Services Science, Engineering and Management Conference, at IBM Palisades, October 6-7

This digest was created in real-time duringthe meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted on the Coevolving Innovations web site by David Ing.

Dick Larson, Engineering Systems Division, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Operations management

  • High-rise buildings, elevator delays
  • Russ Ackoff sent a student
  • Typically, more elevator shafts
  • Problem isn't the delay in elevators, it's the complaints
  • Entertain them, instead, put in mirrors
  • Bringing ideas into engineering analysis
  • Not one theorem, but problem solved

ESD: at the intersection of management, engineering, social sciences

  • New center: Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals
  • Work on real problems
  • Different on service systems

1. U.S. Presidential Elections: Queue Wait Equity

  • Voting is participation in a government-offered service
  • True also in Zimbabwe, Afghan, Ohio
  • If someone balks and leaves, have a stealth disenfranchisement
  • Looking for funding, using the 2008 U.S. presidential election as data

Article in Christian Science Monitor: Heroic acts

2. Pandemic Influenza

  • Killed Americans more than any war
  • Social distancing and hygenic steps analysis
  • Working with STEM, open source software
  • For first 6 months, only control: won't have any vaccine
  • Then little

Boston Herald: National ill-prepared flu

  • Then published a year late in Boston Globe

3. Hurricane Preparedness and Response

  • With Ph.D. student Michael Metzger
  • Social science: the boy that cried wolf syndrome, if evaculation called that wasn't required

4. LINC = Learning International Networks Consortim

  • Students now getting education through computer and telecommunications technologies
  • Focus on helping developing countries get quality education in underserved communities

Educational implications

Educating doctoral students at the intersection of management, engineering and social sciences

[Questions]

Design for Ph.D. students?

  • Silos in schools of engineering, first course born in 1861; second course born in 1880
  • Experiment across faculties
  • 5-years old, Ph.D. program is 3 years old

Publications by young faculty, when journals looking for depth

  • Untenured junior faculty, recently tenured and long tenured
  • Let the research what ever is comfortable

How to bring real problems into the educational system

  • Have spun off many companies, and professors have consulting companies
  • Practicum includes summer jobs

Projects with graduate courses or undergraduate?

  • Not primarily graduate
  • However, Dan Hastings has moved from graduate programs to undergrad, sympathetic

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2006/10/06 09:10 Richard C. Larson, "Holistic Trinity of Services Sciences: Management, Social and Engineering Sciences"