A forum sponsored by the Society for Risk Analysis, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Engineer Research and Development Center, and the Electric Power Research Institute
UNCERTAINTY
Its nature, analytical treatment and interpretation
10 11 February 2000
Key Bridge Marriott
Arlington, Virginia
This two-day forum will bring together theorists and practitioners in risk analysis, policy making, philosophy and computer science to address the emerging issues about what it means to admit we're unsure. The questions to be addressed include
The conference is intended as a forum for discussion and debate, rather than merely a teaching workshop. The forum will be focused by short presentations by invited speakers and will allow ample time for open-format discussion and debate among all participants. Speakers include
Timothy Barry is a senior analyst with the Office of Environment and Economics in the Office of Policy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C. His research addresses quantitative uncertainty methods and issues in support of environmental decision making, predominantly for human and ecological risk assessments. He holds a bachelor's degree in chemistry and a doctorate in acoustics from the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. At EPA, he has been involved with the development and implementation of key EPA policy and guidance documents for uncertainty and environmental analysis including EPA's Policy for the Use of Probabilistic Analysis in Risk Assessment (http://www.epa.gov/ncea/mcpolicy.htm) and EPA's Guiding Principles for Monte Carlo Analysis (http://www.epa.gov/ncea/monteabs.htm). He conducted EPA's first two-dimensional Monte Carlo analysis which examined cancer risks attributable to radon in groundwater. He is currently working with EPA's Superfund and Pesticide Programs to develop training materials on Monte Carlo analysis for EPA risk assessors.
Vicki M. Bier has nearly 20 years of experience in risk analysis, primarily in the nuclear power industry. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she has a joint appointment in the Department of Industrial Engineering and the Department of Engineering Physics. Bier holds a doctorate in operations research from MIT and an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Stanford. She specializes in probabilistic risk and decision analysis methods for nuclear power plants but has general research interests in societal decision-making regarding technological hazards. Her recent research has focused on the use of accident precursors in Bayesian estimation of frequencies of rare events such as "near miss" accidents that are greater than expected in normal day to day operations, but less than catastrophic. Bier has studied precursor data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to discover how likely it is that an accident will happen, and what types of accidents are likely to occur. Her analysis showed that accidents caused by human error follow predictable patterns, which suggests that planners can reduce mistakes by ergonomic designs. Bier's research interests include the use of expert opinion in probabilistic risk analysis; the optimal level of problem decomposition in estimation of accident frequencies, and methods for effective risk communication, both to decision makers and to the general public.
Rosina M. Bierbaum is Associate Director for Environment in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She is the Clinton Administration's senior scientific advisor on environmental research and development. She is responsible for scientific input and guidance on a wide range of issues, including global change, air and water quality, endangered species, biodiversity, ecosystem management, endocrine disruptors, environmental monitoring, natural hazards, and energy research and development. She works closely with the President's National Science and Technology Council, co-chairing its Committee on Environmental and Natural Resources, which coordinates Federal research and development efforts in this area. She serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program at the Department of Defense, and acts as liaison to the National Ocean Research Leadership Council. Dr. Bierbaum was the Head of the U.S. Delegation to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Plenary Meeting. Bierbaum was a Senior Associate at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) where she worked on several environmental issues. She two two bachelor's degrees and a doctorate in ecology and evolution from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She has written many articles published in technical and popular journals. She lectures widely on research needs to better manage natural resources, on the effects of multiple stresses on ecosystems, and on the science and impacts of global climate change.
Todd S. Bridges is Research Team Leader for Aquatic Toxicology and Ecological Risk Assessment in the Environmental Laboratory of the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Bridges holds bachelor's and master's degrees in biology and zoology from California State University, Fresno, and a doctorate in biological oceanography from North Carolina State University. In 1992, Bridges joined the staff of the Environmental Laboratory as a research biologist. Bridges' research program includes study of the nature of chronic and sublethal toxicity in freshwater and marine organisms, developing assessment methods for contaminated sediments in support of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' civil and military environmental missions, and developing modeling approaches for use in risk assessment. He serves as a member of the U.S. Army's Biological Technical Assistance Group (BTAG) which develops technical and policy recommendations for the Army on matters related to ecological risk assessment. Bridges also serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.
Mark Colyvan is a lecturer in philosophy and logic at the University of Tasmania, Australia. He holds an honors degree in mathematics from the University of New England in Australia and a doctorate in philosophy from the Australian National University. His research has addressed various philosophical issues surrounding the applications of mathematics in science. His current work focuses on the treatment of uncertainty and vagueness both in scientific classification schemes and in decision theory, and, more generally, on the epistemological problems arising from measurement error and other sources of uncertainty in risk assessment. Colyvan has written on the problems associated with the classification of threatened species in the face of poor data and vagueness in the relevant categories recognized by law or international convention. He has also published many articles in both philosophical and scientific journals, and he is the author of two books, An Introduction to Logic and The Indispensability of Mathematics.
Douglas Dixon manages research initiatives for the Electric Power Research Institute in the areas of aquatic protection, water quality, fisheries and hydropower environmental issues. He holds a doctoral degree in marine fisheries science from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science of the College of William & Mary. He has more than 25 years of experience in environmental science and engineering research, including 10 years in assessing the impacts on aquatic resources, and wide-ranging experience in both regulatory and procedural matters from the perspective of the regulated community under the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Protection Act, Federal Power Act, the Endangered Species Act, and numerous other state and federal environmental laws. His work has focused on the fisheries science of freshwater species in both cold and warm water environments, environmental impact assessment such as entrainment and impingement, assessments for threatened and endangered species, instream flow assessment, and fisheries and aquatic resource management planning.
Scott Ferson is a senior scientist and vice president of Applied Biomathematics, a research and development firm on Long Island, New York. He holds a bachelor's degree in biology from Wabash College and a doctorate in ecology and evolution from the State University of New York. Ferson's research focuses on developing reliable mathematical and statistical tools for ecological and human health risk assessments and on methods for uncertainty analysis when empirical information is very sparse. He has participated in several scientific advisory panels for U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of Health and other government agencies. He has over sixty scientific publications in environmental risk analysis and uncertainty propagation, and has directed the development of several commercial software packages used in environmental and ecological risk analysis. He is an author of Risk Assessment for Conservation Biology.
Adam M. Finkel is one of the nation's leading experts in the evolving field of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis, with 15 years of experience in both the scientific and public policy aspects of environmental and occupational health. He is Director of Health Standards Programs at the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). This directorate is responsible for a wide variety of regulations protecting workers from chemical, radiological, biological, and ergonomic hazards. It has recently published three major final rules (two of which were successfully defended against litigation and a Congressional veto resolution). He served as a fellow at the Center for Risk Management at Resources for the Future, and director of its Rational Risk Reduction Program, examining the strengths and limitations of risk assessment for setting national environmental priorities. He was also a senior fellow at the Green Center for the Study of Science and Society at the University of Texas at Dallas. His primary research interests are: (1) quantifying and communicating the uncertainties in risk estimates, and critically examining the claim that risk estimates are invariably too "conservative"; (2) accounting for variations in human susceptibility to environmental and occupational disease; and (3) exploring the role of personal values in risk assessment. He has published many scientific articles, and jointly edited the book Worst Things First? The Debate over Risk-Based National Environmental Priorities. He served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Risk Assessment for Hazardous Air Pollutants, and authored a major portion of the committee's study Science and Judgment in Risk Assessment. He is currently the President of the Risk Assessment and Policy Association, and recently received the Chauncey Starr Award from the Society for Risk Analysis. Finkel holds a doctorate in environmental health sciences from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Kathryn Blackmond Laskey is a professor in the Department of Systems Engineering and Operations Research at George Mason University. Her research interests include knowledge representations for reasoning about uncertain phenomena; knowledge-based construction of problem-specific probability and decision models; application of decision theoretic intelligent systems to reasoning about the behavior of military forces; and methods for combining expert knowledge and data to learn both structure and parameters of probability models. Dr. Laskey has research affiliations with the Center of Excellence in Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence and the Krasnow Institute for Cognitive Science at George Mason University. She received a doctoral degree in statistics and public policy from Carnegie Mellon University.
Deborah Mayo is professor in the Philosophy Department at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She holds bachelor's degrees from Clark University in philosophy and mathematics and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. She has authored many scholarly papers on the philosophy of science and the nature of evidence. Mayo is author of the book Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge, for which she received the Lakatos Award in Philosophy of Science, and she is an editor of the collection Acceptable Evidence: Science and Values in Risk Management. In 1999, she directed a six-week summer seminar sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities for college and university teachers entitled "Philosophy of Experimental Inference: Induction, Reliability, and Error" (http://www.phil.vt.edu/mayo/seminar.html). Her research focuses on scientific inference, and particularly, statistical inference, error statistics, experimental practice and the reliable detection of errors, the philosophy of evidence, Bayesian methods, and the limits of experimental testing.
Richard Neapolitan is professor of computer science at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana and master's and doctoral degrees in mathematics from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is author of many scholarly articles on uncertainty, computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. He has also written several books, including Probabilistic Inference and Learning Using Bayesian Networks and Probabilistic Reasoning in Expert Systems, which has been instrumental in organizing research on Bayesian networks into a cohesive field. He has also written two texts on algorithms, Foundation of Algorithms and Foundations of Algorithms Using C++ Pseudocode. Neapolitan's research lately has focused on representing and using causal knowledge, second- and higher-order uncertainty, belief networks and belief functions. His most recent research investigates the relationship between human causal learning and algorithms for learning causes from passive data. He is currently working on another book Inference and Learning Using Bayesian Networks for Prentice Hall, which concerns learning Bayesian networks from data.
Teddy I. Seidenfeld is the Simon Professor of Philosophy and Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University where he works on the foundations of statistics, including problems that involve the notion of "ignorance". Classically, ignorance has been modeled as equal probability. Dr. Seidenfeld's research has shown very surprising consequences of this approach for statistical inference and statistical decision theory. His research has explored anomalous features robust Bayesian methods, specifically, a phenomenon dubbed "dilation" in which new evidence from an experiment is certain to increase disagreements among different Bayesian analysts who share the data. His research addresses the general question of whether the norms of Bayesian statistics can be extended from individuals acting alone to cooperative groups. In terms of comparing opinions of different researchers, when will common evidence drive them to agree in their personal probabilities? In terms of decisions, when can two Bayesians acting in partnership make (coherent) decisions that preserve their common preferences? His work suggests these two perspectives lead to very different results. Seidenfeld has many scholarly publications and holds a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University and undergraduate degrees from Rochester University. The goal of his current work is to provide a unified treatment of group probabilities and group decisions. The strategy is to relax a central assumption of Bayesian, expected utility theory: the "ordering" postulate by not assuming one can always judge which of two events is more probable or which of two options is more preferred.
Ronald R. Yager is Director of the Machine Intelligence Institute and Professor of Information and Decision Technologies at Iona College. He received his undergraduate degree from the City College of New York and his Ph.D. from the Polytechnic University of New York. He has served at the National Science Foundation as program director in the Information Sciences program. He was a NASA/Stanford visiting fellow as well as a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley. He has served as a lecturer at NATO Advanced Study Institutes. He is a fellow of the IEEE, the Fuzzy Systems Association and the New York Academy of Sciences. He is editor in chief of the International Journal of Intelligent Systems. He serves on the editorial board of a number of journals including Neural Networks, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, the Journal of Approximate Reasoning, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Fuzzy Sets and Systems and the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems. Yager is one of the co-founders of the conference on Information Processing and the Management of Uncertainty. He has published over 500 articles and fifteen books. In addition to his pioneering work in the area of fuzzy logic, he has focused on problems arising in decision making under uncertainty and the fusion of information. The role of attitudes in resolving uncertainty and making decisions has been a topic of his interest. He has actively encouraged technology transfer by lecturing at commercial concerns and governmental agencies on the latest advances in uncertainty related issues.
On or before January 26, the workshop registration fee is
$300 for SRA members,
$300 for government employees,
$200 for graduate students,
$400 for others,
$200 for additional persons registering at the same time.
After January 26, the fee is
$350 for SRA members,
$450 for others,
$250 for additional persons registering at the same time.
Payment should accompany a completed registration form. Major credit card, check or purchase order is acceptable. You are considered registered when full payment or purchase order has been received. Registration will be confirmed when payment is received. Registration includes workshop materials, morning pastries, beverage breaks, lunches, wine and cheese reception. Seating is limited, so please register early.
Substitutions of workshop participants may be made at any time without penalty. Cancellations must be made in writing before February 1. The fee, minus a $25 service charge, will be refunded. No refund is possible for cancellations received after February 1 or no-shows.
Hotel rooms have been
reserved at the Key Bridge
Marriott in Arlington, Virginia. The Marriott is offering a rate of
$129 for single/double occupancy if booked before 19 January
2000. To reserve your room, call the hotel directly at 800-228-9290
and mention the SRA meeting for the quoted rate. The direct number for
the hotel is 703-524-6400. It is also possible to reserve a room over
the web.
The address of the Key Bridge Marriott is 1401 Lee Highway, Arlington,
Virginia 22209. The hotel is minutes from Reagan Washington National
Airport and two blocks from the Rosslyn Metro. Parking is available at
the hotel for $10 per day. Cab fare from the airport is about $7. The
hotel is 2 miles to Washington D.C., 5 minutes to the Pentagon and
Fashion Center at Pentagon City, 10 minutes to the Capitol, White House,
Georgetown, Kennedy Center, Smithsonian and Old Town Alexandria, 3 miles
to National Airport and 24 miles to Washington Dulles Airport and 55
miles to BWI. For questions about the
content of the workshop, contact the organizer Scott Ferson at scott@ramas.com or
516-751-4350. For information about other workshops and forums on
related topics, consult http://www.sra.org/events.htm.
For more information about the Society for Risk Analysis, consult its
homepage at http://www.sra.org. You can
contact SRA Headquarters at
Secretariat, Society for Risk Analysis, 1313 Dolley Madison Boulevard,
Suite 402, McLean, Virginia 22101, Telephone 703-790-1745, Facsimile
703-790-2672, Electronic sra@burkinc.com. To comment on this
website, contact the SRA webmaster at
webmaster@sra.org. Accommodations
Further information
