Talks@IDSIA: integrating local decision support for global decision-making

Thursday, 14 June, 10:00 Room 230, Galleria 2, SUPSI, Manno
Speaker: Christopher Zobel
Title: Integrating local decision support for global decision-making

Abstract

Disaster management situations often require integrating instances of local
data/information in order to formulate a global strategy for mitigating or
responding to an emergency. A variety of AI tools are available for
capturing and managing distributed information in an intelligent and
interactive way. This talk will briefly discuss several interesting issues
and ideas for using AI in this context, including leveraging local variable
influence measures for neural networks and discussing potential applications
of cognitive sensor networks.

About the speaker

Christopher W. Zobel is Associate Professor of Business Information
Technology at Virginia Tech. He received a PhD in systems engineering from
the University of Virginia, an MS in mathematics from the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA in mathematics from Colgate
University. His primary research interests are in the areas of intelligent
decision support systems, knowledge engineering, large-scale stochastic
decision problems, heuristic problem solving, and computer-based simulation.
Dr. Zobel also has a strong interest in the application areas of disaster
risk management and agricultural/environmental/natural resources management.
He has published papers in Decision Sciences, the International Journal of
Production Research, European Journal of Operational Research, and IEEE
Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, among others. He is a member
of the Decision Sciences Institute, the Association for Information Systems,
and the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.