04 May 2016









Donald Costello visited ASA, IIASA

Professor Donald F. Costello, distinguished speaker from Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), visited the Advanced System Analysis program on 3-4 May 2016 and gave a talk on "Applied Systems Support for Distributed Data Driven Analysis".

The interest in what has been called Big Data from systems analysis projects, come from many areas of systems study. 

The possibility of new systems thinking has arisen out of external advances in hardware and software and cheapness of data sources. This has been accompanied by increased cheaper data storage capabilities, increased computational processing power including HPC, and the availability of increased volumes of data from a variety of sources, which give organization more data than they have computing resources and technologies to process internally which in turn gives rise to evolving new computing power data architectures in the cloud. All this makes digital research possible that never before was possible.

In addition to the obvious great volumes of data, Data Scientists have begun a systematic study of the variety of characterizing Big Data often initially described as the four Vs: Volume, Variety, Velocity, and Veracity. We will discuss these in our talks.

In our effort to develop a IIASA Model we need to find ways of making these varieties known and accessible in the process of doing both initial design of a systems and in the building of the system under study (SUS) as well as in the running of the specific models run under the SUS.


Don Costello has had a mixed career splitting his time between Universities and Business. He helped start three Computer Science Departments and three University Information Technology facilities (University of Nebraska, University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh and Madison and Colorado State University). He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses and has done work in research areas of Statistical Computing, Performance Modeling, Standards for Learning Objects and Managing Intellectual Property. He is a 40-year member of ACM and is a fellow of the British Computing Society. He has lectured all over the United States as well as in England, Ireland, Austria, Germany, India and Sri Lanka. He also held a four-year Carnegie Foundation grant to investigate how IP is managed in Universities around the World. In business career he has managed IT facilities, founded and sold two firms and consulted with over 100 firms throughout the world. His recent consulting includes five years consulting on ERP systems, SAP, as well as being a Technical Consultant on .com and e-Learning projects. Don currently holds a position as a Senior Lecturer and NCITE scholar at the University of Nebraska and is working on the importance of standards in modeling the large systems needed to support e-learning environments.

 


Print this page

Last edited: 13 May 2016

CONTACT DETAILS

Artem Baklanov

Research Scholar Agriculture, Forestry, and Ecosystem Services Research Group - Biodiversity and Natural Resources Program

Research Scholar Exploratory Modeling of Human-natural Systems Research Group - Advancing Systems Analysis Program

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Phone: (+43 2236) 807 0 Fax:(+43 2236) 71 313