Contact
Office
(434) 982-2069
Location
Olsson Hall 101C
P.O. Box 400747
Charlottesville, VA 22904

In Memoriam: William T. Scherer

Chair, Department of Systems and Information Engineering Editor-in-Chief Systems Director, Accelerated Masters Degree Program (AMP)
Contact
Office
(434) 982-2069
Location
Olsson Hall 101C
P.O. Box 400747
Charlottesville, VA 22904
In Memoriam Google Scholar ResearchGate Accelerated Master's Program in Systems Engineering Systems Journal

About

It is with great sadness that UVA Engineering shares news of a significant loss within our community.  Bill Scherer, professor and chair of Systems and Information Engineering, passed away on Wednesday, October 30. Please read more about Bill's life and legacy. 

William T. Scherer is an expert in systems engineering, stochastic control, and business analytics. Professor Scherer has served on the University of Virginia Systems Engineering Program faculty since 1986. He also consults with numerous organizations on the topics of systems thinking and business analytics applied to disparate organizations. He has 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 current research focuses 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 has strong interests in engineering education and has published papers on curriculum and pedagogy, and 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.

 

Education

B.S. University of Virginia, 1980

​M.E. University of Virginia, 1981

​Ph.D. University of Virginia, 1986

Research Interests

Business Analytics and Decision Analysis
Computational Statistics and Simulation/Statistical Modeling
Stochastic Modeling
Optimization Models and Methods
Intelligent Transportation Systems
Sports Analytics

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

Courses Taught

SYS 6001: Introduction to Systems Engineering
SYS 3034: Systems Performance Evaluation
SYS 4053/4054: Systems Engineering Capstone Course

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

Featured Grants & Projects

NSF Center for Visula and Decision Dynamics (CVDI) The Center for Visual and Decision Informatics (CVDI) conducts multidisciplinary, cross-institutional research to develop the visual and decision support tools and techniques that allow leaders to improve the way their organization's data are organized and interpreted. CVDI develops visualization and data analytics techniques for sectors including government, health care, sustainability, transportation, commerce, and finance. As part of its efforts, CVDI recognizes the importance of research related to ethics, accountability, and transparency, when data analytics has to function in increasingly complex and emerging contexts such as augmented intelligence and cybersecurity.
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NSF - Northrop Grumman IUCRC Center for Visual and Decision Informatics (CVDI) Model-Free Signal State-Space Detection.
MITRE Using geolocating to improve the service to veterans at VA Hospitals.
US Army Training and Doctrine Command Using systems thinking and machine learning to mine intelligence reports.