Complex human-natural systems on Earth and in Space

American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, Dec 13-17, 2021

PRISM and MIT Media Lab To Host AGU Fall Meeting Session

PRISM is delighted to announce that we will be jointly hosting a hosting a session at this years American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting with the MIT Media Lab Space Enabled Group.

The world we live in is becoming increasingly interconnected and more and more, we need to understand how systems which were once thought of as separable and distinct , such as energy, space weather, finance, interact with each other. For example, climate change is transforming our weather systems which adds significant strain to energy infrastructure on the ground, leading to blackouts. These blackouts in turn interact with social systems creating greater risks for disadvantaged communities, as made apparent by recent disasters such as the power crisis in Texas. In order to understand the connections between different systems, it is vital that researchers from different domains collaborate.

One way to study connections between different systems is to jointly analyse data from different domains. This can often be challenging since data in different domains may be collected at different temporal (minute vs monthly) and spatial (county vs country) resolutions. Furthermore, while data science techniques can produce significant insights, domain expertise is required to gain the full benefits. Our session will examine how cross disciplinary research in human-natural systems can be facilitated via data science. We are interested in techniques which combine information from multi-domain, multi-resolution dynamic datasets, facilitate collaboration between data scientists and domain experts and case studies which integrate information across different domains.

Please join us for a discussion of interrelationships between domains and novel approaches to complex human-natural systems.

The AGU Fall Meeting is one of the premier scientific conferences of the year and prestigious place to showcase your work. Learn more about AGU here.

Topics of Interest

Case studies of connections between different research domains
Combining multiresolution data
Knowledge discovery for human-natural systems
Complex systems/network analysis
Data science methods for facilitating collaboration across domains
Cross-disciplinary research
Linking data and domains via data science

Submission

Deadlines and Dates

Abstract submission: Wednesday, 4 August 2021 at 23:59 EDT

Session Dates: Dec 13-17, 2021 (Specific Times TBA)

We can only accommodate a limited number of oral presentations and some paper submissions may be converted to poster presentations.

All submissions can be made through AGU using the following link: https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/prelim.cgi/Session/124401.

For poster submissions, please indicate the intent for a poster presentation at the beginning of the abstract description.

All presenters will be required to register for the AGU 2021 conference.

Invited Speakers

Jessica Flack

Jessica Flack is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, director of SFI's Collective Computation Group (C4), a chief editor of a new, transdisciplinary journal, Collective Intelligence, and, previously, was founding director of University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Complexity and Collective Computation in the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. Flack is interested in the roles of information processing and collective computation in the emergence of robust but evolvable structure and function in biological and social systems. This work sits at the intersection of evolutionary theory, statistical mechanics, information theory, theoretical computer science and cognitive science. Goals include identifying the computational principles that allow nature to overcome subjectivity due to information processing to produce ordered states and accounting for the origins of space and time in biological systems. A central idea is noisy information processors reduce uncertainty about the future by computing their macroscopic worlds through collective coarse-graining in evolutionary and/or learning time. In other words, how the appropriate aggregation of information accumulated by individuals making decisions under uncertainty can produce good collective forecasts. Flack's work has been covered in many publications and media outlets, including the BBC, NPR, Nature, Science, The Economist, Bloomberg, New Scientist, Current Biology, The Atlantic, and Quanta Magazine. Flack also writes popular science articles on collective behavior and complexity science for magazines like Aeon. In 2020 her work with Nihat Ay and David Krakauer on the Information Theory of Individuality (ITI) was chosen as a science breakthrough of the year by Quanta Magazine.

Andrew Robertson

Dr Andrew Robertson is a Senior Research Scientist and heads the IRI Climate Group. He is an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences and teaches in the Master of Arts Program in Climate and Society. Graduating with a PhD in atmospheric dynamics, he has over 30 years of experience in topics ranging from midlatitude meteorology, coupled ocean-atmosphere climate dynamics, sub-seasonal and seasonal forecasting, downscaling, and tailoring of climate information for use in conjunction with sectoral models for climate adaptation and risk management. He has taught in capacity building training courses around the world. Robertson serves a co-chair of the WWRP/WCRP Sub-Seasonal to Seasonal Prediction Project (S2S).

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