Responsible Decision-Making in the Face of Severe Uncertainty
by Moshe SNIEDOVICH

Abstract

Severe uncertainty is an ever-present phenomenon that lurks in the background, and yet we manage to carry on with our daily life without giving it too much thought. Indeed, we do not allow it to paralyze us, perhaps because there is not much that we can do about it.

However, what about the experts? What do the experts say?

For obvious reasons the paradigms offered by classical decision theory for tackling severe uncertainty are extremely simple, so much so that prima facie they seem to be naive. This is a reflection of the fact that conditions of severe uncertainty leaves one precious little to work with. We must therefore expect models designed for decision-making under severe uncertainty to be austere. Consequently, the state of the art is such that no fully satisfactory recipes exist for dealing with problems involving decision-making under severe uncertainty.

In this presentation we examine the conceptual, methodological and practical aspects of this important area of decision theory.

The discussion is based on the speaker's interaction over the past four years with academics, practitioners and research centers in Australia regarding methods available for dealing with practical problems in the areas of conservation biology, homeland security, financial analysis, and others.

About the speaker

Moshe SNIEDOVICH is a Principal Fellow in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne. He obtained his BSc in Agricultural Engineering (Technion, Israel, 1968) and then worked as a Planning Engineer in the Ministry of Agriculture (Israel, 1968-1972) before commencing his PhD in Water Resources and Systems and Industrial Engineering (University of Arizona, USA, 1972-1976). He then spent three years as a post doc -- one year in Princeton University (1976-77) and two years at IBM Thomas J Watson Research Centre (1977-79) - before joining the National Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences (NRIMS) in South Africa (1979-89). In 1989 he joined the University of Melbourne.

Moshe's research and teaching interests are in the areas of sequential decision making, interactive computing and modeling composite optimisation and decision-making under uncertainty. His publication record consists of one book and over ninety articles. He has been awarded numerous grants for the development of multimedia educational resources for OR/MS that eventually led to the tutOR project. Moshe has also been very active on the international OR/MS scene. He served as IFORS VP (representing APORS) for six years (1998 - 2003) and was in charge of the IFORS tutORial project.