Wednesday, September 22, 2010
TODAY: Department of Play info session! Wed (9/22) 6-7:30pm @ E14-240
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Speakers at the Conference "Using Prediction Markets in Government". September 22, 2010, Washington, DC.
Rich Byrne, MITRE
Mr. Richard Byrne is a vice president in The MITRE Corporation's Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems. In this role, he directs MITRE's work on behalf of the U.S. intelligence agencies, military intelligence organizations, and the combatant commanders with a particular emphasis on integration topics. Prior to joining MITRE, Mr. Byrne was a founder and engineering manager at VTC, a semiconductor startup where he led the design and production release of more than 150 products over five years. From 1980 to 1985, Mr. Byrne worked as the technical manager of VLSI Design Methods for telecommunication at ITT's Advanced Technology Center where he designed custom, ASIC, standard cell, and gate array products and advanced CAD tools. A member of the IEEE and the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA), Mr. Byrne sits on the board of the AFCEA Lexington-Concord Chapter. In 2010, he received AFCEA International's Benjamin H. Oliver Gold Medal for Engineering. He received the 2006 AFCEA International Meritorious Award for Engineering and the 2004 AFCEA International Golden Link Award. He served as the chairman of the Semiconductor Research Corporation's Design Sciences Board for two years and was a contributor to the first International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. Mr. Byrne received a B.S. in electrical engineering and an M.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. He is a 2006 graduate of the Harvard Business School General Management Program, where he was elected class speaker.
John Michitson, MITRE
During his 29 year career he has been a technical manager, systems engineer and engaged in research and development, and product management for engineering corporations on the forefront of technology, such as the MITRE Corporation and Bell Labs, as well as Internet startups. He is currently leading a cross-functional team applying technical guidance across several airborne networking programs to ensure interoperability. He is currently spearheading two internal research proposals that leverage open innovation and prediction markets for Federal Government markets. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Merrimack College and recently completed the Entrepreneurship Development Program at MIT's Sloan School of Management. John is very active in his community. He served 10 years on the City Council in Haverhill, Massachusetts, including his last two years as President.
Ricardo Valerdi, MIT
Dr. Ricardo Valerdi is a Research Associate in the Engineering Systems Division at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on systems engineering metrics, cost estimation, test & evaluation, human systems integration, enterprise transformation, and performance measurement. His research has been funded by Army, Navy, Air Force, and BAE Systems. Dr. Valerdi is the co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Enterprise Transformation and served on the Board of Directors of the International Council on Systems Engineering. He received a Ph.D. in Industrial & Systems Engineering from the University of Southern California.
Matthew Potoski, Iowa State University
Matthew Potoski is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Iowa State University where he teaches courses on public management and policy. He has received Iowa State University LAS awards for Early and Mid-Career Achievement in Research. He is Co-Editor of both the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management and the International Public Management Journal. Dr. Potoski's research investigates public management and policy in domestic and international contexts, including public sector contracting and service delivery, environmental policy, and voluntary regulations. He is co-author with Aseem Prakash of the Voluntary Environmentalists (Cambridge, 2006) and Co-Editor of Voluntary Programs: A Club Theory Approach (MIT 2008). He is author or co-author of over thirty articles appearing in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and Public Administration Review. Dr. Potoski received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Indiana University in 1998 and a bachelor's degree in Government from Franklin and Marshall College.
Rob Henry, MITRE
Mr. Henry has been with MITRE's Center for Acquisition and Systems Analysis (CASA) since 1995 and co-leads MITRE's risk analysis and management community of practice. He has a broad range of risk analysis and management experience developed over ten years supporting a diverse set of sponsors (US Government Classified and intelligence agencies, Office of Secretary of Defense, Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Department of Homeland Security, Census Bureau, FAA, Department of the Treasury, NOAA) and MITRE research initiatives. Mr. Henry has a demonstrated ability to assess the risk analysis and management needs of an organization. He develops, tailors, and implements a wide variety of risk analysis and management methodologies, approaches and tools supporting capability-based risk assessments, risk metrics, enterprise risk management, program risk management, risk-informed portfolio analysis, analysis of alternatives, and trade-space analysis. Additionally, Mr. Henry is a trained facilitator and has facilitated numerous risk analysis and mitigation planning sessions. He has provided risk theory and practice training to well over a 1,000 individuals in government organizations. Rob has an M.A. in Teaching, History from Salem State College and a B.A. in History from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Jason Matheny, IARPA
Jason is an Incisive Analysis Program Manager at Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity (IARPA) and is interested in Statistical Forecasting, Econometrics, Risk Analysis, Human Judgment, Uncertainty, Bio-surveillance, Epidemiology, Modeling and Simulation. Jason has a B.A. from the University of Chicago, an M.B.A. from Duke University, an M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D in Applied Economics from Johns Hopkins University.
Jon Schuler, MITRE
Jon Schuler has been with the MITRE corporation since 2007, specializing in applied mathematics, statistics, data mining, as well as computational sociology of organizations, program requirements, and other relational dependencies. Prior, Jon spent 12 years in the field of image and signal processing of airborne tactical infrared and hyperspectral imaging sensors for the Department of Navy, and holds a patent on image super-resolution. Professionally, Jon has migrated from the analysis of 'hard sciences' (and correspondingly well-defined data sets), to analysis of the 'soft sciences', represented by subjective assessments and qualitative measurements. Jon strives to tease out actionable, reproducible conclusions from such data sets using non-parametric statistical methods. Jon is a huge fan of 'The Black Swan' and 'Freakonomics'
Thomas Montgomery, Ford
Tom is a Technical Expert in Ford Motor Company's Research and Advanced Engineering. He has a B.S. in Physics and PhD in Distributed Artificial Intelligence from the University of Michigan. Tom has specialized in text mining (data mining from text-based sources), with a recent expansion into prediction markets. Seventeen years in Ford Research has given him the opportunity to contribute to many areas of the company including supply base risk analysis, competitive intelligence, customer satisfaction, survey verbatim analysis, early warning in warranty claims, failure mode simulation, and market share analysis. Tom says, "it is a target-rich environment at Ford -- there is never a dull moment, always another interesting and challenging problem to work on."
David Rejeski, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
David Rejeski directs the Science and Technology Innovation Program at the WoodrowWilson International Center for Scholars, a non-partisan policy research institute in Washington, DC. The program's mission is to explore the scientific and technological frontier, stimulating discovery and bringing new tools to bear on public policy challenges that emerge as science advances. Project areas presently include: nanotechnology, synthetic biology, serious games, participatory technology assessment, and geoengineering. He was recently a Visiting Fellow at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and has been an adjunct affiliated staff member at RAND. Between 1994 and 2000, he served as an agency representative (from EPA) to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). Before moving to CEQ, he worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) on a variety of technology and R&D issues, including the development and implementation of the National Environmental Technology Strategy. Prior to working at OSTP, he was head of the Future Studies Unit at the Environmental Protection Agency. David sits on the advisory boards of a number of organizations, including the National Science Foundation's Advisory Committee on Environmental Research and Education; the Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); the National Council of Advisors of the Center for the Study of the Presidency; the Journal of Industrial Ecology; and Games for Change. From 2004 to 2009, he was a member of EPA's Science Advisory Board. He has graduate degrees in public administration and environmental design from Harvard and Yale and studied industrial design at Rhode Island School of Design.
Adam Siegel, Inkling Markets
Adam is the co-founder of Inkling Markets, a yCombinator funded company offering prediction market software and solutions to companies, governments, and non-profits. Before co-founding Inkling, Adam worked at Accenture where he served over a dozen clients across multiple industries for over a decade. He also managed an internal venture fund to seed the development of new ideas and ran a research initiative around next generation user experiences. Adam is a regular speaker at conferences and in M.B.A. classrooms and has been published in Forbes, Risk Management Magazine, and the Journal of Prediction Markets. Adam has a B.A. in Political Science from Indiana University.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Principle 43
1. Goal Condition: The controller must have a goal or goals (e.g. to maintain the setpoint).
2. Action Condition: The controller must be able to affect the state of the system. In engineering, control actions are implemented by actuators.
3. Model Condition: The controller must be (or contain) a model of the system.
4. Observability Condition: The controller must be able to ascertain the state of the system. In engineering terminology, observation of the state of the system is provided by sensors.
(Leveson, Engineering a Safer World, pp.54-55).
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
"Bear Traps: Can Russia Avoid the Pitfalls on the Road to Sustainable Economic Growth" (C. Gaddy and B. Ickes)
There are several chapters that will require particular attention given my research thesis:
2.7 Machinery and Equipment
3.2 Cost of Cold
3.3.1 Siberia and the GULAG
4.1.1 Decentralization versus Federalism
4.6.1 Federalism versus Efficiency
Clifford and I discussed related topics this spring when I visited him in DC. I am looking forward to further discussion this fall.
For more info please see Barry W. Ickes' blog, http://ickmansblog.blogspot.com/
Monday, September 13, 2010
Goodbye Wordpress.com, Hello WordPress!
WELCOME TO MY NEW WEBSITE
One year after I started my blog on abdimom.wordpress.com I made my decision to build and migrate to my own website. What started as innocent collection of System architecture principles (thank you Professor Edward Crawley), have become full-time hobby.
I am very disorganized person, who lives very much in the present. Around late January 2010, as I gained pace and habit of collecting my system architecture principles, I started to realize that my blog can be the place for both collecting what I've learned in the past and what I will [and need to] learn in the future.

Building and maintaing your own blog is very time consuming and often painful endeavor, but I hope it will payback in the long term. Special thanks to Rafael Maranon at http://rafaelmaranon.mit.edu/ for his help and support, thanks to Leyla Abdimomunova (no blog reference for now, but she is next) for her patience and tolerance to my addiction. Special thanks to Lois Slavin, Communications Director at MIT System Design and Management program for motivation and support, as well as for linking my blog to http://sdm-blog.mit.edu/.
PS: I also started to put together my thesis (for now just Chapter 1), which I would like to share with you.
First year blogging anniversary

Thursday, September 2, 2010
Amazon Kindle: Azamat shared from Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World
" To be reliably better than individuals across many types of issues, we have to be careful to avoid two fundamental problems: idiots and gossip. "
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Russia’s web community is preparing for the 2011-2012 political season.

"Живой журнал" (LiveJournal, the most popular blog platform is Russia) now is integrated with Twitter and Facebook. LiveJournal has 26 million users, one quarter of which belong to the Russian-speaking blog-sphere. In comparison, Facebook has auditory of 500 million people world-wide. FB's market segment among Russia's social network sites is expected to grow from 2% in 2009 to 10% by the end of 2010. For now Russia's most popular social network is Vkontakte, a mock-up version of russified Facebook with similar user-interface, that keeps 45% of the market (14 million users).
LiveJournal is one-dimensional platform with primary focus on blogposts, whereas Facebook allows to integrate diverse range of visual and audio media on its platform. Today Facebook's major problem is limited broadband access beyond Russia's megalopolises. This is where Twitter gets its niche by allowing faster and more reliable micro-blog interaction via omnipresent 2G and emerging 3G networks.
In sum, the migration of Russia's most active bloggers from XX century LiveJournal to XXI century Facebook is underway. It will takes several months before we see the spillover effect. By the end of this year Russian-speaking Facebook and Twitter will be as much politicized as "Живой журнал" (LiveJournal).
It seems that both sides are getting ready for the incoming web-storm. However, President Medvedev's fascination with social media and particular with Twitter (http://bit.ly/dxov70) may backfire if Russian officials underestimate the latest developments.