Events

AI for Systems Engineering is a practical, intensive, eight-hour workshop on applying AI within established systems engineering practice. AI tools are increasingly accessible, yet accessibility is not the same as effective use, and teams often produce outputs that are hard to trust or to integrate.

Through short presentations and extensive hands-on exercises, participants learn to frame engineering problems for AI, guide the interaction, and interpret outputs so they can be used appropriately within engineering artifacts. The workshop builds real skill in validating and authoring requirements, creating and evaluating alternative architectures, and deriving subsystem requirements, while recognizing the limitations and risks of AI.

Participants use their own preferred large language model, so the learning transfers directly to daily work, and all materials, exercises, and reference content remain available for reuse afterward. The emphasis is disciplined application that strengthens, rather than replaces, engineering knowledge and judgment, with a roadmap from individual use to integration at scale across engineering workflows.

About the speaker: John Fitch brings more than four decades of engineering, engineering management, consulting, and training experience, and was certified by INCOSE as an Expert Systems Engineering Professional in 2012. Across more than 20 years of independent consulting he has focused on decision management, requirements, risk, system design and architecture, and technology roadmapping for clients including Motorola, Northrop Grumman, United Technologies, QinetiQ, and the U.S. Army, spanning defense, aerospace, medical devices, energy, and communications. An innovator in systems engineering methods, he was an early adopter of DOORS for requirements management and created the Decision Driven Design methodology and its decision patterns. He has presented at INCOSE, IEEE, and NDIA, and has taught several thousand professionals to think more clearly, creatively, and holistically — a passion he now brings to PPI.

It may be shocking to state that AI growth in medicine has stagnated, despite buzzing news appearing daily informing us of new releases, apps, and automated magic. The problem lies in the content being delivered. AI doing better than students at passing medical exams is not that surprising — it does a marvelous job analyzing highly structured multiple-choice questions. The real dilemma is that recent AI advancements have focused on office automation, solving problems electronic medical records introduced two decades ago, and delivering dubious cost savings.

But real productivity in medicine is measured by patient health outcomes — and from that perspective, many advancements fail to impress. Using fairytales and reality to separate hype from value, this year's AI in Medicine update focuses on what truly matters in the clinical space: care quality, patient safety, real-world evidence in drug development, proteomics, quantum computing, the economics of AI, and digital twins.

About the speaker: Dr. Jacob Krive is Clinical Associate Professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a Clinician Researcher at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, and Associate Professor at Nova Southeastern University. With 30+ years of IT experience leading large teams at Endeavor Health, Advocate Health, and IBM, his research focuses on medical AI, clinical analytics, and decision support.

Risk Management considers safety as the primary stakeholder need — a system must function as intended, in its intended environment, safely.

ISO 14971 serves as the de facto standard for the application of risk management to medical devices. Join INCOSE Chicagoland and SME Mike Gut to learn about the requirements for risk management and how they determine the safety of a medical device by the manufacturer during a product's life cycle.

About the speaker: Mike Gut is a member of INCOSE Chicagoland and a Mechanical and Systems Engineer with more than nineteen years of experience in the medical device industry. Mike will be speaking from the Actalent offices in Schaumburg, sharing tips, tricks, and lessons learned. Mike has also served the chapter for more than a decade in multiple leadership roles including secretary and president, consistently supporting chapter activities, operations, and events.

This presentation addresses how to translate the architecture data in an MBSE database into validated requirements. We review basics regarding “requirements” and “validation”, identify several requirements templates, and show, using Vitech CORE, how to validate and map the architecture data into the elements of the several requirements templates.

About the speaker: Dr. Ron Carson is an INCOSE Fellow and certified ESEP. He retired as a Technical Fellow in Systems Engineering after 27 years at The Boeing Company. He has been an Adjunct Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle Pacific University, and Missouri University of Science & Technology, and maintains the YouTube channel “Ron on Requirements.”

Say “communication” and many think of speaking and writing to share ideas and perspectives. While SEs must make their intellectual contribution, their first responsibility is to elicit and facilitate the thoughtful contributions of others. For SEs, the first concept in communication must be listening.

This presentation frames a more effective communications toolkit centered around active listening. It addresses the conceptual why as well as the practical how to listen so others will speak.

About the speaker: For over 30 years, David has helped organizations worldwide increase their SE proficiency. An INCOSE Fellow and ESEP, David was the 2014/2015 President of INCOSE. He founded Vitech, developing industry-leading methods and software, and today as President of Blue Holon guides organizations in advancing SE capabilities and digital transformation.

Resilience is a fairly new topic in the SE world. As such, few understand the concept and the need to address resilience when defining needs and requirements. This presentation addresses defining needs and requirements for resilient systems in practical terms such that attendees can immediately apply concepts and do the activities that will help them develop resilient systems.

Topics include understanding the need to address resilience, assessing current system resilience levels, analyzing adversities that could cause loss of mission or assets, defining concepts for avoidance, withstanding, and recovery, and defining both design controls and operational requirements.

About the speaker: Lou Wheatcraft is an international expert in systems engineering with over 50 years' experience, including 22 years in the United States Air Force. Lou has taught over 200 requirement seminars and is a principal author of several RWG manuals and guides including the NRM, GtNR, GtVV, and the newly released GtWR v4.