Speaking about “simple models at the service of complex realities,” Avi Mandelbaum delivered the fourth Distinguished Lecture at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering on February 24, 2011. In his talk, titled “Service Engineering: Data-Based Science in Support of Service Management, or Empirical Adventures in Call Centers and Hospitals,” Dr. Mandelbaum described examples of complex service operations for which data-based simple models have been found useful (e.g., call centers, hospitals, banks, courts and more). Dr. Mandelbaum, the Benjamin and Florence Free Chair Professor of Operations Research, Statistics and Service Engineering at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, views these service systems through the mathematical lenses of Queueing Science, with a bias towards Statistics. If you were unable to attend the lecture or wish to hear it again, click here to view the video.