2025 Ross B. Corotis Lecture
Warren B. Powell
Professor Emeritus, Princeton University
Chief Innovation Officer, Optimal Dynamics
The Universal Modeling Framework for Sequential Decision Problems:
The Next Generation of AI
Wednesday, November 3, 2025
5:00-6:00 p.m.
Homewood Campus, Hackerman Hall, Room B17
Reception to Follow (by RSVP only)*
Zoom Link to Be Provided
*Registration is only required if you plan to attend the reception following the lecture.
The Universal Modeling Framework for Sequential Decision Problems: The Next Generation of AI
Sequential decisions are a universal problem class that arise in the context of any human activity, including engineering and the sciences, health services, medical decision making, transportation, business and finance, although in this talk Powell will emphasize applications in energy systems. Despite their universal applicability, the science of making decisions in the presence of dynamic information has been buried in the academic literature under the weight of arcane mathematics and complex algorithms.
This entire talk is based on the premise: If you want to run a better {anything} you have to make better decisions.
Powell starts from a foundation he calls framing the problem, which begins by simply defining a decision and then identifying five classes of decisions, several of which are routinely overlooked. He then poses three questions: what are the performance metrics, what types of decisions are being made and what are the uncertainties which lay the foundation for any model. He will then present his universal modeling framework for any sequential decision problem, followed by four meta-classes of policies (methods for making decisions) that include any method, including hybrids, that has been presented in the research literature or used in practice. This opens the door to choosing policies that balance factors from how well they work, to how easy they are to use. Powell will prioritize the methods from most to least widely used, based on his experience using each method.
Even when not using a computer model to make decisions, proper modeling helps people think about problems. This property has been lost on in the jungle of sophisticated methods in the literature.
Powell will end by making the case for teaching sequential decision analytics at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including to less-analytical students in domain-based fields.
About Warren B. Powell
Warren B. Powell is Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, where he taught for 39 years, and is currently a co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Optimal Dynamics as well as Executive-in-Residence at Rutgers Business School. He was the founder and director of CASTLE Lab, which focused on stochastic optimization with applications to freight transportation, energy systems, health, e-commerce, finance and the laboratory sciences, supported by over $50 million in funding from government and industry. Powell pioneered a new universal framework that can be used to model any sequential decision problem, including the identification of four classes of policies that spans every possible method for making decisions, which is documented in his latest book with Wiley: Reinforcement Learning and Stochastic Optimization: A unified framework for sequential decisions. He has published more than 250 papers, five books, and produced more than 60 graduate students and post-docs. He is the 2021 recipient of the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Transportation Science and Logistics and the 2022 Saul Gass Expository Writing Award. Powell is a fellow of Informs, and the recipient of numerous other awards.
About the Ross B. Corotis Lecture
The Ross B. Corotis Lecture for Civil and Systems Engineering was established at Johns Hopkins University to commemorate the engineer who established the University’s Department of Civil and Systems Engineering. The lecture is endowed by alumni, faculty, and friends of the department in honor of prominent structural engineer, Ross B. Corotis, which contributes to the ongoing guest seminars in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering and provides for these special lectures.
Ross B. Corotis, NAE, is an emeritus professor of engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. He researches the coordinated roles of engineering and social science in framing and communicating long-term hazard risks and resiliency for the built environment. With three degrees from MIT, he was on the faculty at Northwestern University, established the Department of Civil Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, and was Dean of Engineering at CU Boulder.
He has chaired committees on structural safety for ASCE and ACI, the Advisory Committee of IASSAR, served as science advisor for the Department of State in Washington, DC., and was editor of the journals Structural Safety and ASCE’s Journal of Engineering Mechanics. For the National Academies, he served on the Building Research Board, the Disasters Roundtable, the Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment, chaired the Laboratory Assessment Board, was founding chair of the Committee on NIST Technical Programs, and was chair of the Civil & Environmental Engineering section of the NAE.
He is a registered professional engineer and structural engineer, Distinguished Member of ASCE, Fellow of the Structural Engineering and Engineering Mechanics Institutes, recipient of the ASCE OPAL Lifetime Achievement Award in Education, and author of more than 250 publications.
On Wednesday, November 6, Pascal Van Hentenryck, A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s H. Milton Steward School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, delivered the 2024 Corotis Lecture. His talk was titled: AI Engineering for Societal Impact.
The fusion of AI with optimization and control has the potential to deliver outcomes that are beyond the realm of these technologies when applied independently on complex engineering applications. This talk reviews the theoretical foundations underlying this fusion, including the concepts of primal and dual optimization proxies, predict then optimize, self-supervised learning, and deep multi-stage policies. The presentation also highlights these methodological developments in sustainable supply chains, electrical power systems with massive shares of distributed energy resources, and transportation systems that may transform accessibility to jobs, education, and health-care. Event brochure with more information.
Ross B. Corotis, NAE, Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder
On Wednesday, March 1, 2023, Ross B. Corotis delivered the inaugural Corotis Lecture. His lecture was entitled: Engineering Risk and Decision Analysis for Communities Facing Natural Hazards: A Talk in Four+ Parts.
The cost of natural disasters continues to rise around the world, in part because of population growth, urbanization, and the pressures they place on land use, and in part because policy makers continue to undervalue natural hazard risk in long-term planning. Yet these hazards are critical to community sustainability and fundamental to the concept of resilience.
The shortcoming in reducing the vulnerability of infrastructure lies partly with engineers and risk professionals, who must be aware of public perceptions of risk and political process rationality, which present inherent incompatibilities. Engineers need to know which measures of risk are most meaningful or relevant to decision makers, and then be able to communicate those risks, and the costs and benefits of mitigation, in concise, credible, and meaningful terms. This seminar will discuss four related aspects: approximate reliability methods for community-wide resilience, issues of risk perception, practical rationality of elected officials, and the role for generalized information theory as an alternative to probability. View the event brochure with more information.