Abstract: When evaluating or reporting a risk, there is a tendency to ignore or underestimate uncertainties and to take catastrophist or exceedingly optimistic positions. Media amplification can spread fears that exceed the actual risks and group interests can obscure real ones. Further, in retrospect, a common excuse for inaction is to call a bad surprise a “black swan” that could not have been anticipated when there was ample information to the contrary. From a risk analyst perspective, I will discuss the logic of quantifying uncertainty rather than using classic adjectives and adverbs (“likely”, “unlikely”, “pretty certain”, etc.). I will present some basic, elementary properties and observations, for example, more information does not mean less uncertainty, taking the most likely hypothesis and presenting it as certain is logically wrong, so is letting the last screaming headline obscure the value of prior information. For each, I will present and discuss some examples.  

About the Speaker: Dr. M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell is the Burt and Deedee McMurtry Professor of Engineering, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University and Chair (Emerita) of Management Science and Engineering. She is a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) of the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and joined CISAC as an affiliated faculty member in September 2011. 

She is a world leader in engineering risk analysis and management and more generally, the use of Bayesian probability to process incomplete information. Her research and that of her Engineering Risk Research Group at Stanford have focused on the inclusion of technical and management factors in probabilistic risk analysis models with applications to the NASA shuttle tiles, offshore oil platforms and medical systems. Since 2001, she has combined risk analysis and game analysis to assess intelligence information and risks of terrorist attacks.

She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the French Academie des Technologies and of several boards including Aerospace, Draper Laboratory and InQtel. Dr. Paté-Cornell was a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from December 2001 to 2008. She holds and Engineering degree (Applied Math/CS) from the Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble (France), an MS in Operations Research and a PhD in Engineering-Economic Systems, both from Stanford University.