Symposium on Complex Systems Engineering/Schedule/Thursday 1d comments
From CSWiki
Participants Doug Norman, Mitre. Had built complex systems. Theater Battle Management core systems, after 9/11, tapped to be chief engineer. Brought in Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of New England Complex Systems institute to help.
John Boardman, Brit, currently in USA. Built an "extended enterprise simulator." On faculty at Stevens Inst. of Technology 2 years ago. 2000 students in SE master's program. Systems Thinking and Enterprise architecture.
Farhad Zaerpoor, Aerospace. Ops and analysis of future space systems. From user's point of view, are concepts any good. Practitioner, not theorist. I have to put concepts together with collaborative systems, competing systems, other system, in an environment with adversaries, and say system is good or can be denied by an adversary. Analysis has been hijacked by people with canned models that don't have an idea of how good the answer is. Looking for better ways to analyze complexity, and to find ways of convincing customer to do this.
Wayne Davis. Univ. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In Large Scale systems for 36 years. Problems in Purdue Large-Scale Systems group in the early 70s are coming back (global oil shortage, escape from self-contained buildings in disaster...) Illinois has a lot of nuclear electric generators. Needed large scale planning for nuclear disasters...helped agencies tie together plans. New integrated steel plant: will it work? (became academic). NIST and DOD on advanced manufacturing techniques. Extensive background in controls, mechanics and optimization became useless on this type of project. Last 5 years in complex systems; knew much of what he was teaching was not correct; is now retired.
Sarah Sheard, Third Millennium Systems. Interested in implementation of complex system knowledge into SE and into companies in particular. Expertise in SE of space systems, SE processes, teams, and process improvement, in a consortium of companies. Now on own, passion to bring SE and Complex Systems together. This week's smaller conference precedes a larger communication-focused conference to be held in October in conjunction with NECSI ICCS conference. This will be half SE and half CS, with purpose of showing a new connection has been made.
Mark Johnson, Aerospace. Designed and saw fielded "Systems testing systems" in 80s...was electronics security. Been in Australia, Athens, England...disasters all. Masters at AFIT (engineering school/astrophysics). Wrote trusted software standards. Master's in robotics with neural networks. Worked lightning systems at SMC (protection; also prediction). Managed Brilliant Pebbles (Star Wars) algorithm working group. Retired 1998, did doctorate, modeling bone fracture healing process. Meshed various tools and methodologies to make things work. Currently at Aerospace, do operations research and decision science.
Bob Weber, Aerospace (part time, semi-retired). Vietnam era: joined Air Force and worked sensor design and testing mostly for ballistic missile detection. Advanced technologies in optics, now coming to fruition. When came to Aerospace, noted lack of operational understanding in a lot of military programs. Reliability is a big problem, and the human elements. Reeducated self in SW and operations analyst rather than previous background in hard core physics. Simulation is a language for interdisciplinary communication. Helped Russ plan conference and keep group small (to address interdisciplinary interaction).
Ken Webb. Primordion. Over 25 years in software development area, building computer SW systems. Nortel Network (telecom) some years ago (250 engineers); noted groups didn't know each other's parts. Pulling together a way to visualize connections. Became interested in complex systems. Been reading about biology. Later worked for Objectime, and concepts have made it into UML 2.0. MS in evolutionary and adaptive systems. Building own tool now, expanding to help with more complex systems. Looking for small set of constructs to be used as a basis for building all sorts of systems. UML seems a good place to start.
Alex Ryan. Defense Science Technology Organization in Australia (7 years). Military ops analysis and wargaming; systems design and capability development process. SE side through work, plus about to get PhD in complex systems.
Anne Marie Grisogono. Physicist by training. Systems for Army...where to invest long-range research effort. Biggest problem is problems deriving from complexity. Learning from natural complex systems; how they deal with complexity. Adaptation is how complexity is handled. Trying to develop implications and know how to learn and exploit better in designing, growing, managing and interacting with our complex systems.
