MIT
Reports to the President 1994-95
The explosive development of new sources of information and the continuing
emergence of ready access to faster and more powerful computers have created
both enormous potential and considerable need for more informed decision
making. The Decision Sciences Program (DSP) aims to exploit these
opportunities by developing innovative educational and research programs and by
working closely with industry. Drawing upon several fields of science,
engineering and management, decision sciences is an interdisciplinary topic
emerging in importance in many industries in both service and manufacturing
sectors. It is a field that helps to guide individuals and public and private
organizations in making informed decisions, often concerning the effective use
of scarce financial, human, and technical resources.
Professor Thomas L. Magnanti, George Eastman Professor of Management Science,
serves as the Program's Director, and Professor Richard C. Larson, as its
Associate Director (Professor Larson was on sabbatical this past year). The
Center coordinates the efforts of approximately 20 affiliated faculty and
senior research staff drawn from all five schools at MIT.
A primary goal of the new program is to support graduate education in the
decision sciences at MIT, enriching ongoing programs like those at the
Operations Research Center, and creating new opportunities in areas like
statistics and decision processes.
The disciplinary base of the decision sciences ranges from behavioral decision
theory and psychology to applied mathematics, economics, operations research,
optimal control, and statistics, all topics that help inform individuals and
organizations in making decisions. Recognizing the interdisciplinary nature of
the field, the DSP attempts to draws upon existing resources and expertise in
other several MIT centers and programs, including the Operations Research
Center, the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, the Center for
Transportation Studies, the Leaders for Manufacturing Program, the Center for
Educational Computing Initiatives, and the Center for Computational Research in
Economics and Management Science.
This past year, DSP faculty have been working as part of a larger joint School
of Engineering and Sloan School of Management team to develop a new joint
graduate program, Systems Design and Management. The new program will offer
four distance learning courses next Spring, three taught by DSP affiliated
faculty.
The DSP faculty have also been reviewing the MIT graduate offering in
statistics, developing a course and exam for the PhD Program in statistics that
emphasizes MIT strengths in applications and in allied fields such as
operations research.
The Decision Sciences Program aims to promote cross disciplinary research in
both underlying theory and applications. Two such efforts are underway.
Under a Memorandum of Understanding with the Center for Advanced Aviation
System Development (CAASD) of the MITRE Corporation, the DSP Program has
undertaken a multi-year collaborative effort to conduct research in the general
domain of air transportation. A major research initiative for this
collaboration is currently funded by the FAA. Professor Amedeo R. Odoni
serves as the principle investigator for this effort. As part of this umbrella
agreement, MITRE supports summer interns from the Center and will exchanges
visitors with MIT. One such visitor, a senior MITRE scientist, spent the Fall
1994 term in residence at MIT studying the implications of weather forecasting
on air traffic control. During this past year, three PhD students completed
theses supported by the air transportation management program. DSP is
coordinating its efforts in this general arena with MIT's Flight Transportation
Laboratory.
Frequently, when individuals or organizations make transactions, they generate
considerable data. Examples are bar-code scanned data from supermarkets,
customer interaction data from Automatic Teller Machines (ATM's), materials
movement and position data from assembly lines, stocks and options trading
data, point of sale data from retailers, and satellite data giving estimates of
vehicle locations. The DSP aims to develop a Transactional Data Laboratory
that interprets and discovers ways to better utilize such data. Equipped with
a sample of new transactional data acquisition technologies, the laboratory
will resemble traditional laboratories at MIT. In addition to computers, the
laboratory will include examples of data acquisition technologies that are
creating enormous (gigabyte) data warehouses. This past year several MIT
faculty, working with faculty from other universities and with a few
individuals from industry, have developed research proposal for the
Transactional Data Laboratory. In addition, Professor Anantaram Balakrishnan
and Dr. Nitin Patel have been working with Hewlett-Packard to develop
methodology and applications for extracting and utilizing transactional data in
the context of electronics assembly operations. These efforts require
developing new models for structuring, understanding, and exploiting massive
amounts of information for problem diagnostics, planning, and improvement.
The Decision Sciences Program functions as a virtual program, with very modest
infrastructure (space, staff). Its intent is to be a new type of
organizational entity at MIT that helps to stimulate and coordinate initiatives
that cut across traditional Institute departments, centers, and laboratories.
It also aims to develop new initiatives that might not normally fit into
existing organizational entities. The support of statistics at the Institute,
the MITRE collaboration and FAA research grant, and the Transactional Data
Laboratory are examples of the types of activities that DSP seeks to develop as
part of this overall mission.
Thomas L. Magnanti
MIT
Reports to the President 1994-95