Decision making defines human experience at individual, societal and national levels. In an art form, through decision making, humans have organized themselves effectively to achieve grand objectives and be resilient in face of challenges. It is a perpetual human activity honed with data, information, knowledge, understanding, insight and experience. The science of decision making is an academic endeavor to understand, classify and characterize decision making at all levels of human experience. The science promises to pave way for removing biases, adding speed, and dealing with uncertainty, enabling informed decisions and teaming with sophisticated automated and autonomous systems. Now is the opportune moment to bring science into decision making.
This talk will give an overview of a new course “Making Critical Decisions Using Intelligent Systems.” It will touch on humanistic decision making and decision science, military decision making construct, various decision models and techniques, all geared towards enablement of informed decision making.
Sitaram Kowtha is currently a Principal Professional Staff member at the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and has been with the lab for over 18 years. Prior to joining JHU-APL, he worked as a telecommunications research and systems engineer at Verizon and as computer scientist at Defense Information Systems Agency. His educational background includes BE in Electrical Engineering, City College of New York and MS + PhD in Computer Science, Stevens Institute of Technology. His background include development of electronics, software systems and network management solutions. This enabled his journey into cyberspace operations as systems engineer and analyst. Sitaram’s current interests are in bringing the world of decision science and decision-making together towards better informed decision making, be it by humans or machines.