Keynote Speaker 1

Topic: Does it Pay to be Environmentally and Socially Responsible? Evidence from Sustainability Disclosure.

Supply chain activities such as sourcing, production, distribution, and transportation of the manufacturing and logistics sectors have caused the depletion of natural resources, over-exploitation of renewable resources, and discharge of greenhouse gases. These sectors have also been criticized for inadequate attention to social sustainability issues. Given this context, in the recent past, both logistics and manufacturing firms have been investing significant amounts of their resources to adopt supply chain sustainability practices. Thus, an assessment of the association of sustainability practices and firms’ financial performance is critical. This presentation explores the scope and extent of environmental and social sustainability disclosure — as benchmarked against the Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI-G4) — of OECD manufacturing and global logistics firms and investigates the relationships between the extent of environmental and social sustainability disclosure of these firms and their actual financial performance and beyond.

Keynote Speaker 2

Topic: Challenges and Opportunities in Algorithmic Solutions for Re-Balancing in Bike Sharing Systems

In recent years, the booming of the bike sharing system (BSS) has played an important role in offering a convenient means of public transport. The BSS is also viewed as a solution to the first/last mile connection issue in urban cities. The BSS can be classified into dock and dock-less. However, due to imbalance in bike usage over spatial and temporal domains, stations in the BSS may exhibit overflow (full stations) or underflow (empty stations). In this talk, we will take a holistic view of the BSS design by examining the following four components: (1) system design, (2) system prediction, (3) system balancing, and (4) trip advisor. We will focus on system balancing, addressing the issue of overflow/underflow. We will look at two main methods of bike rebalancing: with trucks and with workers. Discussion on the other three components that are related to system balancing will also be given. Specifically, we will study various algorithmic solutions with the availability of data in spacial and temporal domains. Finally, we will discuss several key challenges and opportunities of the BSS design and applications as well as the future of dock and dock-less BSS in a bigger setting of the transportation system.