As the technical disciplines focus their attention on increasingly complex phenomenon, the amount of work necessary to develop fluency with the culture and methodologies for “doing science” or engineering is growing, seemingly without bound. Fields have grown apart and developed highly specialized jargon, even though approaches to analysis and design from different fields often use information in very similar ways. This has created an explosion in the number of fields, subfields, and emphases, leading to a crisis for both universities and students as they struggle to manage the corresponding information explosion of the educational process.
The IDeA Labs, or Information and Decision Algorithm Laboratories, at Brigham Young University, is a fluid response to this crisis that attempts to focus on the fundamental information science behind today’s technical endeavors by using systems theory as a common language to investigate algorithmic decision processes from a wide variety of contexts. The belief is that the superposition of research into a wide variety of applications will help distill the common information processing threads between them.
This talk will introduce the IDeA Labs as an interdisciplinary effort between Computer Science, Mathematics, and Statistics and offer an overview of some of our projects, including the on-going development of a retail laboratory, data-driven market structure analysis, automated water management, production sequencing for flexible batch-manufacturing systems, laser stabilization, control-system software verification, and an invitation to our soon-to-be-completed “Tour de Finance”.
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