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Oct. 23, 2002

CONTACT: June Qiong Dong, 312-5557

PROFESSOR PUBLISHES BOOK PLUGGING INTO SUPERNETWORKS

OSWEGO -- How the world is becoming an increasingly networked place is the subject of a new book co-authored by Dr. June Qiong Dong, associate professor of marketing and management at SUNY Oswego.

"Supernetworks: Decision-Making for the Information Age" looks at information, transportation, telecommunication, financial and social networks -- and how these networks interrelate with each other. "We live in the networked economy," Dong explained.

Dong developed the book, as well as other papers and research on the subject, in collaboration with Anna Nagurney, the John F. Smith Memorial Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. A $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study complex network systems proved pivotal to the project, Dong said.

Businesses and individuals often make decisions based on more than one network system, Dong said, noting that decisions on whether to commute or telecommute affect both transportation and telecommunication networks. "We have to develop some kind of theory or analytic tools to let people make decisions in the system or supernetworks," she said.

"The book has received a lot of attention internationally," she said. "Many university libraries have picked it up already."

Dong said she believes the book, published by Edward Elgar Publications, can be used by academics, practitioners, economists, businesspeople, researchers and others. "I think it's very flexible and touches on a lot of topics," she said.

"The book itself is a product of supernetworks," Dong noted. Much of the collaboration took place when Dong was on sabbatical as a senior research fellow at Hong Kong Polytechnical University and Nagurney was in either the United States or Sweden. In addition to phone and traditional mail, the co-authors communicated using the Internet because of the large time differences, Dong said. "We literally worked around the clock," she said.

During her nearly year-long sabbatical, Dong also wrote or co-wrote more than a dozen articles that appeared in such journals as Computational Economics, Netmonics and Journal of Economics and Dynamics Control.

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