Operations Research & Decision Systems
Models, constrained resources, complex organizations, and decisions that remain necessary even when the evidence is incomplete.
A Few Places to Begin
Representative entry points from across the site.
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Handbook of Military and Defense Operations Research
Natalie Scala and I edited this handbook around the fact that operations research in security is not confined to a recognizable class of textbook problems. The second edition gathers work on military and defense applications across analysis, data, cyber, decision-making, and the operational contexts that make those tools matter.
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Agent-Based Modeling for Evaluation of a Wearable-Sensor-Based Disease Surveillance Network
This work used agent-based modeling to ask whether a disease-surveillance network could detect what it claimed to detect under realistic operating assumptions.
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The Model Is Not the System
Scholarship
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Crystal Cube: Forecasting Disruptive Events
Crystal Cube treated disruption forecasting as a practical systems problem: combine disparate signals, make the model useful, and confront the difference between a prediction and an operational decision.
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Agent-Based Modeling for Evaluation of a Wearable-Sensor-Based Disease Surveillance Network
This work used agent-based modeling to ask whether a disease-surveillance network could detect what it claimed to detect under realistic operating assumptions.
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Mixed Reality for Post-Disaster Situational Awareness
A post-disaster system has to make information usable under conditions that are actively hostile to usability. The work joined sensing, visualization, and response rather than treating any one of them as sufficient.
Books
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Handbook of Military and Defense Operations Research
Natalie Scala and I edited this handbook around the fact that operations research in security is not confined to a recognizable class of textbook problems. The second edition gathers work on military and defense applications across analysis, data, cyber, decision-making, and the operational contexts that make those tools matter.
Software
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Kami
An agent-based modeling library in modern C++, developed at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. It provides the pieces for modeling individual actors and their environments when collective behavior cannot be treated as a simple aggregate.
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Kivu Ebola analysis
A reproducible analysis repository for the 2018–2019 Kivu Ebola outbreak, retained as a research artifact alongside the resulting Joint Statistical Meetings presentation.
Teaching
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MSA 607 — Program Management in Complex Organizations
This course is a unique course that looks beyond standard project management and looks at the interrelationships of projects inside large and diversified organizations.
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MSA 647 — People and Project Administration
This course introduces the nontechnical side of project management. It focuses on communication, principally with stakeholders and within the project team. From this course, students should be able to manage project risk better from a personnel standpoint.
Service
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Chapman and Hall / CRC Press
Provide editorial stewardship for a scholarly series at the intersection of analytics and operations research.
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Military Operations Research Journal
Contribute editorial review and professional judgment to the field’s principal scholarly journal.