Eswaran Subrahmanian

Scholar in residence April 2024 – October 2024

Eswaran Subrahmanian is a Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and an Associate at the Software and Systems Division at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. His contributions span design theory, collaborative engineering,  philosophy of design, gaming, simulation, computational linguistics, mathematical foundation of information modeling for systems design, standards development,  and socio-technical systems design. He was the head of the multi-disciplinary n-dim (n-dimensional information modeling) group. In his work, he combined ethnographic methods, and participatory design methods to provide support for geographically distributed engineering. He has worked with several multinational companies including Westinghouse, Alcoa, ABB, Bosch, and Bombardier designing, developing, and deploying collaborative support systems.

He spent 4 years in India first as the Chief Scientist at the Center for Science Technology and Policy and created the laboratory for the use of games and simulations for infrastructure design and public policy. He subsequently was the co-founder and member of the non-profit research group Fields of View on the use of games and simulation for the inclusive design of policy and support systems till 2022. He is also the Co-Chair of the Special Interest Group on Design Theory with Prof. Pascal Le Masson of Mines ParisTech and has conducted a yearly workshop on Design Theory for over 12 years with participants from multiple disciplines around the world. His passion is in sharing and learning by collaborating with colleagues from disciplines that span design, philosophy, sociology, management, public policy, computer science, and mathematics.

At CMU he was instrumental in creating cross cross-disciplinary cross-university product design course with his colleague and a course on problem formulation in a social context that was offered to students from CMU and TU-Delft. He was a visiting professor at the Technology Policy Management Department at TU-Delft, The Netherlands, IIIT Bangalore, India, and at  IUT University Lyon II in France.  He is a fellow of AAAS and a Distinguished Scientist of the Association of Computing Machinery. He is on the Board of Topos Institute, an applied Category theory Institute in the US.

He will be spending two months over two time periods working with PhD students and faculty at the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Health Systems at KTH. He intends to learn from the research at KTH to enhance his understanding of health systems and the application of pluralistic methodology for supporting the design of digital health care with his host Prof. Sebastiaan Meijer and his colleagues.  Besides writing papers, he intends to extend and develop the conception of a Digital twin beyond engineering to health care systems using Category theory, a meta-mathematical theory.

Contact: es3e@andrew.cmu.edu