Dr. Azad Madni

Professor and Director, Systems Architecting and Engineering Program
USC

Dr. Azad Madni is the Director of the Systems Architecting and Engineering Program in the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California. He joined USC as a Professor after a highly successful career in the aerospace and defense industry. In 1994, he founded and served as CEO of Intelligent Systems Technology, Inc., a high-tech R&D firm specializing in modeling, simulation, and gaming technologies primarily for Defense applications.

He has received several awards and commendations from DoD and the commercial sector for his pioneering research in modeling and simulation in support of human-systems integration, concurrent engineering, agile manufacturing, and distributed training. He is a two-time Developer of the Year Award winner from the Software Council of Southern California for his successful commercialization of DoD-sponsored technology. At DARPATech 2004, he was selected by DARPA IPTO for Sustained Excellence by a Performer and Significant Technical Achievement awards. In 2006, he received the C.V. Ramamoorthy Distinguished Scholar Award for seminal research in design and process science at the 9th World Conference of Integrated Design and Process Technology. In 2008, he received the President’s Award at the Eleventh Biennial World Conference on Integrated Systems, Design, and Process Science for his leadership of the Society for Design and Process Science.

He began working in the human-system integration area in the early ‘80s. He is the creator of PERCNET/HSI, one of the earliest HSI tools developed for analyzing cognitive workload and evaluating human-machine function allocation options. He was the Principal Investigator on DARPA’s Pilot’s Associate Definition Study and led the development of modeling and simulation tools on the Air Force’s Cockpit Automation Technology (CAT) Program. His research interests are early systems engineering, systems architecting, game-based simulation, and behavioral game theory.

His research has been sponsored by OSD, DARPA, DHS S&T, HSARPA, MDA, AFRL, AFOSR, RDECOM, CECOM, TATRC, ARI, AMCOM, ONR, NRL, SPAWAR, NAVSEA, NAVAIR MARCOR, STRICOM, NIST, DoE, and NASA. He has conducted highly successful collaborative research with major universities and FFRDCs including UCLA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, UCF, USC, MIT, GMU, Georgia Tech, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oakridge National Research Laboratory, NIST, and Institute for Defense Analysis.

He is an elected Fellow of IEEE, INCOSE, SDPS, and IETE and an Associate Fellow of AIAA. He is listed in Marquis' Who's Who in Science and Engineering, Who's Who in Industry and Finance, and Who’s Who in America. He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in engineering from UCLA. He is also a graduate of AEA/Stanford Institute Program for Senior Executives.