Nobel Laureate Dr. Elinor Ostrom to Speak at UMass on Climate Change

This week will definitely not be routine (as if there ever was a routine week in academia).

I will be flying tomorrow to Raleigh, North Carolina to take part in the SAMSI Engineering and Renewable Energy Workshop, where I will be delivering a keynote lecture on Sustainability: Methodology with Some Applications. I am very much looking forward to the workshop and its program is very timely.

While there, I also have a scheduled lunch date with one of my former doctoral students who works at SAS, Dr. Padma Ramanujam, and hope to also catch Dr. Radhika Kulkarni. Perhaps you have had a chance to read the Forbes article on the founder of SAS, Jim Goodnight, who has been called the King of Analytics!

I have my presentation prepared and besides the NSF-sponsored workshop taking place this week, when I return, I will have the distinct pleasure of hearing Dr. Elinor Ostrom, the first female to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Science, which she received in 2009, give the Philip Gamble memorial lecture, entitled: "Thinking About Climate Change as a Commons." According to the UMass Amherst release on her upcoming lecture on September 22, 2011:

Ostrom is considered one of the leading scholars in the study of common pool resources (CPR). In particular, Ostrom's work emphasizes how humans interact with ecosystems to maintain long-term sustainable resource yields. Common pool resources include many forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands, and irrigation systems.

As I noted in an earlier blogpost, when Ostrom received the Nobel Prize:

Interestingly, I had contributed a chapter on parallel computation to the first volume of the Handbook of Computational Economics, whereas Ostrom had contributed a chapter on governing social-ecological systems with Janssen to the second volume. The editors of these two volumes were, respectively, Hans Amman, David Kendrick, and John Rust for the first, and Leigh Tesfatsion and Ken Judd for the second volume. These are my good colleagues from the Society of Computational Economics.

Clearly, the theme this week is the environment!

Uncertainty Quantification -- the Theme at SAMSI This Year

Uncertainty is something that we deal with in our daily lives.

When it comes to mathematical modeling, analysis, and algorithms, which are used in complex decision-making, the design of systems, and the operation of networks in the modern world, as well as the understanding of the environment and resources, uncertainty is a reality but may be challenging to quantify.

This year, the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI), which is a partnership of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, in collaboration with the William R. Kenan, Jr. Institute for Engineering, Technology and Science, has as its theme: Uncertainty Quantification.

SAMSI is part of the Mathematical Sciences Institutes program of the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation.

SAMSI is organizing a yearlong series of events under this theme and I am delighted to be taking part in its Engineering and Renewable Energy Workshop next month.

I have been asked to deliver a keynote entitled, Sustainability, with a focus on methodology.

The program leaders are a great group consisting of:

Amy Braverman

Roger Ghanem

David Higdon

Christine Shoemaker

Jeff Wu.

As the SAMSI website emphasizes: The intellectual content of computational modeling comes from a variety of disciplines, including mathematics, statistics, probability, operations research, and computer science. Despite a wide diversity in methodology and applications, there are a variety of common challenges in developing, evaluating and using complex computer models of processes.

It should be a very exciting year at SAMSI. I look forward to engaging with various thought leaders on this topic.