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Dr. Smith is currently teaching PPD 557: Operations Research and Modeling. The syllabus can be found at the USC schedule of classes page: https://classes.usc.edu/

At USC, Dr. Smith has taught Operations Research and Decision Analysis in the graduate programs of the Price School of Public Policy, the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department in the Viterbi School of Engineering, the Marshall School of Business and the Department of Mathematics. He has also taught for the UCLA Business and Engineering Program, California Institute of Technology, and the Claremont Graduate University in the Peter Drucker Executive Management Program.

At the graduate level: Decision Analysis, Value and Decision Theory, Engineering Management Decisions and Statistics, Operations Research and Modeling, Decision Analysis, Quantitative R&D Planning, Operations Management and Analytic Decision Models, C Programming, Systems Analysis, Probability Concepts in Engineering, Engineering Statistics, Probability and Statistics for Business Majors, Introduction to Operations Research: Stochastic Models, Business Statistics, and Honors Statistics.

Dr. Smith has also developed decision analysis methodologies and tools for the analysis of advanced space missions and technologies for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He has authored over 200 technical papers spanning a wide variety of technological disciplines. Dr. Smith has been a principal investigator on Computational Approaches to the R&D Portfolio Selection problem and has developed algorithms and tools for technology evaluation, technology portfolio management, and automated resource allocation systems. He has extensive experience in decision support systems and software development applied to technology management.

Research Interests:

  • Data visualization
  • Bayesian data analytics
  • Research and Development Portfolio Selection Problems
  • Multi-criteria decision analysis
  • Mathematical modeling and simulation
  • Automation, robotics, and human interaction for in-space operations

Some honors and awards:

  • NASA Team Award for “Outstanding contributions for development, quality assurance, and configuration control of NASA Cost Analysis Data Requirement Products.”
  • NASA Team Award for work on Mars technology portfolio analysis task.
  • Outstanding paper, Journal of Systems Engineering.
  • Award for Outstanding Performance by the Telecommunications and Mission Operations Directorate, Service Preparation Subsystem Task.
  • NASA Award “For the creative development of a technical innovation: START-Systematic Approach for Selection of R&D Technology Portfolios.”
  • Cassini Project Systems Engineering Award for continued effort and support.
  • NASA award for technical innovation for “Generic Extravehicular (EVA) and Telerobot Task Primitives for Analysis, Design, and Integration; Version 1.0: Reference Compilation for the EVA and Telerobotics Communities.”
  • Group Achievement Award for, “Outstanding contribution to the development of photovoltaic solar cells for terrestrial applications.”
  • Award for “Best Theoretical/Empirical Research Paper,” Western Regional Conference of The Decision Sciences Institute.

Education:

B.S., M.S., Systems Engineering, University of Arizona; M.A., Mathematical Economics, University of Southern California; Ph.D., Business Administration, University of Southern California.