pandemics requires a broad inclusion of academic disciplines since no one domain can cover a significant fraction of the problem. Numerous research papers and action plans have treated pandemics as purely medical happenings, focusing on hospitals, health care professionals, creation and distribution of vaccines and anti-virals, etc. But human behavior with regard to hygiene and social distancing constitutes a first-order partial brake or control of the spread and intensity of infection. Such behavioral options are “non-pharmaceutical interventions.” (NPIs) The chapter employs simple mathematical models to study alternative controls of infection, addressing a well-known parameter in epidemiology, R0, the “reproductive number,” defined as the mean number of new infections generated by an index case. Values of R0 greater than 1.0 usually indicate that the infection begins with exponential growth, the generation-to-generation growth rate being R0. R0 is broken down into constituent parts related to the frequency and intensity of human contacts, both partially under our control. It is suggested that any numerical value for R0 has little meaning outside the social context to which it pertains. Difference equation models are then employed to study the effects of heterogeneity of population social contact rates, the analysis showing that the disease tends to be driven by high frequency individuals. Related analyses show the futility of trying geographically to isolate the disease. Finally, the models are operated under a variety of assumptions related to social distancing and changes in hygienic behavior. The results are promising in terms of potentially reducing the total impact of the pandemic

Nonfixed Retirement Age for University Professors: Modeling Its Effects on New Faculty Hires

We model the set of tenure-track faculty members at a university as a queue, where “customers” in queue are faculty members in active careers. Arrivals to the queue are usually young, untenured assistant professors, and departures from the queue are primarily those who do not pass a promotion or tenure hurdle and those who retire. There are other less-often-used ways to enter and leave the queue. Our focus is on system effects of the elimination of mandatory retirement age. In particular, we are concerned with estimating the number of assistant professor slots that annually are no longer available because of the elimination of mandatory retirement. We start with steady-state assumptions that require use of Little's Law of Queueing, and we progress to a transient model using system dynamics. We apply these simple models using available data from our home university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.United States. National Institutes of Health (5U01GM094141-02

Stopping Pandemic Flu: Government and Community Interventions in a Multi-Community Model

Focusing on mitigation strategies for global pandemic influenza, we use elementary mathematical models to evaluate the implementation and timing of intervention strategies such as travel restrictions, vaccination, social distancing and improved hygiene. A spreadsheet model of infection spread between several linked heterogeneous communities is based on analytical calculations and Monte Carlo simulations. Since human behavior will likely change during the course of a pandemic, thereby altering the dynamics of the disease, we incorporate a feedback parameter into our model to reflect altered behavior. Our results indicate that while a flu pandemic could be devastating; there are coping methods that when implemented quickly and correctly can significantly mitigate the severity of a global outbreak