SIE Seminar: Ben Ruddell

Abstract: Ben is a professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS) at Northern Arizona University and the Director of the FEWSION supply chain data science project. During AY2020-2022 he was the director of SICCS. His Ph.D. is in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a registered professional engineer in Arizona (Water Resources practice area). His professional experience is in informatics, data science, systems engineering, and generally in the leadership of the interdisciplinary university enterprise. His professional goals are the advancement of the science and management of complex systems, and excellence in education in a university setting. Why? Because our country and world need better solutions to handle chaos and complex systems, and we need better scientists and engineers who know how to best serve their communities with these solutions.

Bio: FEWSION™ provides U.S. communities with real-life data to map the vulnerabilities and environmental footprints of supply chains and critical infrastructures. FEWSION™ has built the first complete empirical description of the U.S. supply chain networks so that every citizen and policymaker in the U.S. can see where their commodities come from. This network data is transformative because it provides an accurate top-down picture of the global human-natural system, and therefore provides scientists with the opportunity to unlock the secrets of that system's adaptive resilience and complex processes. In this presentation, the first-generation data product and viewer will be demonstrated and recent scientific results will be discussed.