Larson, Richard C. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Contact Information

Richard C. Larson
MIT
Cambridge, MA 02421
» Phone: (617) 253-3604
» E-mail: rclarson@mit.edu
» Website

Topics:

New Research on the Theory of Waiting Lines (Queues), Including the Psychology of Queuing

Operations Research Applied to Urban Service Systems
Emergency services (police, ambulance, fire), solid refuse, transit, traffic.

How the Internet May Change the Way We Teach and Learn Operations Research

Give Me Problem, I'll Show You OR!
In this introductory talk, Prof. Larson will ask the audience for topics of interest to them, and he will show how each topic relates to OR and math modeling in general. (Elementary)

Planning for and Responding to Disasters
Hurricanes, Pandemics, Floods, Earthquakes -- we show how OR contributes to decision-making before and during and after a disaster. (Intermediate)

Background:

Ph. D. - Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Currently Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and of Engineering Systems and Director of the Learning International Networks Consortium at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Internationally known for his work in applied operations research, with invited programs given in Denmark, Italy, and Venezuela. The youngest winner of the ORSA Lanchester Prize, awarded in 1972 for his book Urban Police Patrol Analysis. He is author, co-author, or editor of six books and author of over 50 scientific articles, primarily in the fields of queuing, logistics and emergency response systems. He has served as consultant to Coca-Cola, Union Carbide Corporation, RAND Corporation, the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Science and the U.S. Department of Justice. In 1974 he was the principal founder of Public Systems Evaluation, Inc., a not-for-profit firm that in 1981 became the for-profit Enforth Corporation and in 1990 merged with Queues, Ltd. to become Q.E.D. His research on queues has not only resulted in new computational techniques (e.g. the Queue Inference Engine), but has also been covered extensively in national media (e.g. ABC TV's 20/20, FFN, Nightwatch, USA Today: The TV Program, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and over 30 radio interviews).