Richard - If no one has yet mentioned the west coast school of decision analysis, here's a summary. It spawned a small industry of practitioners, most active in the 80-90's. The firms trace back to Stanford Research Institute's Decision Analysis Group, founded in 1968 (?), as an adjunct to the Engineering-Economic Systems Dept (EES) at Stanford. Ron Howard's work contributed to the foundations. James Matheson and Carl Spetzler were instrumental in creating the practice, as were others. As students we gained familiarity with the practice through the "red book:"
Howard, R.A., Matheson, J. E., "Readings in Decision Analysis" (Menlo Park CA: SRI 1977). SRI maintains archives. Someday it will be interesting for a scholar to retrieve them and write the early history of this group. Just before I joined EES, in 1981, the Group left SRI to enter private consulting. The "second generation" of decision analysts formed several independent firms located near Stanford: "Decision Focus", "Applied Decision Analysis" and "Strategic Decisions Group" among them. Ron, James and Carl were all at SDG. None of these firms exist in the form they were during their heyday, though there is a successor firm that keeps the SDG name. A few new groups have followed in recent years. In the drug industry, PharSight, Inc. in Mountain View, had (and still has?) a traditional decision analysis team. Another is SmartOrg, at www.smartorg.com. There is a Decision Analysis Society associated with INFORMS that publishes a journal under that name where some of the current DA work is tracked. See the Dec 2005 issue for a retrospective. Greg Parnell at West Point is President. Of course there are many others I don't have space to mention, and others who can fill in details, or correct my impressions of the history. John Mark Agosta o) 408 765-0429 Machine Learning m) 650 465-4707 -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kathryn Blackmond Laskey Sent: Sunday, April 16, 2006 1:01 PM To: Kathryn Blackmond Laskey; Kevin Van Horn; Rich Cc: uai@engr.orst.edu Subject: Re: [UAI] Who uses Decision Analysis? As an added note, we teach decision and risk analysis in our systems engineering and operations research programs at George Mason University. The majority of our students are working professionals, and many of them apply the techniques in their professional lives. I'm not aware of everything they do at work, but sometimes they choose work-related topics for class projects. As just one example, a few years ago a student who worked for a company that makes people-movers for airports developed a decision support system that elicited information to construct a multi-attribute utility function, and provided recommendations for which kind of people-mover system an airport should install. I believe the system was used by her company. Among those who have studied decision analysis, it's pretty widely used. I know many people who say that although they rarely perform a full-blown quantitative decision analysis, they find the approach to problem structuring quite useful. In other words, their qualititative heuristics for making decisions follow a decision-analytic approach. Kathryn Laskey At 3:57 PM -0400 4/14/06, Kathryn Blackmond Laskey wrote: >Please also see the web site of Innovative Decisions, Inc. > >On that web site, you can find a long list of publications that >includes numerous journal and conference papers, book chapters, and >books. Many of the principals at Innovative Decisions have been >doing decision analysis since the 70's, and some of the publications >on the list date back to that time, while others were published >within the past few months or are in press. > >The web site also advertises a chapter on risk management in the >recently published Homeland Security Handbook. > >Kathryn Laskey > > >At 7:24 PM -0700 3/31/06, Kevin Van Horn wrote: >>The fact that Lumina Decision Systems (lumina.com), Decisioneering >>(decisioneering.com), Palisade (www.palisade.com), TreeAge Software >>(www.treeage.com), and other companies selling decision analysis >>software are still in business, and have been for many years, is >>pretty good evidence that corporate America does use decision >>analysis. You can probably find some case studies on their websites. >> >>On Mar 29, 2006, at 7:31 AM, Rich wrote: >> >>> After describing decision analysis to my class recently, a student >>> actually applied it on his job. A question then came up. Where has it >>> been successfully applied in real life problems? Although it's been >>> around my whole life (at least since Jimmy Savage's book in 1954), I >>> actually am aware of few real applications. There are a lot of >>> publications that discuss problems that look real (e.g. Clemen's >>> book), but is any of this real? Did Penzoil really analyze the >>> problem as Clemen describes? Of course sitting in my `ivory tower' I >>> would not know what goes on in corporate America, etc. So I would be >>> curious to learn of any real applications of decision analysis, >>> especially ones that are published. This could be in an expert system >>> (that people use) or to make a one time decision. >>> Thanks, >>> Rich >>> >>> Richard E. Neapolitan >>> Professor and Chair of Computer Science >>> Northeastern Illinois University >>> 5500 N. St. Louis >>> Chicago, Illinois 60625 >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> uai mailing list >>> uai@ENGR.ORST.EDU >>> https://secure.engr.oregonstate.edu/mailman/listinfo/uai >> >>_______________________________________________ >>uai mailing list >>uai@ENGR.ORST.EDU >>https://secure.engr.oregonstate.edu/mailman/listinfo/uai > >_______________________________________________ >uai mailing list >uai@ENGR.ORST.EDU >https://secure.engr.oregonstate.edu/mailman/listinfo/uai _______________________________________________ uai mailing list uai@ENGR.ORST.EDU https://secure.engr.oregonstate.edu/mailman/listinfo/uai _______________________________________________ uai mailing list uai@ENGR.ORST.EDU https://secure.engr.oregonstate.edu/mailman/listinfo/uai
