home > News & Events > Events > Webinar: “Investigating the Future of Curated Model Collections”

Our systems thinking webinar with Donna H. Rhodes, director of the Systems Engineering Advancement Research Initiative and principal research scientist at MIT, has been cancelled due to illness. We hope to reschedule the talk for the spring semester of 2023.

About the talk: “Enterprises that design and develop complex systems are experiencing disruptive change as model-centric engineering replaces traditional practice. Newer technologies are enabling more extensive reuse and composability of models, and we are now approaching a future where digital twins will co-exist with operational systems throughout the system lifecycle. While repositories of models, simulations and data have been implemented on a limited basis, digital transformation impacts their scale and importance to the enterprise. This webinar discusses several years of research on model curation as a formal practice for governance of an enterprise-level model collection. The return-on-investment business case for curated model collections is not presently well-defined, however it clear that a model collection is only worthwhile if model consumers trust the models. We highlight findings from our studies on precursors, barriers and enablers for trust in the model curation context, and share a vision for model discovery as supported by curated model collections.”

About the speaker:

Donna Rhodes is a principal research scientist in the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the director of MIT’s Systems Engineering Advancement Research Initiative (SEAri), a research group investigating digital transformation of engineering and manufacturing from a sociotechnical perspective. Dr. Rhodes is the principal investigator for numerous sponsored research projects on innovative approaches for architecting sociotechnical systems and enterprises, digital transformation, digital twins, human-model interaction, and model-centric decision making. She advises thesis students in SDM and other academic programs, teaches a graduate course on systems architecting applied to enterprises, and is an instructor in the MIT xPRO certificate program on architecture and systems engineering. 

Dr. Rhodes previously held senior leadership positions in systems engineering and enterprise transformation at IBM, Lockheed Martin, and Lucent Technologies. She has been very involved in the evolution of the systems engineering field, including development of several university graduate programs. Dr. Rhodes is a past president and fellow of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE). Her contributions in the systems field have been recognized by numerous publication and journal awards, IBM Outstanding Innovation Award, Lockheed Martin NOVA Award and INCOSE Founders Award. She received her Ph.D. in Systems Science from the T.J. Watson School of Engineering at Binghamton University.  

About the series

Sponsored by the System Design & Management program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the MIT SDM Systems Thinking Webinar Series features research conducted by SDM faculty, alumni, students, and industry partners. The series is designed to disseminate information on how to employ systems thinking to address engineering, management, and socio-political components of complex challenges.