Engineering Commons^™

Managing Healthcare Data Assets As A Complex Adaptive System, Katie Clifton

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

A major project is underway to develop a shared platform for data and analytics in a highly federated healthcare delivery organization. In the status quo data environment, analysts have integrated information from various domains — medical records, claims, membership — to produce a multitude of reports and analysis. Duplicative, mis-aligned, and siloed datasets were created as an unintended consequence.

One objective of the project is to produce outcomes (reports, analysis) that are more standardized and efficient than the status quo without sacrificing adaptability. Standards and practices are being intentionally developed as a mechanism for this emerging system to achieve more …

Iot And Digitization Will Reconnect System Engineering And Science, John Blyler

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

The fully connected world is quickly becoming a reality. Architects and developers of this new world must understand both the hardware and software basics of IoT and IIoT systems as well as the proven way to deal with the complexities of the integration of sensors, processors, wireless connectivity, edge to cloud networks, data partitioning and processing, AI, machine language, digital threads and twins, and much more. Such complexity can only be handled with a systems-of-systems (SoS) engineering approach.

But while systems engineering may hold many of the solutions to IoT challenges, systems engineering must evolve from its traditional role. Some …

Evolving Machine Morality Strategies Through Multiagent Simulations, David Burke

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

There is a general consensus among robotics researchers that the world of the future will be filled with autonomous and semi-autonomous machines. There is less of a consensus, though, on the best approach to instilling a sense of 'machine morality' in these systems so that they will be able to have effective interactions with humans in an increasingly complex world. In my talk, we take a brief look at some existing approaches to computational ethics, and then describe work we've undertaken creating multiagent simulations involving moral decision-making during strategic interactions. In these simulations, agents make choices about whether to cooperate …

Systems Ideas For The Scientific And Societal Imperatives Of The Coastal Ocean: Case Of The Bp Oil Gusher In The Gulf Of Mexico, Spring & Summer 2010, Christopher Mooers

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

In recent decades, great progress has been made in advancing the scientific understanding of the coastal ocean (i.e., the 200 nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)) across a broad set of disciplines. Simultaneously, the societal use of the coastal ocean has skyrocketed through, for example, increased shipping & boating, sports & commercial fishing, and exploitation of non-living resources, such as, oil & gas extraction and sand & gravel mining. International law and national policy assign coastal nations the responsibility for stewardship (i.e., wise management) of their respective EEZs. The scope of the stewardship and applications can be summarized as (1) …

How A Systems Engineer Starts..., Herman Migliore

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

Dr. Migliore will review systems engineering as a process for developing products, processes, and services and suggest views that encourage systems thinking. As an example, he will focus on the beginning of the development process, the fuzzy front end, and discuss a method, ConOps, for getting started using examples from PSU's masters program.

Creating Insanity In Learning Systems: Addressing Ambiguity Effects Of Predicting Non-Linear Continuous Valued Functions With Reconstructabilty Analysis From Large Categorically Valued Input Data Sets, William D. Eisenhauer

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

Being told to give two different, and potentially counter, responses to the same stimulus can set up a double bind in humans, leading to a type of insanity. So what how do you deal with it when it comes up quite frequently in modeling through simplification and removal of predictive variables?

In his current dissertation research Ike Eisenhauer is using reconstructability analysis to implement K-System, U-System, and B-System approaches to predict a continuously valued function through discrete categorically valued input variables [e.g. textual data]. One of the key issues is how to address the inability of K-Systems and U-Systems to …

Beyond Biobricks: Synthesizing Synergistic Biochemical Systems From The Bottom-Up, Mark A. Bedau

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

Engineers who attempt to discover and optimize the behavior of complex biochemical systems face a dauntingly difficult task. This is especially true if the systems are governed by multiple qualitative and quantitative variables that have non-linear response functions and that interact synergistically. The synthetic biology community has responded to this difficulty by promoting the use of "standard biological parts" called "BioBricks", which are supposed to make biology into traditional engineering and enable engineers to "program living organisms in the same way a computer scientists can program a computer". But the BioBricks research program faces daunting hurdles, because the nonlinearity and …