Ali E. Abbas is Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Professor of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. A leading authority in the field of decision and risk analysis, Dr. Abbas received his M.S. in electrical engineering; M.S. in engineering economic systems & operations research; PhD in management science and engineering, and PhD minor in electrical engineering all from the school of engineering at Stanford University.
His research interests include all aspects of decision making under uncertainty (broadly defined), information theory, signal processing, artificial intelligence, and bioinformatics. He is co-author of two forthcoming books “The Foundations of Decision Analysis” with Ronald Howard, and the single-author book “The Foundations of Multiattribute Utility”. He is also an associate Editor for both the Operations Research and Decision Analysis journals of INFORMS and is the decision analysis area editor for IIE Transactions.
Prior to joining USC, Dr. Abbas was on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was the Art Davis Faculty Scholar in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the College of Engineering. In that capacity, he founded the Information Systems and Decision Analysis Lab. Prior to the University of Illinois, he was a Lecturer in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University.
Dr. Abbas is widely published in books, journals and conference publications. He has also shared his expertise through television appearances and numerous invited talks. He is a recipient of multiple research awards from the National Science Foundation including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the inaugural class of the National Science Foundation I-Corps award. He is also recipient of numerous publication awards in decision analysis. Dr. Abbas has organized numerous workshops including the decision analysis tracks of INFORMS 2007, 2008, the Bayesian inference and Maximum Entropy conference in 2005, and numerous workshops with NASA and other individual organizations.
Dr. Abbas also has extensive industry experience with Schlumberger Oilfield Services, where he held several international positions in Wireline logging, operations management, and international training. He also has extensive consulting experience and has taught executive education courses at a variety of institutions such as Stanford University.
