Julian Scott Yeomans
Julian is a Professor of Operations Management & Information Systems and the Program Director for both the Master of Management in Artificial Intelligence (MMAI) and the Master of Business Analytics (MBAN). He holds degrees in management science/information systems, environmental engineering, business, and statistics. He generally teaches courses on VBA programming and spreadsheet-based decision support systems. Recent research efforts have focused on the development of simulation-decomposition (SimDec), population-based simulation-optimization algorithms, machine learning, and modelling-to-generate-alternatives with applications to such diverse areas as aviation electrification, urban electric vehicle transportation, waste management, environmental informatics, climate sustainability, empirical finance, osmotic food dehydration, and cascading domino-effect risks. He has published 6 books and over 135 journal articles. This research program is currently funded by an NSERC Civil, Industrial, and Systems Engineering Discovery Grant (2022-2027) and supported by a Schulich Research Excellence Fellowship (2021-24).
In collaboration with Mariia Kozlova from LUT University in Finland, Julian has created the pre-eminent global sensitivity analysis technique by combining SimDec with a groundbreaking new method for quantifying factor impacts. At its core, SimDec visually “teases out” inherent cause-and-effect relationships and “wicked” interactions between groups of input and output parameters. While straightforward and elegant, this novel approach significantly enhances the analytical capabilities of users by readily exposing seemingly, a priori, counter-intuitive behaviors that can be readily understood by both technical specialists and non-technical users. A downloadable free-of-charge electronic book, together with open-source computer code in Python, Julia, R, and Matlab, is being made available to promote as widespread an adoption and penetration of SimDec as possible.