Spring 2016 Seminars at UMass Dartmouth

In April, I had the great opportunity to give a couple seminars at UMass Dartmouth. The first talk I gave was the last of a series for a group of students and faculty from the business school, and was meant to demonstrate what systems thinking means in practice, particularly in healthcare. I showed two examples of engineering/analytics projects I'd done in the healthcare arena. The second lecture was a guest lecture for an operations management class taught by a colleague of mine. There, I spoke about how engineers view uncertainty in healthcare operations both from a theoretical and practical perspective, how we tend to deal with that uncertainty, and some of the mistakes we tend to make in so doing. The abstracts of the two talks are below for those interested.

From Business Analytics to Federal Healthcare Policy: Systems Thinking in Practice

What I do as an engineer doesn't much resemble my undergraduate engineering coursework. Rather, I rely on a combination of systems engineering, management, operations research, data analytics, economics, and public policy concepts and methods to investigate and tackle problems in the healthcare industry. The recent emergence of "analytics" and "big data" remind us that we must constantly update our analysis tool-belt, but they also highlight the risk of relying too much on trendy techniques. A vexing healthcare operations management question may involve social science just as much as it does data science or traditional management principals. Critically, it is the co-application of multiple frames of analysis that offer us insight into complex systems and problems. Increasingly, this approach has come to be known as "systems thinking." I will discuss several concepts and tools from the systems thinking domain and elsewhere that I have found essential to successful problem-solving today. The talk will center around two cases: one involves medical decision-making, and the other deals with how a massive governmental institution manages all its policies.

The Role of Uncertainty in Principal and in Practice

Uncertainty is pervasive. It plays a critical role in engineering, management, and public policy. We face decisions that are subject to considerable uncertainties every day. Yet, it is commonly not well understood. Oftentimes it is either ignored or treated improperly when designing a product, conducting an analysis, or making a decision. Particularly in the field of operations management, proper assessments of uncertainty are critical. In this talk I will describe different types of uncertainty, their properties, and how to engage with them. The talk will center on three engineering projects across which uncertainty presented various challenges.