Michael Howell, MSc

Michael Howell, MSc is an independent researcher and IT Professional specializing in Healthcare. He works on design and executing test cases for the IBM Curam system at eSystems. The system helps to manage health and social programs, with governments being the main buyers.

By integrating information technology systems, like the IBM Curam system, governments can save time and money, reduce waste, fraud, and abuse, improve data accuracy, and provide better assistance to individuals and families.

Previously, Michael was Business Analyst at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and DXC Technology. At HPE, he worked three years on projects related to the Healthcare Industry and at DXC Technology, and he worked almost four years on projects related to Behavioral Health and Provider Data Maintenance.

Michael’s interests are now in how technology progresses, in particular, the causes of exponential technological improvement, in methods for forecasting improvements in technological capability, and interest in policy proposals for spurring technological innovation.

Michael has coauthored several articles exploring mission length as a metric for measuring improvements in space exploration technology. The goal of this research has been to find evidence of exponential improvement in space exploration in order to define Moore’s law for space. He has focused on the applicability of various modeling techniques to improve forecasts of mission length.

Read Moore’s Law and Space Exploration: New Insights and Next Steps and Moore’s Law, Wright’s Law and the countdown to exponential space.

Michael has also written on the philosophical and religious roots of the USSR space program as a factor in its early successes. By using the metric of mission lifespan, he further demonstrated how a head-start by the USSR was overcome by the faster rate of improvement by the United States which ultimately led it to “win” the space race.

Read Trends in technology development in the US and USSR during the Space Race.

Michael earned his Master’s Degree of Science in Information Science in 2020 and his Bachelor’s Degree of Business Administration in Management Information Systems in 2014, both at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

His master’s thesis explored the use of Box-Jenkins modeling to forecast improvements in space exploration technology.

Outside of research, Michael has performed software documentation, quality assurance, and business analysis in the fields of healthcare reimbursement and retail banking.

Currently, he is based in Little Rock, Arkansas.

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