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Moulakis Lecture: Engineering with Doubt

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For the fall 2025 Moulakis Lecture on Responsible Engineering, we were thrilled to welcome Moriba Jah (MAeroEngr'01, PhD'05) back to CU Boulder for a presentation on a fascinating premise: What does engineering look like when it begins with unknowing?

Here's how he described his talk, "Engineering with Doubt: Possibilistic Intelligence for an Uncertain World": 

"In a time of compounding crises, climate collapse, geopolitical volatility, runaway automation, our systems cannot simply optimize. They must reason. They must doubt. And most importantly, they must explain why they chose what they did.

This talk introduces a unified epistemic framework for non-Bayesian abductive inference under maximum uncertainty, a new paradigm where engineering doesn’t just respond to inputs, but actively interrogates the plausible, the unknown, and the unspoken.

Built on the pillars of possibility theory, information theory, and ordinal trust modeling, this architecture enables machines to:

  • Infer without overconfidence
  • Act without erasing ambiguity
  • Justify without obscuring doubt

This isn’t about building smarter algorithms. It’s about building wiser systems, agents that don't force decisions, but earn them. Agents that don't collapse uncertainty, but dialogue with it.

From orbital threat analysis to planetary policy reasoning, from space debris attribution to real-time humanitarian response, this abductive engine is already being deployed to make high-stakes decisions with humility and rigor.

Engineering must evolve from deterministic prediction to ethical discernment. This lecture shows how."

Jah is currently a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is the holder of the Mrs. Pearlie Dashiell Henderson Centennial Fellowship in Engineering. He is the director for Decision Intelligence group, a group within the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, as well as the Lead for the Space Security and Safety Program at the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Jah came to UT Austin by way of the Air Force Research Laboratory and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory prior to that, where he was a Spacecraft Navigator on a handful of Mars missions. 

Jah earned his master's (2001) and PhD (2005) from CU Boulder. In 2016, he received the College of Engineering and Applied Science's Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award in recognition of his government service.