Do you have a talk to share that can fit into one of our sessions? Would you be willing to co-chair or participate as a panelist in one of our sessions? If so, we invite you to contact one of the session chairs listed below by November 5, 2021.

Chair | Contact Info: Tom Keelin ([email protected])   

Description: While eliciting, representing, and combining expert opinion has been a hallmark of decision analysis theory and practice for more than 50 years, new innovations are making it faster, easier, and more practical. New continuous probability distributions (metalogs and J-QPD’s) are available to quickly convert elicited quantiles into smooth continuous distributions. New tools are available to assess expert opinion and provide real-time feedback to the expert on the shape of their distribution. New methods are available to weight the opinion of multiple experts and express the combined opinion as a closed form quantile-parameterized distribution that’s easy to simulate. This session will explore such innovations and provide practical tools for implementation.

Chair | Contact Info: Tracy Allison Altman ([email protected]) and Steve Stein ([email protected])

Description: Deep dive into the rapid rise of technology that augments human decision making: Tools for decision science, analytics, business intelligence, and artificial intelligence. Presenters offer practical ways to identify which decisions can/should be automated, and which should not. The session addresses how to integrate machine learning, KPIs, and robotic process automation into decision steps, and will illustrate the many nuances of human-machine collaboration.

Chairs | Contact Info: Ellen Coopersmith ([email protected]) and Lindsay Oyola ([email protected])



Description: There is a global effort to shift toward renewable energy sources, with the goal of zero-carbon emissions sometime in the second half of this century. To achieve this goal, all economic enterprises, both those which produce or consume energy, must consider the impact of their strategic choices on their carbon footprint and address the critical need for innovative alternatives. This session will focus on pioneering applications of decision science to stimulate creative alternatives to approach net-zero and provide insight into the tradeoffs across near-term and long-term goals. We invite speakers from all industries who are working on creative ways to address the carbon conundrum in a decision quality manner.

Chairs|Contact Info: Shaun Comfort([email protected])

and Bart Willigers ([email protected])

Description: Estimating the probability of success to guide investment decisions spans multiple industries and technologies. This is true whether a company is contemplating investing in developing new molecular treatments for unmet medical needs or investing in assets to meet a future demand for energy. This session presents example approaches in use today and compares/contrasts these approaches in a panel discussion with Q&A from audience. The presenters illustrate how combining classical decision analysis, probability elicitation, and advances in predictive modeling can provide plausible estimates of success to guide decision making. Please join us for a timely discussion that cuts across disciplines and industries and illustrates the value of combining DA and Data Science.

Chair | Contact Info: Julia Varshavsky ([email protected]) Co-chair: Open

Description: It could take over a decade and more than $2.5B to bring a pharmaceutical product to market. Contributing to the cost, timeline and risk burden are many decision-making forks along the development path that impact probability of technical and regulatory success, value to patients, and size of the market. Decision-making paradigms in early-stage development are order of magnitude more complicated because they encompass broader uncertainties of the proof of concept from drug discovery through the early clinical development stage. Moreover, these decisions have to be made with restricted expertise pool and scarce funding. In such an environment, the efficiency of the risk-informed decision-making process, clarity in setting development milestones, optimizing access to expertise, and laser-focus on execution are vital. This session will encompass discussions of the risks and opportunities involved in early-stage pharmaceutical development from the founder, investor and drug development expert point of view. It will also showcase approaches and examples for management of these risks and the return on investment.

Chairs | Contact Info: Sought; contact William Leaf-Herrmann ([email protected]) and Gary Summers ([email protected])



Description: COVID-19 has wracked our world. Few historical precedents (bubonic plagues, 1918’s influenza pandemic, and HIV/AIDS) exceeded the current death toll. We seek co-chairs and presentations/speakers to share innovative approaches and lessons learned from applying DA to decisions influenced by COVID. Instead of focusing on how these decisions should be made, this session focuses on how decisions were made, including lessons learned for personal, business, public policy, and global healthcare choices, addressing multiple objectives and stakeholders’ varying values. We envision a session with three speakers, perhaps including a panel discussion, plus questions and answers.

Chairs | Contact Info: Jay Andersen ([email protected]) and Leslie Lippard ([email protected])



Description: This session will feature speakers who will share actual applications of Decision Analysis in the form of case studies. The speakers will endeavor to summarize their work and highlight the insights gained, giving particular emphasis to any lessons learned that span multiple situations or industries. The presentations may also include discussion of the approaches used which enabled robust decision maker dialog leading to decision clarity.

Chairs | Contact Info: Sought; contact William Leaf-Herrmann ([email protected]) and Gary Summers ([email protected])



Description: We seek co-chairs and presentations/speakers to share their experiences applying decision analysis to military and public policy decision-making. The presentations might highlight the challenges faced and benefits produced when forging alignment and commitment from multiple stakeholders representing diverse goals/interests, while managing tradeoffs among multiple objectives and gleaning insight into uncertain, complex systems. We envision a session with three speakers, plus questions and answers.

We look forward to your participation!

William Leaf-Herrmann and Gary Summers

SDP Annual Conference Co-chairs