"Making Rational Decisions Under Uncertainty and Model Complexity"   A Celebration in Honor of Professor James L. Beck's Career and Tenure at Caltech

The symposium on

Making Rational Decisions under Uncertainty and Model Complexity

February 3-4, 2017, Caltech

is dedicated to honoring the career of James L. Beck, the George W. Housner Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech. Professor Beck has a distinguished academic career in earthquake engineering and in Bayesian inference and probabilistic methods for uncertainty quantification and propagation. He is well known for his philosophical perspectives towards the Bayesian approach and their transformation into computational methods for solving decision-making problems with uncertainties. His approach has led to fundamental formulations that enabled non-trivial practical problems in science and engineering to be solved and their results interpreted in a manner consistent with modeling assumptions and available information. Over the years, students and colleagues of Professor Beck have benefited from his scholarship, mentorship and collegiality, contributing to disciplines spanning over structural health monitoring, control, design optimization, seismic inversion, earthquake early warning systems, risk and loss assessment, and more. The workshop will be a celebration of Professor Beck’s achievements, a rendezvous for alumni of his research group and his colleagues, and a forum for discussing current challenges under the symposium theme.