In Spring 2009, I anticipate having 65 students (or more) enrolled in my SRA 311 (Risk Management: Assessment and Mitigation) course.   SRA 311 is the last required core course for the Security Risk Analysis undergraduate major at Penn State University.  Most students in this course will be second-semester juniors or first-semester seniors interested in a career in security risk analysis or intelligence analysis.

All SRA 311 students are required to contribute to a final course project that seeks to perform a risk study for a real problem of real interest to real decision makers.  I anticipate 5-person teams, and with 65 students this means I should have about 13 teams.  This also means I need at least 13 final course project ideas to choose from.

To meet my needs, I am currently seeking course project ideas for my SRA 311 students.  If you have any risk analysis project ideas that would lend itself to student participation, please send me an email or leave a comment to this post.  Ideas from last semester include:

• Self-assessment methodology for social network participation risk
• Risk analysis self-assessment methodology for campus lab theft
• Press release preparedness methodology
• many others…

Some of the ideas I have for Spring 2009 include:

• User risk assessment for an online social/collaborative environment (PSU Home, Second Life, etc.)
• Research lab security assessment methodology
• Methodology for hazard preparedness (each group focused on a different hazard)
• Technology transfer risk assessment methodology
• Structure and content of a regional threat and vulnerability forecast
• Risk assessment methodology for organizational surprise

What I would really like are some information security-oriented risk analysis project ideas, a few homeland security ones, maybe one or two methods geared toward the national security or business intelligence communities, etc.

Unlike in Fall 2008, many Spring 2009 projects will be focused on building simple decision support tools that implement the methodology, complemented by a media presentation (You Tube video, website, poster, NO POWERPOINT).  Of course, for those niche studies, the project will be dominated by a paper.

Send article as PDF to

In contrast to the things I did in my risk management course (SRA 311, Penn State University) during Fall 2008, next semester (Spring 2009) I plan to integrate several software packages into my curriculum:

• Microsoft Bayesian Network Editor, MSBNx (link here): for teaching students about Bayesian networks and how to play around with them
• Graphical Network Interface, GeNIe 2.0 (link here): for teaching students about influence diagrams, decision trees, and so on
• RAMAS Constructor (link here): for teaching students about uncertainty more than anything else
• Preference’s DecideIT (link here): for teaching students about decision analysis, decision trees, tornado diagrams, etc. [Note: this is commercial software under an academic site license]
• OpenFTA (link here): for teaching students about fault trees

Other software that would be nice to talk about, but in all reality is beyond what we can realistically do in one semester, includes:

• SimulAr (link here):  Open source software for running Monte-Carlo simulations in Excel
• Araucaria (link here):  Open source software for argument diagramming
• DecisionDeck, D2 (link here):  Open source software for multicriteria decision analysis
• Method for Assessing the Credentials of Evidence, MACE (I wish I had the link here):  for assessing reliability of human sources
• Palo Alto Research Center ACH Tool 2.0.3 Tool (link here):  for implementing the analysis of competing hypotheses, or ACH
• Uncertainty Analysis with Correlations, or Unicorn (link here):  software for high dimension dependence modeling
• Expert Calibration, or EXCALIBER (link here):  software for generating probability distributions from experts
• Unibalance (link here):  software for paired comparisons

What would be nice are some friendly software tools for various group brainstorming activities, fuzzy systems, systems dynamics modeling (e.g., stock and flow), Markov modeling, eliciting membership functions, and so on.  If you have any ideas for such things, please pass on the word.

Send article as PDF to

The title of this post aligns with the title of the lecture that Professor Lotfi Zadeh (of fuzzy logic fame, among other subjects) is scheduled to deliver as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series of the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University (see the flier below).

I strongly encourage all uncertainty, risk, intelligence, control theory, etc. researchers situated nearby this event to attend.  And with his 60+ years of active research in all areas of information science, computer science and engineering, Professor Zadeh exhibits a level of depth and breadth that is unmatched by anyone I ever had the privilege of listening to.

Whether you can attend or not, below are citations for several of his most recent publications.  Unfortunately, access to these requires a subscription to each particular journal.  An alternative, of course, is to request the article via your local library (e.g., interlibrary loan), or go to the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, or nearby library of a public university and download it there.  Of course, you could also email Professor Zadeh himself (I leave it to you to find his email address) and ask if he might send these to you.

• “Toward a Generalized Theory of Uncertainty: An Outline” (2005).  doi:10.1016/j.ins.2005.01.017
  
• “Generalized Theory of Uncertainty (GTU)” (2006). doi:10.1016/j.csda.2006.04.029
• “Toward Human-Level Machine Intelligence.” (2007). doi:10.1109/SOFA.2007.4318296
• “Computation with Imprecise Probabilities.” (2008). doi:10.1109/IRI.2008.4582989
• “Is there a Need for Fuzzy Logic?” (2008). doi:10.1016/j.ins.2008.02.012

More information on Professor Zadeh’s research legacy (to include a number of his papers in PDF format) can be found at his personal website hosted by the Berkeley Initiative on Soft Computing.

Send article as PDF to