Professor Eugene Santos Jr.

Professor of Engineering Eugene Santos Jr. has been elevated to Fellow by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The IEEE Board of Directors cited Professor Santos "for contributions to decision support systems and reasoning under uncertainty."

Santos develops engineering-based tools to model human behavior and decision-making. These models can predict outcomes for a wide variety of situations, from political elections, to criminal activity, to surgical procedures. Having more information about potential outcomes can help people make better decisions, reduce errors and mishaps, and promote a better understanding of why people do what they do.

He examines a wide range of factors that influence behavior and uses the theory of probability to assess, quantify, and rank degrees of influence. "You can't say a cultural experience will always produce a particular outcome," said Santos, "But influence can make an outcome more or less likely, so I try to capture those elements of what's more likely and what's less likely. That gives me a baseline. Then once I see an action, I can go back through the influence structure, including what they've told me about their beliefs, their demographics, their personal history, to see how they got from their background to their final action."

Santos received his M.S. in mathematics from Youngstown State University and his Sc.M. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Brown University. His areas of research interest include artificial intelligence, intent inferencing, social and cultural modeling, computational social science, automated reasoning, decision science, adversarial reasoning, user modeling, natural language processing, probabilistic reasoning, and knowledge engineering, verification and validation, protein folding, virtual reality, and active user interfaces. He is Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Part B, an associate editor for the International Journal of Image and Graphics, and is on the editorial advisory board for System and Information Sciences Notes as well as the editorial boards for Journal of Intelligent Information Systems and Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence.