On September 30, 2009, the PHM Society held a special Luminary Session on Prognostics as a keystone event for its 2009 Annual Conference. In this session, four experts from radically different domains (engineering, meteorology, decision science, and financial/economic sectors) presented their perspectives on prognosis and provided new insights on how to face the abundance of challenges in the PHM/CBM community. The session concluded with an engaging Panel Session.

Download the luminary session brochure here.

Presenters:

Mr. Stephen Engel – Engineering (charts)
Steve is an Associate Technical Fellow for the Aerospace Sector of the Northrop Grumman Corporation. For nearly 20 years, Mr. Engel has focused on diagnostics and prognostics design and development for military systems. He is presently coauthor of the model-based reasoning algorithm used for Prognostics Health Management (PHM) onboard the Joint Strike Fighter. He is also the technical lead responsible for the design of reasoning and prediction algorithms for DARPA’s Structural Integrity Prognosis System. Mr. Engel holds a dozen patents in PHM, artificial intelligence paradigms and related technologies.

Dr. Mark E. Johnson – Meteorology / Climatology (charts)
Mark E. Johnson is Professor of Statistics at the University of Central Florida in Orlando and has served on the Florida Commission on Hurricane Loss Projection Methodology. Professor Johnson is the author of Multivariate Statistical Simulation (Wiley) and has published in such journals as Risk Analysis, Bull. of the American Meteorological Society, Technometrics, J. of the Amer. Stat. Assoc., Biometrics, and J. of the Royal Stat. Soc.

Dr. Thomas R. Stewart – Decision Science / Policy (charts)
Thomas R. Stewart is Director of the Center for Policy Research at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany. He received his Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology from the University of Illinois and has worked at the Center for Research on Judgment and Policy, Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado, and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Dr. Stewart’s research interest is in professional judgment under conditions of complexity and uncertainty. His research includes studies of physician and weather forecaster judgment.

A video of the presentation will be posted here soon.

Dr. Jerry Nickelsburg – Financial / Economic (charts)
Jerry Nickelsburg is a senior economist at UCLA Anderson Forecast in which he plays a key role in the economic modeling and forecasting of California economies. He is a regular presenter at the Los Angeles Mayor’s Economic Conference and has been cited in the Financial Times, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, Variety, CNBC, NBC, PBS, and L.A. Business Journal. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota in 1980 specializing in monetary economics and econometrics. He was formerly a professor of Economics at the University of Southern California and has held executive positions with McDonnell Douglas, Boeing as well as the Federal Reserve Board of Governors developing forecasting tools, and has advised banks, investors and financial institutions.

A video of the presentation will be posted here soon.

Session Chair and Organizer:

Gregory J. Kacprzynski is Director of Engineering Services and a co-founder of Impact Technologies LLC, a small business headquartered in Rochester NY, USA with over 120 multi-disciplinary engineers, scientists and technicians. Greg directs engineering teams that develop software and provide consulting support for system health management solutions including diagnostic, prognostic and reasoning technologies, physics of failure modeling, intelligent control and maintenance optimization for both private industry and US government agencies.