Boston Conference July 31-Aug 2 to Mark 50th Anniversary of System Dynamics.Field founder Jay Forrester to deliver key note talk on field's past and future CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Years after it was created at MIT MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology , the field of system dynamics System dynamics is an approach to understanding the behaviour of complex systems over time. It deals with internal feedback loops and time delays that affect the behaviour of the entire system. - and its legendary 89-year-old founder, Jay Forrester - will be both celebrated and advanced at an international conference in Boston next week that will feature a world-class range of speakers and presentations, with Forrester delivering the keynote keynote /key·note/ (ke´not) in homeopathy, the characteristic property of a drug that indicates its use in treating a similar symptom of disease. talk on Aug. 2. Among his many accomplishments, Forrester, who came to MIT in 1939, pioneered the first practical, real-time digital computer, Whirlwind whirlwind, revolving mass of air resulting from local atmospheric instability, such as that caused by intense heating of the ground by the sun on a hot summer day. , and, in the process, invented the first practical memory device for computers. But the conference marks Forrester's landmark research and first major articles about system dynamics, a methodology for studying and managing complex feedback systems, such as those regularly found in business and other social systems. Forrester, who became part of the newly formed MIT Sloan School of Management The MIT Sloan School of Management is one of the five schools of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. It is one of the world's leading business schools, conducting research and teaching in finance, entrepreneurship, marketing, in 1956, believed that complex management systems could be modeled using the same concepts of feedback control that apply to engineered systems. "Many of Jay's ideas were far ahead of their time," wrote John Sterman John David Sterman is the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management, and the current director of the MIT System Dynamics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is mostly considered as the current leader of the System Dynamics school of thought. , MIT Sloan Jay Forrester Professor of Management and conference program chairman Sterman in a special anniversary issue System Dynamics Review. "Some still are." Today, for example, system dynamicists examine why large projects, from ship building to writing software code, are frequently over-run or why attempts to generate and manage development growth so often fail. In his address on Aug. 2, Forrester will reflect on the past and envision the future of system dynamics. "Science and technology are no longer frontiers; they have receded into the fabric of everyday activity," Forrester wrote for the anniversary issue of System Dynamics Review. "I believe that we are now embarking on the next great frontier, which will be to explore a much deeper understanding of social and economic behavior." The conference, which is being run by the non-profit System Dynamics Society The System Dynamics Society is a not-for-profit organization based in Albany, New York, USA, whose mission is to further research into system dynamics and systems thinking. , will take place at the Seaport Hotel. More information, including a schedule, can be found at http://systemdynamics.org/conferences/2007/index.htm. |
|
||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion