Elicitation of Expert Opinions for Uncertainty and Risks [Hardcover]

Bilal M. Ayyub (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0849310873 | ISBN-13: 978-0849310874 | Publication Date: June 27, 2001 | Edition: 1

Experts, despite their importance and value, can be double-edged swords. They can make valuable contributions from their deep base of knowledge, but those contributions may also contain their own biases and pet theories. Therefore, selecting experts, eliciting their opinions, and aggregating their opinions must be performed and handled carefully, with full recognition of the uncertainties inherent in those opinions.

Elicitation of Expert Opinions for Uncertainty and Risks illuminates those uncertainties and builds a foundation of philosophy, background, methods, and guidelines that helps its readers effectively execute the elicitation process. Based on the first-hand experiences of the author, the book is filled with illustrations, examples, case studies, and applications that demonstrate not only the methods and successes of expert opinion elicitation, but also its pitfalls and failures.

Studies show that in the future, analysts, engineers, and scientists will need to solve ever more complex problems and reach decisions with limited resources. This will lead to an increased reliance on the proper treatment of uncertainty and on the use of expert opinions. Elicitation of Expert Opinions for Uncertainty and Risks will help prepare you to better understand knowledge and ignorance, to successfully elicit expert opinions, to select appropriate expressions of those opinions, and to use various methods to model and aggregate opinions.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 328 pages
• Publisher: CRC Press; 1 edition (June 27, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0849310873
• ISBN-13: 978-0849310874
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,324,438 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bilal M. Ayyub is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the director of the Center for Technology and Systems Management (CTSM) at the A. James Clark School of Engineering. Ayyub has been at the University of Maryland since 1983. He is a leading authority in the areas of risk analysis, uncertainty modeling, decision analysis, and systems engineering. Ayyub is also the president of BMA Engineering, Inc., a Bethesda, Maryland-based engineering consulting firm that works with infrastructure and defense systems.

Ayyub is a multiple recipient of the ASNE Jimmie Hamilton Award for the best papers in the Naval Engineers Journal in 1985, 1992, 2000 and 2003. Also, he received the ASCE Outstanding Research Oriented Paper in the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management for 1987, the ASCE Edmund Friedman Award in 1989, the ASCE Walter Huber Research Prize in 1997, and the K. S. Fu Award of NAFIPS in 1995. He received the Department of the Army Public Service Award in 2007 for leading the development of the risk model for the hurricane protection system of New Orleans. Ayyub was appointed to many national committees and investigation boards including most recently on the working group on higher education of the transition team of Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, 2006-07, the working group on homeland security of the transition team of Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, 2006-07, and the Committee for Assessment of the Bureau of Reclamation's Security Program, Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment, National Research Council of the National Academies, 2006-08. He was appointed to the Maryland Governor's Commission on Middle Eastern American Affairs, and on the Board of Advisors of the ASCE Council on Disaster Risk Management(CDRM). Presently, he chairs the CDRM Vulnerability and Risk Committee. He has delivered many invited talks at leading national and international organizations including most recently a distinguished lecture to the Brazilian Research Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, Naval War College for the Chief of Naval Operations, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Australian National Marine Safety Committee.

Ayyub is the author and co-author of more than 550 publications in journals and conference proceedings, and reports. Among the publications of Ayyub are more than 20 books.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Review from Sandia National Laboratories, February 26, 2002

By 

Bilal M. Ayyub - See all my reviews

This review is from: Elicitation of Expert Opinions for Uncertainty and Risks (Hardcover)

Professor Ayyub's book contributes to the literature on expert opinion in several unique ways. First, it is built on the philosophical and epistemological foundations of recognizing and categorizing what is not known. Some may consider this a foundation built on sand. I consider it a foundation based on understanding the weaknesses in knowledge before we build. Only from this perspective can we critically evaluate what we think we know. Second, with the recognition of the wide variety of types of ignorance, one can seek to find the most appropriate mathematical representation for the ignorance. This approach is contrary to the tradition in expert elicitation of seeing all ignorance as representable by traditional probability theory.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Subjectivity Can Be As Useful As Objectivity, March 31, 2002

By 

Robert Finkelstein (Potomac, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Elicitation of Expert Opinions for Uncertainty and Risks (Hardcover)

The book provides a wide view of the topic, as useful background information and context for the subject, before focusing on the details needed by the reader for a variety of practical applications. Expert opinion is used by decision-makers, for example, in performing technology assessment to determine the direction of investment in costly research and development. Properly elicited, analyzed, and interpreted, expert opinion - subjectivity - can be as useful as objective data in decision-making for engineers and managers.