Sustainability
Sustainability
Besides my work in category theory I am interested in applying my skills to solve the climate crisis.
See here on a trustworthy source on climate change: https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/
Click on https://sites.google.com/view/gumsmathclimateday to learn more on the Math CS Climate Day series I initiated in spring 2023.
I am currently looking for positions and research collaborations where I can use my skills for sustainability. Below some ideas for research that I want to do. Please reach out to me, if you want to work with me on any of these or if you have similar ideas.
With the transition away from centralized combustion plants to distributed renewable generation, the structure of electricity grids is fundamentally changing. In order to avoid large scale outages, grid operators have to adapt to these changes.
Many alternator based generators (e.g. solar plants) have an emergency shut-off mechanism that turns them off if the frequency of the grid is unstable. The effects of these shut-off mechanisms are hard to predict with traditional methods and have caused severe outages before.
Restriction categories are not only useful to describe the correspondence between local properties and global properties, they also are used in computer science to model programs that possibly do not terminate. I hope to use a similar construction to model dynamical systems with shut-off mechanisms
A species dying out can have severe impacts on the ecosystem that are hard to predict. While food chains' local properties (immediate predator and prey of a given species) are easy to understand, the connection between a given species and the rest of the ecosystem is nontrivial.
In this context I propose to use restriction categories for two purposes.
Grandis's manifold construction in join restriction categories is a very effective way to obtain global behavior from local behavior.
Restriction categories are used to describe programs with errors. One could model extinction as a function that produces errors on certain situations. Through their composition one could see which other extinctions a set of extinctions could lead to.