About Me | James Howard

Me at the 2017 Howard County Library Evening in the Stacks

James Howard works on complicated systems: the kind that involve mathematical models, software, artificial intelligence, scarce resources, and institutions that eventually have to decide what to do. His work moves among mathematics, statistics, engineering, computing, and public policy because the problems do not respect the boundaries between those fields.

That approach has carried him from infectious-disease modeling and satellite population forecasting to government blockchain research, disruption prediction, and the operational questions that turn an AI model into a system someone can actually use. The recurring question is simple enough to state and usually difficult to answer: what is happening, what matters, and what should the institution do next?

The work is technical, but its point is not technical display. Models need assumptions, systems have constraints, and decisions have consequences. Much of the job is making those things visible—and explaining them clearly enough that a real person can act on them.

Professional Work

James is a data scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Previously, he has consulted for government agencies including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Executive Office of the President, and the United States Department of Homeland Security. Before that, he served as an internal consultant on scientific computing for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

Those institutions differ, but the work has a familiar shape: research, quantitative analysis, and technical systems whose results must survive contact with operations, policy, and public consequences. The Scholarship and Software sections document the methods and projects in more detail. James also takes on independent consulting work when a problem calls for the same mix of analysis, software, and decision support outside those institutional settings.

Representative Problems and Projects

Representative work has included models of infectious respiratory disease and Ebolavirus; forecasting global disruptive events and the population of Earth-orbiting satellites; blockchain research for government services; and technology designed to rescue victims of structural collapse. The subjects vary. The work underneath them tends to be the same: form a usable model, test it against real constraints, and make the result useful to the people who have to decide what happens next.

He has written and edited four books on numerical analysis, online mathematics education, flood insurance, and military operations research. The same interest in making technical work usable runs through the writing: recent work on artificial intelligence asks not only what a model can do, but what happens when it becomes part of a real institution.

Teaching and Public Service

Teaching and public service are serious parts of this work, not hobbies added around it. James has taught mathematics and statistics at the University of Maryland Global Campus since 2010, and has also taught public affairs, including at the City University of New York and the University of New Mexico. Teaching means starting with the problem and working backward to the machinery; the Teaching section carries the fuller record.

His public and institutional service includes local-government boards, professional-society work, the Maryland Defense Force, and long-running community and university service. These are places where the method is tested in the presence of actual rules, budgets, and constraints.

Credentials and Recognition

Education

PhD, Public Policy, University of Maryland Baltimore County
- CPhil, Public Policy, University of Maryland Graduate School, Baltimore
- MPA, Public Policy and Administration, University of Baltimore
MA, Buddhist Studies, with Distinction, University of South Wales
MS, Electrical Engineering, Columbia University in the City of New York
MS, Applied and Computational Mathematics, the Johns Hopkins University
MS, Environmental Engineering and Science, the Johns Hopkins University
BA, East Asian Studies, cum laude, University of Maryland Global Campus
BS, Mathematics, University of Maryland, College Park
- College Park Scholars Citation, International Studies
Post Secondary Educational Options Program, Miami University