8th International DSI Conference
Risky Business

Stanford professor Elizabeth Paté-Cornell has dedicated her life to analyzing risk and helping professionals in myriad fields develop better tools for making decisions in uncertain situations. Paté-Cornell participated in the 8th Annual International Decision Sciences Institute conference, held recently at IESE.

On July 4, she had reason to celebrate, and it wasn’t because it was Independence Day in her adoptive U.S. home. Just after 5:50 a.m. that day, a space probe sent from the “Deep Impact” mothership collided right into the heart of a comet as planned, yielding never-before-seen images that the U.S. space agency NASA hopes will provide new insight into the Universe. What are the odds of a washing machine-sized “impactor” hitting a comet in outer space at a speed of 37,000km/h “just exactly where we wanted it to,” in the words of a NASA scientist?

To answer that question, you’d have to ask Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, a world leader in risk analysis, risk management and the use of Bayesian probability to process incomplete information – such as what might happen during a probe crash that has never happened before in history. She followed with great interest the progress of the “Deep Impact” mission as a member of the Jet Propulsion Lab Technical Advisory Committee, and has worked actively in the past on the risk assessment of shuttle missions. Her risk analysis of space shuttle tiles has earned her accolades in the field. Since 2001, she has applied risk analytic methods to study different types of terrorist attacks on the United States, the assessment of intelligence information and the effectiveness of countermeasures.

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