Ackoff Center Weblog

Russell Ackoff Doctoral Fellowship from Wharton School

Doctoral student Minji Kim is the recipient of the Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowship Award for 2014 from the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center.

 

Kim’s research will focus on determining the effectiveness of anti-smoking public service announcements with different themes (e.g. negative health consequences on smokers vs. secondhand smoking) that are customized to the level of race, gender, and age of the audiences.  This builds upon research that indicates that the used of tailored communication using exemplar or persuader characters that are similar to the target audience are more effective.

 

The Ackoff Fellowship provides funding for doctoral research on human decision making. It is named in honor of an endowment provided to the Wharton School by the Anheuser-Busch Charitable Trust.  Russell Ackoff, Professor Emeritus of Management Science life's work was dedicated to furthering the understanding of human behavior in organizations. 

 

The fellowships provide financial support for the students to conduct specific research projects. In addition to supporting the cost of research, one of the goals of the Ackoff awards is to foster a sense of community among scholars at Penn involved in research on decision making. 

 

Kim is the seventh Annenberg student to receive this fellowship. Hyun Suk Kim, Susan Mello (Gr ’13), and Dina Shapiro-Luft received the fellowship for their individual projects in 2012; Shapiro-Luft also received the honor in 2010. Cabral Bigman-Galimore (Gr ‘11) and Peter Busse (Gr ‘11) received fellowships in 2011. Shawnika Hull (Gr ‘10) is a two-time recipient, receiving the honor in 2008 and 2009.

 

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Next

The 58th Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences

The George Washington University, Washington, DC.
July 27 – August 1, 2014
 
Theme: Learning Across Boundaries: Exploring the Variety ofSystemic Theory and Practice
 
CALL FOR PAPERS
The International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS) was founded in 1956 as a section of the AAAS, to “encourage the development of theoretical systems which are applicable to more than one of the traditional departments of knowledge”. There are now many thousands of systems thinkers, complexity scientists and cyberneticians worldwide. As more and more new application areas, practices, systems methodologies, theories and philosophies are developed, the number of research communities continues to increase. Fragmentation is the inevitable result of the proliferation of new systems ideas in response to new issues and contexts. While this might, at first, appear to be a negative consequence of our success, it brings with it an enormous opportunity: mutual learning from each other to enhance systems, cybernetic and complexity theories and practices in all our diverse domains. It is this opportunity that provides the focus for our 2014 conference.

This conference will reach out to all the diverse systems communities and provide a forum for mutual learning across their boundaries.
This year we will innovate in three ways:

• Not centrally determining all the conference streams. While the ISSS ‘special integration groups’ (SIGs) will each have their own stream (as in previous years), we also encourage anyone with an interest not already represented by the SIGs to put forward their own ideas for streams. Inviting thought leaders from as many research communities as possible.
• Designing hour-long boundary-spanning workshops where a single theory or practice, developed in a given research community, will be presented.
• This conference represents a tremendously exciting learning opportunity, and we warmly welcome your participation, whether you are a long-standing member of the ISSS or have never heard of us before. We particularly welcome systems, cybernetics and complexity researchers who have knowledge of a particular domain of theory, methodology or practice, and want to expand their understanding of what else might be available. We invite abstracts and papers in all areas of systemic thinking and practice, and details of possible SIG streams and Exploratory groups are listed on the ISSS website.

This year, the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) meeting "Living in Cybernetics" will also be held at GWU in the week following the ISSS meeting (3-9th August). There will be a discount for those attending both conferences, and details are on each society’s conference web pages.

Note that the conference fee includes free membership of the ISSS for a year, including electronic access to our journal, Systems Research and Behavioral Science.
Important dates:

May 31, 2014  End of Early Discount Rate on ISSS conference
May 31, 2014  Deadline for Workshop Proposals
June 30, 2014  Last date for Abstracts to be included in the Conference Programme.

Full Papers may be submitted at any point, but people must first submit an abstract for review. See website for further details on publications, and all conference information is available at http://www.isss.org/world or by emailing: [email protected]