Strategic Resilience - Leveraging Data to Address Community Vulnerabilities

A Public Lecture by Professor Jose Emmanuel Ramirez-Marquez

9 June 2026 at 17:00 (Finnish time)
School of Business, Ekonominaukio 1

The event is part of the Better Business – Better Society seminar series organized by the Aalto University School of Business, in collaboration with the Aalto University School of Science.
Please register for the event here.

Abstract

Communities today face overlapping disruptions such as climate events, infrastructure stress, and unequal access to essential services. These challenges are not isolated; they interact, amplify one another, and often expose existing vulnerabilities. Organizations and policymakers are not lacking data. The challenge is translating large, complex datasets into decisions that are fair and timely. This presentation will focus on how converting data into structured insights reveals where systems are vulnerable, who is most affected, and which interventions produce the greatest resilience gains. 

Bio

Dr. Ramirez-Marquez is Associate Professor and Division Director of Enterprise Science and Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, Schaefer School of Engineering and Science, Department of Systems Engineering. His research efforts focus on three main thrusts:

  • Urban Informatics Primary research area includes the development of analytics, models, and methods for quantifying, estimating, and improving the performance of urban-based systems. The main focus of research is on computational social systems that involve understanding the relationship between citizens and the city. Concepts of  eliability, vulnerability, and resilience/adaptability are explored with a focus on community well-being, equitability and justice, and infrastructure performance. 

  • Data Visualization for Decision Making Exploratory research area on the use of visualization techniques as a means to aid decision-making and communication of  outcomes. The current focus is on developing appropriate visuals so that “wicked” problems can be solved through a mixture of crowds and machine learning algorithms. This area plays at the interface of human-machine interactions. 

  • AI & ML Techniques This area includes the development of evolutionary optimization approaches, artificial intelligence, and machine learning that can be used for single or multiple objective optimization problems. The primary focus is on urban-based problems but applications to other areas such as architecture are also involved.

More information about Dr. Ramirez Marquez is available on:

Participation

This event is open to all interested participants. The lecture will last about 30 minutes, followed by questions and discussions.

Aalto Systems Forum

The growing challenge of our time is the need to understand and to manage wholes, i.e. systems. Problems in technology, economy, organisations and the environment are strongly interconnected, include multiple criteria and evolve dynamically over time. Systems Sciences as a field of scientific inquiry develops tools and approaches which help address these problems.

Aalto Systems Forum provides a platform for a dialogue between practitioners and researchers, based on major research results and accompanying insights which are presented by leading international scholars.

Aalto Systems Forum is organized by the Systems Analysis Laboratory research group at the Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis of Aalto University School of Science.  http://sal.aalto.fi/en/aaltosystemsforum/