TITLE: Games and Risk Analysis: Four cases involving Management and
National Security

SPEAKER: Dr Elisabeth
Pate-Cornell

ABSTRACT:

A presentation of four models of risk and decision analyses
involving games, designed to support strategic decisions. The first
is a single-move game, in which the US faces risks of terrorist
attacks by several possible groups. The result is a probabilistic
ranking of the threat posed by different types of weapons.  The
second is a dynamic counter-terrorism analysis designed to compare
the stabilizing effects of different short- and long-term government
strategies. It is based on the simulation of an alternate game
between a government and a terrorist group. The third is a dynamic
evaluation of US nuclear counter-proliferation strategies for a
single country. It involves an analysis of the weapon development
program given the country's evolving intent and capabilities, and
the effectiveness of different US strategies to prevent or delay its
success.  The fourth is a principal-agent model of the development
of an engineered system, in which an agent in charge of part of the
project may consider meeting a deadline by cutting corners if he
falls behind schedule. This generally increases the system failure
probability and the goal is to support the decisions of the manager
in setting constraints and incentives to decrease the total costs.
These four cases are based on systems analysis and probability but
present a spectrum of models, assumptions and results.


Biography:


Dr. M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1948.
Her undergraduate degree is in mathematics and physics (BS,
Marseilles, France, 1968), and her first graduate degrees are in
applied mathematics and computer science (MS and Engineer Degree,
Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble, France, 1970; 1971).  She
received a Masters degree in Operations Research (OR) in 1972 and a
Ph.D. in Engineering-Economic Systems (EES) in 1978, both from
Stanford University.  She joined the Stanford faculty in 1981, and serves as Chair (since
1997) of the now Department of Management Science and Engineering. 
In 1999, she was named the Burt and Deedee McMurtry Professor in the
School of Engineering, and she is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy)
of the Stanford Institute for International Studies.


Dr. Paté-Cornell was elected to the National Academy of Engineering
in 1995, and is currently a member of its Council. She has served on
the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from December
2001 to December 2004.  Dr. Paté-Cornell is a world leader in
research related to engineering risk analysis, risk management,
decision analysis under uncertainty, and more generally, the use of
Bayesian probability to process incomplete information. In recent
years, her research and that of her Engineering Risk Research Group
at Stanford have focused on the inclusion of both technical and
organizational factors in probabilistic risk analysis models. These
models have been applied to a wide variety of topics, ranging from
the risk management of the NASA shuttle tiles to that of offshore
oil platforms and medical systems such as anesthesia during surgery.
She is currently working on risk management processes for complex
projects and programs, with application to space, industrial and
medical systems. Since 2001, she has applied risk analytic methods
to the study of different types of terrorist attacks on the United
States, the assessment of intelligence information and the
effectiveness of counter measures.


Dr. Paté-Cornell is the author or co-author of more than a hundred
papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings. She has
received several best-paper awards from professional organizations
such as the American Nuclear Society and the Decision Analysis
Society of INFORMS (for her work on the shuttle tiles), and
peer-reviewed journals such as Military Operations Research in 2002
for a paper on the assessment of terrorist threats.