Samuel Holtzman

About this talk – A Taxonomy of Ignorance

Samuel explains that we know more than we think we do.

About Samuel Holtzman

Since the late 1970s, Dr. Holtzman has focused his professional life on helping organizations and individuals make better decisions. At Ayax Systems Inc., he is responsible for designing such public decision systems as Let Simon Decide and private client systems.

Before joining Ayax, Dr. Holtzman focused on decisions in the pharmaceutical industry. He co-founded and was the chairman, president, and CEO of Rosa & Co. LLC (formerly Rosa Pharmaceuticals, Inc.). Previously, he co-founded and was chairman, president, and CEO of Entelos, Inc, the world leader in systems biology for in silico drug discovery and development. Before Entelos, he was a partner of Strategic Decisions Group (SDG), an international management consultancy, where he worked extensively with pharmaceutical and other R&D-intensive companies.

Dr. Holtzman led the design and development of R&D Decision Advisor®, an intelligent decision system (IDS) that has been applied to R&D portfolio management decisions by major corporations worldwide. He has also directed several other IDS efforts in such areas as infertile patient treatment, critical-care patient treatment, pharmaceutical development, and plant management. His IDS work is the subject of his book, Intelligent Decision Systems, published by Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.

Dr. Holtzman is a consulting associate professor in Management Science and Engineering (MS&E) at Stanford University, where he teaches and directs research in business decision analysis, medical decision analysis, and decision systems. He received a doctorate in decision analysis from the EES (now MS&E) department at Stanford University and holds graduate and undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.