CS + X Seminar Decision Making Under Uncertainty

Guest: Kemal Kılıç, Sabancı University

Abstract: Experts often rely on their intuitions while making critical decisions. However, empirical research conducted in wide range of disciplines demonstrate that, decisions based on analytical models outperforms the intuition based decisions. There are variety of reasons why human judgement fails, e.g., bounded rationality, low dimensional brain, decision making heuristics and biases, etc. On the other hand, the analytical models are all based on various assumptions and unfortunately real life often doesn’t fit to the framework of these models. Particularly the uncertainty in the analytical models is considered as risk (i.e., known unknowns) but in reality we usually face unknown unknowns. Thus it is not hard to deduce that both ends of the spectrum (pure intuition and pure data driven analytical models) have their weaknesses. At this point, a disciplined intuition framework suggested by Daniel Kahneman which is a compromise between the two extremes seems to be a promising way to make decisions under uncertainty. Data Analytics is a process where the overall objective is creating value from data. The process itself is iterative and requires extensive amount of domain expertise while building models that satisfy the required performance. The data analytics team continuously make decisions under uncertainty throughout the process and face unknown unknowns. In this talk, we will discuss how data analytics teams benefit from the disciplined intuition framework which is used mostly by the experts of decision making under uncertainty, namely the entrepreneurs..

Bio: Dr. Kemal Kilic received the B.Sc. degree from the Electronics Engineering Department, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, M.Sc. degree from Industrial Engineering Department, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey and PhD degree from the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, University of Toronto, Canada. He is currently an associate professor in the Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey. His current research and teaching focus includes data analytics, innovation management, digital transformation and decision making. Dr. Kilic served as Board Member in Information Technologies Panel of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (2014-2015), Panel Board Member of NATO System Analysis and Studies (SAS) Group (2015-2018) and Member-at-Large of NATO SAS Panel (2018-…). He has been heavily involved in development of various industrial education and leadership development programmes for leading groups and conglomerates of Turkey regarding to digital transformation and data analytics at the Executive Development Unit (EDU) of Sabanci University.

Zoom link: https://sabanciuniv.zoom.us/j/96604065635