Please welcome Dr. Simon Hsiang to the ISE Department. Dr. Hsiang serves as the head of the Systems Engineering & Engineering Management Department at the University of North Carolina – Charlotte.
As always refreshments are available in 428 Daniels Hall 30 minutes before the seminar begins.
The goal of ergonomic research aims to understand the human intelligence in complex systems, and the challenge is
to provide the in-situ evidence reflecting the human behaviors in the system of interest under different
anthropometrical, psychophysical and psychosocial constraints. Although there is little support to claim that any
human operates at the “optimal” level, some objective functions provide a good frame of reference for the strategy
and trade-off in job designs and controls entailing searching through the available alternatives until an acceptability threshold is met. To demonstrate such satisficing aspects of ergonomic research three projects will be used: the multidimensional trade-off in manual materials handling, the optimal control and stochastic resonance in VR walkway design, and the computational model for spacecraft/habitat volume. Through these studies, some basic questions regarding how to use objective functions in ergonomic research will be examined: Can we mine data, design
experiment, or perform certain analysis or simulation to validate or falsify crucial assumptions? What explicit and
implicit assumptions have we made? Have we confused facts with behavioral assumptions? How would the design or
control change if each of our key assumptions proves incorrect? What are the specifics in the situation or operating
condition? What concerns remain uncertain or ambiguous?
Dr. Simon M. Hsiang is the Department Chair and a professor of Systems Engineering and Engineering
Management at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Prior to joining UNC Charlotte in July 2015, he served as
the E. L. Derr Professor at Texas Tech University. He has more than 20 years of teaching experience in the areas of
biomechanics and data analytics. He was a senior researcher for the Liberty Mutual Insurance Group in Boston for 8
years working in the areas of incident analysis and field surveys of risk factors involved in occupational injuries and worker compensation. The risk analysis involved in his work are usually multi-features, multiple failure modes, highly demographical and geographical networks. Since he joined academia, he has received support from the National
Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), the U.S. Air Force and the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). His experience with large complex systems of recurring
events in the actuarial and field epidemiological studies can be directly conveyed to the stratification and development of meta-rules. The goals for both systems are the same, to transfer community dependent incomplete anecdotes into verifiable probability based on the given causal criteria.
