Event Description
Dr. David Mendonca, Associate Professor, Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, will serve as a guest speaker to the College of Engineering on Thursday, March 2, 2017 at 2:00 p.m. in the Hill Conference Room.
Dr. Mendonca's talk is entitled, Systems Engineering for Future Cities and explores the future of systems engineering research and education for urban settings. Recent, rapid and ongoing advances in systems modeling methodologies, in sensing capabilities, and in big data analytics are producing an urgent need for comprehensive, integrated approaches to understanding the dynamics and the longer-term evolution of urban areas. And while researchers will continue to address this need through a broad range of activities, these same individuals--acting in their capacity as educators--have a unprecedented opportunity to reshape systems engineering curricula to prepare students to work holistically on the issues and opportunities that will confront so-called "future cities." Doing so will require exploring and exploiting three distinct interfaces: between model- and data-driven methods, between mechanistic and human elements in urban settings, and, perhaps most fundamentally, between current and future opportunities to enrich the lives of cities.
Dr. Mendonca has a Ph.D. in Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.A. from University of Massachusetts/Amherst. He is the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2005-2010) and many other distinguished honors. His research develops and applies systems engineering principles to understand and extend human decision making processes in high-stakes, time-constrained conditions.
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