 Hi, my name is Chris Kaplus, and I'm the Director and Founder of the MIT Freight Lab. What I want to do is talk for a couple minutes about what Freight Lab is and what it does. We're a research initiative within the Center for Transportation and Logistics, and as such, we have three main thrusts of our activity. Education, outreach, and research. Let me talk briefly about each. On education, we have a series of classes that we offer online that ties transportation into actually supply chain and other activities. And also, I have a freight transportation course I've been offering for the last six to seven years. It's the only freight transportation class offered at MIT, and that's for our graduate students here, as well as other students in business, engineering, economics, and other areas take this as well. So on the education front, we try to do both online and in-person education, as well as some executive education as well. For outreach to our partners, we do a couple of activities. The main one is roundtables. I try to run a transportation freight lab roundtable every year. And the roundtables, as most of you already know, consist of about two dozen people selected from across the industry, all practitioners. We come with a common theme, and we discuss it for about a day or a day and a half. It's free-wheeling conversation. Nothing is recorded. We keep notes, but nothing is all anonymized at the end. But the idea is to share and exchange ideas on topics that are pressing that day. We've been doing these since about 2004. We've covered topics such as variability and price, visibility of transportation. How do you deal with the variability of transit time? How do you handle slow steaming? We just recently had one on the Uber for freight initiative. Does the Uber model work for freight transportation? Whatever an interest is for one of our partners, we have a roundtable on it initially, and that might turn into a research project. Additionally, I like to conduct visits. I like to go out and see what the different partners are doing. It keeps me current, and so I always try to do that as well. But the main initiative of Freight Lab is research, and we focus our research into four main buckets. Because what we're really trying to do is improve the state of transportation in the design, procurement, management, and assessment for all modes across all regions. In the short tagline, it's all about studying anything that moves. If it moves, then I want to know about it. I want to study it. So let me talk about some projects that we've done in each of these. For the assessment, we've done a lot of work to look at truckload rates. And what we try to do, our fundamental question is, what drives them? We've done a series of projects here, and it's resulted in many master's thesis. We've tried to see, does level of service drive transportation rates? And we've actually found they're not correlated, and if they are, they're usually negatively correlated. We've looked at how this affects lead time. We've looked at how the bidding process affects this. So we've done a series of work here to see how you can look at your truckload rates to determine your performance, and perversely, or reversely rather, how does my behavior, how does my business practice drive my rates? So it's kind of an assessment side of things. On management, we finished a project a couple years back that looked at ocean transportation, where they were having a problem where they had a transit time distribution that was known as bimodal. So if this is transit time, say between Rotterdam and New York, we were finding for some of our partners that they would have things anywhere from 14 days to 28 days of transit time. It was bimodal. And the question was, how do I manage for that? Because most ERP systems or transportation management systems can only look at one number, an average. So you'd be planning for this average when in fact you're missing it most of the time. And so what we did is we developed a series of frameworks to determine when does it make sense to change the way that you manage your transportation. And it's really a function of critical ratio or how important stocking out is. If it's, we can't stock out ever versus we really don't care. Think you're selling iPhones or smartphones versus bricks. And then what's the level of variability? What's known as the coefficient of variation if it's very variable or not. And what we found is there's this zone. And this is the zone where it really matters. If you're down in this other area, then it really doesn't matter. It's not as critical for you. And so what we tried to do is to develop when should you care about managing differently based on the variability of your transit time. On the procurement side, this is where we did some of our initial work. And so my initial research was in combinatorial auctions. And so we developed how to do these combinatorial auctions, package bids and how it can be incorporated. They're now pretty common in the practice. The latest thing we've done in procurement is actually look at this Uber for freight model. And the whole idea is does this work? Does this make sense? And this is a project that's actually ongoing. It resulted in a round table and now starting into some larger research trying to understand does this model work, this on-demand model. Or, in fact, as I argue, is Uber really just a brokerage for passenger. So it's an ongoing project, but we look at the procurement side as well. Then lastly, design. And there's a couple of projects that we did here. It's to put their known quantity versus going out to market. And this essentially resulted in new design for their distribution. We're also looking now at what the effect of autonomous vehicles or trucks would have on design. And it's an interesting question. It's not going to happen today, tomorrow, or next year, but eventually when it does happen, what will the impact be on how you design your network and design transportation? So this is Freight Lab. These are the type of projects we do. If you're interested in this, please reach out and contact me. I'd love to talk with you.