Transdisciplinary Systems Engineering: Exploiting Convergence in a Hyper-Connected World

Dr. Azad Madni is the Executive Director of University of Southern California’s flagship program in Systems Architecting and Engineering, and a Professor in USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering, with courtesy appointments in the schools of medicine and education. He is the founder and CEO of Intelligent Systems Technology Inc., a high-tech R&D company specializing in cross-disciplinary approaches to complex systems engineering. He received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Engineering from UCLA. His research in intelligent systems, complex systems engineering, and human-technology integration has been sponsored by several government research agencies in DOD, DHS, DOE, DOC, and NASA, as well as aerospace and automotive companies. He has received several prestigious awards and honors from professional engineering societies, industry, and academia including the 2011 INCOSE Pioneer Award and 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award and Visionary Systems Engineering Leadership Award from Boeing for his impact on the aerospace industry and the nation. He is a Life Fellow of IEEE, IETE, and SDPS and Fellow of AAAS, AIAA, and INCOSE. He is the co-author of Tradeoff Decisions in System Design (Springer 2016). Heis the co-founder and current Chair of IEEE SMC Society’s Technical Committee on Model Based Systems Engineering. He has served as the  Los Angeles venue host, organizer and General Chair of the Conference on Systems Engineering Research (CSER) since 2008. His research interests include probabilistic system modeling and machine learning, mutual adaptation and learning in cyber-physical-human systems, and model-based methods for architecting and engineering cyber-secure systems and system-of-systems.