http://blog.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=1565&do=blog&id=279300 . However, not everyone of my former students were able to attend the 2009 event. Thus, unbeknownst to me, a group of former students started to organize another version of the 2009 event in Cambridge MA on April 9, 2011. It was featured as a mini-reunion of old friends and I was invited to attend.  Thus, I was semi-surprised to find out that it was actually an event in my honor. In 2009, the Shanghai event was rather lavish and formal. This time the occasion was informal, personal, and intimate. Again, from all over the US and as far as Greece and Singapore they came including all three of my female phds. Instead of formal lecture workshop and banquet, the audiences are ourselves and our family. Many brought their spouse and children. Each of us talked about what we have done since graduation – family, children, career, reminiscences, and the impact of the Harvard experience. The most gratifying emotion for me is the universal acknowledgement by these former students on what they have learned beyond the books, classes, and exams during their stay at Harvard. They most value the informal interactions and life experiences that I imparted to them during our years together and how these life lessons changed their lives. I in turn was greatly impressed by all the things they have done and the satisfying lives they have led. This is truly a home coming event and the “parental pride” we felt brought my wife and me to tears. You teach and live your life as you believed. But this unexpected and unsolicited reward is the true gift of a lifetime.

·        Below is a summary of the event on 4/9/11 written by one of the participants (Edward Lau) posted here unedited and for the benefit of my other students and colleague who are not at the event .

1. Cambridge Reunion April 9, 2011 (by Edward Lau)
3. The warm Spring breeze brought 16 of us –– academic brothers and sisters once studied under Prof Yu-Chi Ho –– back together in the Maxwell-Dworkin Laboratory Building, right next to the familiar Pierce Hall, to enjoy a delightful reunion of familiar faces and familiar voices.  It all came about in a few serendipitous e-mail exchanges among Chen, Patsis, Larson and Deng, which eventually became a memorable occasion in this early April weekend.  Some were joined by their spouses and others with children, including twins and a newborn baby.  Amid laughter, chit-chats, sharing of new family pictures and old school photos, we caught up with each other on our life changes from the days leaving this west-side courtyard behind Oxford Street, Cambridge.
5. The welcoming lunch in Maxwell-Dworkin  Room 221 segued into a series of presentations by each and every one attending the reunion.  What could be more befitting than to begin with Prof Christos Cassandras’s recount of the key developments in Perturbation Analysis (PA), one of the groundbreaking fields led by Prof Ho.  A 1975 investigation of a real-world production problem (commissioned by the Italian Fiat Corporation) embarked on an entirely new way of thinking in how performance sensitivity could be estimated along a sample path, despite the lack of familiar and formal notion of derivative.  Over time, more mathematical properties and underpinning theories were worked out by many of Prof Ho’s students.  The field of PA grew along the branches under acronyms like IPA, SPA, EPA, DPA, SIPA, and spread beyond the Harvard root to other institutions in the country and around the world.  Fast-forwarding three decades, the latest research conducted by Christos at Boston University points to how the general concepts of PA can be crystallized into a set of three fundamental equations.
7. ·         Upon defending his doctoral thesis and working in the hedge fund industry, Nikos Patsis soon began establishing his own startup company named VoiceWeb in Greece.  Now nearly 10 years later, VoiceWeb’s clients include many major corporations spanning across continents from Europe to Asia.  Nikos showed us a demo of how his company’s product handled human voice interactions in real time, and the function could be deployed over different language platforms.  During the presentation, he attributed his business success to lessons taught by Prof Ho, that (1) the Ph.D. training at Harvard empowered one with the self-confidence to take on whatever challenges in the real world; (2) the down-to-earth work ethics and planning; and (3) the ability to make decision in the midst of limited information.
9. ·         In Michael Larson’s doctoral thesis, he studied the estimation problem of rare events using Ordinal Optimization, the latest research field born out of Prof Ho’s group.  Who could have imagined that Michael would also encounter one of the rarest events in real life –– struck by lightning!  In 2007, his home in Minneapolis was hit by a thunder bolt, and then destroyed by the ensuing fire.  Fortunately, everyone was away from the house but that left his family having to deal with an un-cooperating insurance company in a prolonged and treacherous process.  These days Michael continues to apply his rare event modeling knowledge to design and manage option trading strategies at Seagrass Advisors, his own investment advisory firm in Seattle.
11. ·         The everlasting cheerful spirit of Mei Deng once again lifted everybody up in this afternoon when she shared about her retirement story –– the first among us.  Mei began her dream job shortly before defending her doctoral thesis, a rewarding and fulfilling assignment at AT&T where she was promoted to manager in the shortest amount of time.  After a roller-coaster ride during the dotcom period, she rejoined AT&T until she retired exactly 12 years later to the day marked by when she first joined the company.  Now, between learning to play the piano and serving an even more demanding job of caring for her family (a fact she eagerly reminded all husbands in the audience), Mei is also a co-founder and director of a Chinese startup company.
13. ·         Michael Yang also went to work in AT&T shortly after completing his doctoral study at Harvard, his alma mater.  After a few years working as a management consultant for the McKinsey & Company in Greater Asia, he started his journey on entrepreneurship, like Nikos Patsis, Michael Larson and Mei Deng.  He first took up the role as the chief financial officer in a Silicon Valley technology and media startup company.  These days he is fully engaged in launching three business ventures across the two Pacific coasts in the area of efficient energy solutions.  In Mike’s presentation, he had a plot showing that since his wedding in 2002, in which Prof Ho also served as the Master of Ceremony, his household had been growing (so far) like a logistic function, first twins and then a boy.
15. ·         As the pioneer of Optimal Computing Budget Allocation methodology, Prof Chun Hung Chen broke to us the news that he would be moving back to his home country this July to take up a professorship at the National Taiwan University.  This is primarily driven by the desire to spend more time with his mother.  An avid train lover since childhood, Chun Hung continues to find every opportunity to meander along local rail tracks whenever his travel schedule would allow, or at the very least to pose for pictures standing next to a locomotive.  He would surely miss the cherry blossom seasons in Washington DC, as well as the gourds and other bountiful harvests from their home garden, carefully tended by his wife.
17. ·         On the day prior to our reunion, Prof Loo Hay Lee had jointly presented a talk with Chun Hung in a seminar at Boston University’s Center for Information and Systems Engineering.  This talk, together with our reunion, constituted the twin purpose for Loo Hay to travel half way around the globe (and always the longest distance) from the National University of Singapore.  His research group has been growing from a starting 2 master students into now over a dozen doctoral and master candidates.  Loo Hay maintains the same rigorous standard like that demanded by Prof Ho, and strongly believes in the Socratic method of teaching and learning because this is the most effective way to prepare a young mind to face the multitude of challenges in the real world.  His latest book, co-authored with Chun Hung, is titled “Stochastic Simulation Optimization, An Optimal Computing Budget Allocation.”
19. ·         Les Servi talked about his roundabout journey that ended him back in the MITRE Corporation where he once interned nearly 30 years ago.  Upon finishing at Harvard, he performed industrial and defense related researches at Bell Laboratories, GTE Laboratories, Verizon and the Lincoln Laboratory.  Les continues to be highly involved in the field of operations research ever since working in MIT (through another arrangement by Prof Ho), and is an active and leading member in INFORMS.  In addition to MITRE, Les has recently been appointed to the Defense Science Board, a prestigious science advisory body reporting to the State Department.  While Les pedaled his way back to the same starting point, he was also proud to share with us that his daughter took up biking and determinedly journeyed across America from coast to coast in 2009.
21. ·         Marcia Kastner’s arrival in the afternoon was a pleasant surprise, as she was able to be among us out of another day-long prior commitment.  It was great to hear about her diverse experiences after her Ph.D. study with Prof Ho, extending from the academia, to industry and the government.  Marcia last served as the Administrator of Mathematics Test Development at the Massachusetts Department of Education, where she oversaw the development of standardized tests required by the state and federal laws and for high school graduation in the Commonwealth.  She now shares her wisdom and findings in a new book that aims at providing guidance to teachers, school administrators, government officials as well as parents and students on the quality of math tests.
23. ·         After a 29-year career at the Volpe Center, a consulting service division of the Department of Transportation, Jim Poage is now an independent aviation and human factor consultant.  During his tenure at the DOT, he specialized in air traffic control systems.  These systems, in the U.S. for example, are profoundly complex, constantly changing and technologically demanding to be operated in a safe and seamless manner.  It is a multidisciplinary endeavor involving control system analysis, software engineering design, human interaction factors and organization development.  Through his own consulting practice these days, Jim continues to advise on large scale system design and optimization problems, with a specialty to integrate man-machine systems and human-in-the-loop simulation for feasibility and benefits analyses.
25. ·         Jonathan Lee’s start at the Volpe Center is almost three decades apart since that of Jim’s but there is a strong commonality in their lines of work, especially in complex decision support system for FAA, NASA, and other federal agencies.  In fact, he highlighted several projects in which Jim ideas about human factor were incorporated in the overall design considerations.   Jonathan often found himself collaborating with a diverse team of experts, working under very ambitious prototyping schedule, and having to travel to clients’ sites on a regular basis.  His hard work was certainly paid off with the wide endorsements from various academic, industry and government organizations, including domestically the Reason Foundation and internationally Airways New Zealand.  Jonathan has also extended his productivity in one more dimension –– he brought us to greet his first newborn son during the reunion, and we all congratulated him and his wife.
27. ·         Xiaocang Lin is now a manager at MathWorks, Inc. where he leads a group of software engineers to design state-of-the-art automatic code generation technology for Simulink®, one of the two flagship products offered his company (the other is the programming software platform MATLAB® used by countless science and engineering students around the world).  Xiaocang’s products are widely deployed for design and testing purposes in the automotive and aerospace industries.  They greatly facilitate a system engineer’s tasks in modeling and simulating dynamical systems, as well as in verification and validation from the design to implementation stages.  We were fascinated by his video demo of how his product was used in part to construct an intelligent robot that solved the Rubik’s cube in real time all by itself.
29. ·         Liyi Dai was the last Harvard student in Prof Ho’s group who wrote a doctoral thesis in Perturbation Analysis.  After teaching at the University of Washington at St. Louis, he is now a program manager at the U.S. Army Research Office in North Carolina.  His work involves coordinating and overseeing funding for a variety of advanced scientific and technological research projects for the army.  One of his projects, titled “Brain Power,” was documented in the “60 Minutes” news program on CBS.  Host and correspondent Scott Pelley personally tried out a device that amazingly allowed him to communicate with a computer by nothing more than just thinking about it!  (Hence, the expression “It’s the thought that counts.”)  Liyi later explained that the results of this research would be hugely beneficial to many paralyzed people who would otherwise have no mobility in their bodies.
31. ·         Tracing back the time line of Perturbation Analysis, Prof Leyuan Shi was the second last Harvard student contributed a PA thesis in 1992.  In her study, she looked at the problem of applying PA in the optimization of complex networks.  Since then, Leyuan continues to discover novel optimization techniques and applications, most notably as the creator of the Nested Partitions Method.  Her research interests at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as joint appointment at Peking University in Beijing, cover a wide range of topics from manufacturing and supply chains to health care delivery and transportation.  One of the most interesting applications for Nested Partition approach is to generate optimal radiation treatment plans for targeting tumors while minimizing exposure to otherwise healthy surrounding tissues.
33. ·         Prof Weibo Gong was mindful of our schedule running late in the afternoon, and he made his presentation crisp and precise, adhering to our training that we could always deliver a talk in whatever given time limit.  Better yet, Weibo’s usual wit and humor were not diminished in any way.  In fact, he got us into cheerful laughter in literally every minute of his presentation.  He recalled that one of the most distinct experiences in studying under Prof Ho, and later in working with him, was his unyielding demand of conceptual clarity, that we ought to be able to explain our ideas to him and to anyone fully and clearly.  As the hour was running away from us, Weibo was able to describe a research project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which involved an application of Ordinal Optimization in a compressive sensing problem.
35. ·         Edward Lau was the last one to present before dinner.  He retold from his school days Prof Ho’s conversation about the importance of retirement savings and investment as we entered our working life.  This turns out to be Edward’s current line of work at MFS Investment Management, the oldest mutual fund company in the country.  He applies simulation and optimization to design investment products aiming at meeting client’s long term financial goals.  He also noticed three common threads in our presentations throughout the afternoon, that (1) over the years our hearts had never left Harvard and our memories in Pierce Hall; (2) over the years we had never left each other, in fact, we got to know more from across different generations of Prof Ho’s students; and (3) over the years Prof Ho’s example and teaching had always found its way into various aspects of our personal life and our professional work.
37. Shortly after, we relocated to our dinner venue at Joyful Garden, not too far from the Harvard Stadium across Charles River.  The menu was sumptuous, including of course Boston lobsters and ten other dishes.  But nothing was more fulfilling than the conversations across seats and between tables.  Leading us was Prof Ho’s speech in which he shared with us two primary engagements since he officially retired from Harvard.  One is the Center for Intelligent Network Systems (CFINS) that he has jointly established with his students and other colleagues at Tsinghua University in China since 2001.  The CFINS research model is founded in spirit and in practice much the way it was in the DEDS group at Harvard.  He extends an open invitation to all of us to visit the center whenever we would find ourselves traveling to Beijing.  We would be greeted with enthusiasm by Prof Samuel Jia, his first doctoral student at Tsinghua and now a professor.
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41. In addition to the scientific research and advisory role at Tsinghua, Prof Ho is also active in the blogger’s world in which his blog articles have been read and commented by millions of people online.  He shares in these blogs his 40 years of teaching and research experiences, the life as an American Chinese in the U.S., thoughts about past and ongoing scientific and engineering challenges, as well as any topics of interest to young researchers and students.  These blog articles have also been collected, translated and published in a book titled “Letters From America, Blog Articles on Sciences and Life by Yu Chi Ho” by the Tsinghua University Press.  One of the articles that summarizes Prof Ho’s reflection on his journey in scientific and engineering education can be found here: Half century of Research and Education (I am a lucky guy)
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45. http://blog.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=1565&do=blog&id=279300
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49. This reunion was a semi-surprise for Prof Ho.  He knew of the talk by Chun Hung and Loo Hay but was not aware of the number of attendees and the program.  In his words, “I was semi-surprised, touched and left really speechless by all the emotions.  I thank you all for coming from all over the world and the locals for the organization of this event.”  On the other hand, it was really Prof Ho to whom we should express our gratitude because it was him who brought us together back again in Cambridge, much like the warm Spring breeze bringing the return of migratory birds.
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53. In our company was also Mrs Ho, who in all these years played a definite and strong supporting part in our graduate student life.  We found ourselves always being cared for because of her graciousness and generosity.  How lovely it was when she asked about our well-being, and that of our children as well.  Prof and Mrs Ho are grateful for being together in good health, which allows them to travel, and to enjoy and cherish a blessed life in each other’s company.  Another Prof Ho’s blog gives us a glimpse in real terms this lasting relationship: A tribute to my wife
55. http://blog.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=1565&do=blog&id=15663
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59. We were also very glad to have Prof Peter Luh and his wife joined us for dinner.  They
61. were traveling earlier in the day, and managed to arrive right at the start of Prof Ho’s speech.  Peter has been teaching at the University of Connecticut after his Ph.D. study in 1980, and is one of the main contributors in making CFINS a reality.  We should also mention that Sheldon Baron, one of the earliest students of Prof Ho in the 1960’s, could not join us at the last minute due to a health concern.  We wish him our best regards, and hope to see him in a future gathering.  Indeed, this may already be in the making.  Through another thread of e-mail exchanges, two other former students, Prof Xiren Cao and Prof Jian Qiang Hu, have already talked about organizing another reunion in Shanghai, China soon.

Here are some photos taken at the event: