Good Afternoon,

As a reminder the next COS/VSE Research Luncheon will take place this Thursday, March 21 at Noon in Exploratory Hall, Room 3301.

VSE's speaker is Alex Brodsky and COS's speaker is Rainald Lohner.  Short bios and abstracts are included below.

Dr. Alex Brodsky

Title: Decision Guidance Systems and Applications to Manufacturing, Power Grids, Supply Chain and IoT

Abstract: Decision Support Systems (DSS) are widely used to support organizational and personal decision-making in diverse areas such as engineering systems, finance, business, economics and public policy. They are becoming increasingly critical with the information overload from the Internet. While the scope of DSS is broad, Decision Guidance Systems (DGS) are a class of DSS geared to elicit knowledge from domain experts and provide actionable recommendations to human decision-makers, with the goal of arriving at the best possible course of action.

Currently, the practice of building Decision Guidance (DG) Systems resembles developing database applications decades ago before the invention of the relational Database Management Systems (DBMS). DG applications are typically one-off and hard-wired to specific problems; require significant interdisciplinary expertise to build; are highly complex and costly; and are not extensible, modifiable, or reusable. Therefore, a paradigm shift for the development of DG systems is needed. The key idea is to introduce and develop Decision Guidance Management Systems (DGMS), which would allow fast and easily-extensible development of DG applications, similar to easy development of DB applications using DBMS.

In this talk I will overview research toward this goal, including the recently developed Unity DGMS, and exemplify its use in the area of manufacturing, energy and power.  I will also discuss ideas on how to use the emerging DGMS technology to translate the potential and multibillion dollar investment in Internet of Things (IoT) into business value, e.g., through  (1) better predictability of demand and inventory visibility, (2) better tracking and efficiency of equipment and operating assets (3) accelerated innovation and product support, (4) improved alignment and collaboration among business functions and (5) sustainability and quality through visibility to energy and resource consumption.

Bio: Alex Brodsky is a Professor in the department of Computer Science and Director of the Masters of Science Degree in Information Systems at George Mason University. He teaches classes in Database Management and Decision Guidance Systems, graduated 16 PhD students and currently advises other four. Alex's current research interests include Decision Support, Guidance and Optimization (DSGO) systems; and DSGO applications, including to Energy, Power, Manufacturing, Sustainability and Supply Chain. He earned his Ph.D. and prior degrees in Computer Science and/or Mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Alex has published over 120 refereed papers, including six that received Best Paper Awards, in scholarly peer-reviewed journals, books and conference/workshop proceedings. For his research work related to DSGO systems, Alex received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, NSF Research Initiation Award, and funding from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and Dominion Virginia Power.

Alex serves/ed as Conference Co-chair of the 21st International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2019); keynote speaker at ICEIS-2017; General Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI-2017); keynote speaker at ICTAI-2016; Program Chair of ICTAI-2013; Program Co-chair of the IEEE ICDE workshop on Data-Driven Decision Guidance and Support Systems (DGSS 2012, and DGSS 2013); a general vice co-chair of IEEE ICDE 2012; and Conference Chair of the International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP99).

Prior to joining Mason in 1993, Alex worked at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, at Israel Aircraft Industries and was an R&D officer in the C4I Corps, Israel Defense Forces. He also has start-up and commercialization experience, and is a member of ACM, IEEE, INFORMS and INSTICC.


Dr. Rainald Lohner
Center for Computational Fluid Dynamics
George Mason University

Abstract: The development of numerical methods to compute complex flows, and the ever-increasing memory and speed of computers, has allowed the basic understanding, analysis and optimization of many problems and processes across many fields of physics and engineering. This has led to the development of many so-called 'computational disciplines', one of which is computational fluid dynamics.

The mission of the CFD center at GMU continues to be to further research and education in this field, which combines, in a multidisciplinary manner, physics, engineering, analytical and discrete mathematics, computer science, visualization, validation
and benchmarking.

Besides basic numerical methods for an ever expanding complexity of physics, the CFD Center's main thrust application areas over the last two decades have been blast simulation, free surface flows, dispersion analysis and haemodynamics.

The talk will give a brief overview of the CFD center, and then consider applications that could lead to a tighter collaboration
with colleagues in COS and VSE.

Bio: Rainald L¨ohner is the head of the CFD center at the College of Sciences of George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, in the outskirts of Washington, D.C. He received a MSc in Mechanical Engineering from the Technische Universitat Braunschweig, Germany, as well as a PhD and DSc in Civil Engineering from the University College of Swansea, Wales. His areas of interest include numerical methods, field solvers, grid generation, parallel computing, visualization, pre-processing, fluid-structure interaction, shape and process optimization, as well as computational crowd dynamics.

His codes and methods have been applied in many fields, including aerodynamics or airplanes, cars and trains, hydrodynamics of ships, submarines and UAVs, shock-structure interaction, dispersion analysis in urban areas, haemodynamics of vascular diseases, fundamental studies on chaotic, turbulent flows, as well as evacuation and management of mass events.

He is the author of more than 800 scientific publications covering the fields enumerated above, as well as a textbook on Applied CFD Techniques, and is part of the editorial board of seven international scientific journals.






Elizabeth P. Dean, CMP
Special Assistant to the Dean
Volgenau School of Engineering
George Mason University
Nguyen Engineering Building, Suite 5100
4400 University Drive, MS 4A3
Fairfax, VA 22030

P: 703.993.1500
E: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>


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