George Ball

George is a Raytheon IT Fellow and Information Ecologist and has over 20 years of experience investigating the impact of information on business environments. He works with Raytheon business units and academic institutions to find opportunities for research collaboration to extend the use of technological advances in many areas. George conducts research with both government and non-government funding agencies to leverage next generation concepts in information technology. He has BS and MS Degrees in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a Doctorate in Natural Resources from the University of Arizona. Prior to joining Raytheon, George was a Research Professor at the University of Arizona for ten years. During his tenure he helped establish the Advanced Resource Technology Laboratory which focused on the development and application of geospatial data.

As someone who has worked extensively in the area of modeling and simulation, George became aware of the problem of describing models and information in a uniform manner. The traditional approach of hard coding the input and output variables but with no consistency between one model and another indicated the need for a better approach. About ten years ago, George was introduced to ontology as a mean for language disambiguation and since that time has continued to argue for the use of domain ontologies to improve systems engineering and manufacturing.

George has over 50 published articles in a variety of scientific journals and conference proceedings. Some of his publications related to the use of ontology are:

Ball, George L., Runge, Christopher, and Peoble, Leslie. 2015. An information-centric approach to engineering and manufacturing cyber physical system in the defense industry. Complex Adaptive Systems, Publication 5, Cihan H. Dagli, Editor in Chief. November 2015. Procedia Computer Science 61 (2015) ppg 128-132.

Ball, George, and Runge Christopher. 2013. Producing Reusable Engineered Systems Through Ontology (PRESTO): Implementing an Information Sciences Approach to Architecture-driven, Model-based, Concurrent Engineering. Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation: Applications, Methodology, Technology 2014, Vol. 11(3) ppg 219-226.

Ball, G., Runge, C., Ramsey, R., Barrett, N. 2017. Systems Integration and Verification in an Advanced Smart Factory. Proceedings of the 11th Annual IEEE International Systems Conference, Montreal, Canada, April 24-27, 2017

Lynch, K., Ramsey, R., Ball, G.L., and Schmit, M. 2017. Conceptual Design Acceleration for Cyber-Physical Systems. Proceedings of the 11th Annual IEEE International Systems Conference, Montreal, Canada, April 24-27, 2017.

Lynch, Kevin, Ramsey, Randy, and Ball, George L. From How to Why through Knowledge Capture, Proceedings 2015 International Conference on Knowledge Capture Workshop on Capturing Scientific Knowledge, October 7-10, 2015, Palisades, NY