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In Memoriam: William T. Scherer

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In Memoriam Google Scholar ResearchGate Accelerated Master's Program in Systems Engineering Systems Journal

About

William T. Scherer was an expert in systems engineering, stochastic control, and business analytics. Professor Scherer served on the University of Virginia Systems Engineering Program faculty starting in 1986. He also consulted with numerous organizations on the topics of systems thinking and business analytics applied to disparate organizations. He authored and co-authored numerous publications (journal and conference papers, business cases, and book chapters) on intelligent decision support systems, transportation systems, stochastic control, and systems thinking. His research focused on systems engineering methodology, financial engineering, and intelligent transportation systems. His co-authored book, How To Do Systems Analysis, was published by Wiley in 2007, and a follow-on book, How to Do Systems Analysis: Primer and Casebook, was also published by Wiley in 2016. He had strong interests in engineering education and published papers on curriculum and pedagogy, and he was awarded an Outstanding University of Virginia Faculty Award in 2007. He was also a Visiting Professor at the Darden Graduate School of Business in 2001-2002 and President of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Society 2007-2008.

Please read more about Bill's life and legacy here. 

 

Education

B.S. University of Virginia, 1980

​M.E. University of Virginia, 1981

​Ph.D. University of Virginia, 1986

Selected Publications

Using Machine Learning to Forecast Market Direction with Efficient Frontier Coefficients, Journal of Financial Data Science, 2023. Noal Alexander and William Scherer
Chances and Challenges of ChatGPT and Similar Models for Education in M&S, WSC 2023. William Scherer, Andreas Tolk Tolk, Margaret Loper, Phillip Barry, Ghaith Rabadi, Levent Yilmaz
Extending the Markowitz model with dimensionality reduction: Forecasting efficient frontiers. 2021 Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium (SIEDS). IEEE, 2021. Alexander, Nolan, William Scherer, and Matt Burket
Portfolio design and management through state-based analytics: A probabilistic approach. Cogent Economics & Finance 8.1 (2020): 1854948. Matthew W. Burkett, William T. Scherer, and Andrew Todd
Abstract
Exploring Cognitive States: Temporal Methods for Detecting and Characterizing Physiological Fingerprints. AIAA Scitech 2020 Forum. 2020.
Nicholas J Napoli, Mudit Paliwal, Stephen Adams, William T Scherer, Angela R Harrivel, Kellie D Kennedy, Chad L Stephens
A Fundamental Misunderstanding of Risk: The Bias Associated with the Annualized Calculation of Standard Deviation. Cogent Economics & Finance 8.1 (2020): 1857005. Matthew W. Burkett, and William T. Scherer
Abstract
The Danger of Using Ratio Performance Metrics in System Evaluations. Systems Engineering in Context. Springer, Cham, 2019. 313-321. William T. Scherer, and Stephen Adams
"Time to Rethink Professional Training." Asee Prism (2018) 27-6. William T. Scherer, and Stephen Adams
"Generating Synthetic Bitcoin Transactions and Predicting Market Price Movement Via Inverse Reinforcement Learning and Agent-Based Modeling." Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (2018) 21-3.
K Lee, S Ulkuatam, P Beling, W Scherer
"On the Practical Art of State Definitions for Markov Decision Process Construction." IEEE Access (2018) 6.
William T Scherer, Stephen Adams, Peter A. Beling
"Data, Insights, Models and Decision Making: Machine Learning in Context." [in Intuition, Trust, and Analytics, CRC Press] (2018). Stephen Adams, William Scherer, and Peter Beling
"Trends Over Two Decades of Transportation Research: A Machine Learning Approach." Transportation Research, Record (2017) 2614.
Boyer, Ryan C., William T. Scherer, and Michael C. Smith
"A Human–Machine Methodology for Investigating Systems Thinking in a Complex Corpus." IEEE Systems Journal (2017) 7-24.
Ryan C Boyer, William T Scherer, Cody H Fleming, Casey D Connors, N Peter Whitehead
"Dynamic Scheduling for Veterans Health Administration Patients using Geospatial Dynamic Overbooking." Journal of Medical Systems (2017) 41-182. N. Peter Whitehead Stephen Adams, William T. Scherer, K. Preston White Jr., Jason Payne, Oved Hernandez, Mathew S. Gerber
"Stepping back from the trees to see the forest: a network approach to valuing intelligence." Social Network Analysis and Mining 6.1 (2016) 72.
Smith, Christopher M., William T. Scherer, and Andrew Todd
"Visual analysis to support regulators in electronic order book markets." Environment Systems and Decisions 36.2 (2016) 167-182.
Paddrik, Mark E., R. Hayes, a. Todd, and W Scherer
“Crossed and Locked Quotes in a Multi-market Simulation,” PLOS ONE (2016) ABS Todd, Andrew, Beling, P., and Scherer, W.T.
Systems Analysis Primer and Casebook, Wiley, 2016. Gibson, J.E., Scherer, W.T., Gibson, W.F., and M.C. Smith

Awards

Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award in Systems Engineering, selected by students 2019 and 2020
TRB Best Paper Award - Ryan C. Boyer, William T. Scherer, and Michael C. Smith; Trends Over Two Decades of Transportation Research: A Machine Learning Approach 2017
Jefferson Scholars Hartfield-Jefferson Teaching Award 2013
All University Teaching Award from the University of Virginia in “recognition of excellent teaching and skill in motivating and inspiring students” 2006
Cited by Darden School of Business for Outstanding Performance in team teaching “Optimization models” 2002
SEAS Rodman Scholars Teaching Award for teaching excellence 2001
Mac Wade Award for outstanding service to School of Engineering and Applied Science 1996 -1997
Awarded the Lucien Carr Professorship of Engineering for outstanding contributions to undergraduate engineering education at the University 1995-1996
Named the Distinguished Faculty at the University of Virginia by the Student IMP Society 1993