2015 Winter Simulation Conference

Keynote Speaker - Joshua Epstein is Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director, Center for Advanced Modeling in the Social, Behavioral and Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. He pioneered the technique of agent-based modeling, which is considered a transformative innovation, earning him the prestigious 2008 National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award. Dr. Epstein's work has had a profound influence on the integrated computational modeling of social, behavioral, and biomedical dynamics. He has authored or co-authored several books including Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up, Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling and Agent_Zero.

Pierre L’Ecuyer holds the Canada Research Chair in Stochastic Simulation and Optimization at the University of Montreal since 2004 and an Inria International Chair (Inria-Rennes, France) for 2013-2018. He obtained the Canadian Operational Research Society Award of Merit in 2014, the INFORMS Simulation Society Distinguished Service Award in 2011, the INFORMS Simulation Society Outstanding Research Publication Award twice (1999 and 2009), a Killam Research Fellowship in 2001-03, the Urgel- Archambault Prize from ACFAS in 2002, Steacie Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) in 1995-97, and was elected INFORMS Fellow in 2006. He has published more than 240 scientific articles on simulation methods and developed software libraries for analysis of discrete-event simulation. His work touches on many disciplines, including statistics, operations research, economics, and computer science.

Averill M. Law is the founder of Averill M. Law & Associates, Inc., the world leader in simulation training. His firm has presented more than 530 seminars in 20 countries on topics such as system design and analysis, model validation, design of experiments, agent-based simulation, simulation management, and software selection. He is the founder and president of ALA, and is widely considered to be one of the foremost experts on simulation modeling. Previously, he was a tenured professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Arizona. He is the author of Simulation Modeling and Analysis (5th Edition, McGraw-Hill, 2014), which has been the leading simulation book since 1982 with more than 155,000 copies in print and 14,300 citations. He was awarded the 2009 INFORMS Simulation Society Lifetime Professional Achievement Award. He has a Ph.D. in industrial engineering and operations research from the University of California at Berkeley.

Military Keynote -- Timothy H. Chung is Assistant Professor of Systems Engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His research interests include multi-agent coordination for information gathering applications, operations and decision support for robotic systems, and probabilistic search. He is the Deputy Director of the Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER). Dr. Chung is a Gates Millennium Scholar alumnus and recipient of numerous professional service awards.