Distinguished Lecture Series with Richard de Neufville, Ph.D.

Distinguished Lecture Series with Richard de Neufville, Ph.D.

Banner for CCAT Distinguished Lecture Series with Richard de Neufville. It features their headshot and job title.

Speaker(s): Richard de Neufville, Ph.D., Professor of Engineering Systems — Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Presentation Title: Flexibility in Engineering Design: Implications for Autonomous Vehicle Transportation and Infrastructure

Date/Time: Thursday, October 29th, 2019 | 3:30 PM ET

Abstract: Professor de Neufville will describe the essential elements of flexibility in Engineering Design. This includes the uncertain range of possible futures by incorporating the capability to adapt efficiently to the actual developments.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Richard de Neufville (Ph.D. MIT, 1965), is a professor of engineering systems at MIT. He served as White House Fellow for President Lyndon Johnson and also served in the Army Corps of Engineers as an Airborne Ranger officer. He is the founder and director of MIT’s Technology and Policy Program (TPP), and is now with the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). In recent years, his research has been guided by the incorporation of flexibility in decision-making to mitigate risk and uncertainties in systems development, and analysis of socio-technical systems. For this reason, he has earned global reputation for his work on interdependencies and interrelationships among and between engineering, social, and other systems; technological systems autonomy and connectedness, and data science and analytics. Dr. Neufville has published 7 textbooks that opened up novel directions for research and practice at the time they were published. These include the groundbreaking text Systems Analysis for Engineers and Managers (McGraw-Hill, 1971), a series of texts on airport planning from 1976 to 2013, and two texts inspired by his innovative real options concept – Flexibility in Engineering Design (MIT Press, 2011) and Flexibility and Real Estate Valuation under Uncertainty: A Practical Guide for Developers (Wiley, 2018). His work has been widely recognized, including by Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships and the NATO Systems Science Prize. Also, he was awarded a Chevalier des Palmes Académiques and honorary Doctor of Philosophy by the French Government and Delft University of Technology, respectively. He has served in various positions at the Judge Management School at Cambridge, Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon), Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, the University of California, Berkeley, University of Calgary, London Graduate School of Business, Oxford University, the Ecole Centrale, and the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (Paris). Dr. Neufville is known worldwide for his applications in airport systems planning, design, and management. He has been associated with major airport projects in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia – as well as others in Africa and Latin America. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) awarded Prof. de Neufville the Robert Horonjeff Award for 2018, recognizing his outstanding achievements and contributions to the advancement of the field of air transportation engineering.

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