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Edwards Lecture: Taking Uncertainties into Account in Geosciences, Physics, and Engineering

Edwards Lecture: Taking Uncertainties into Account in Geosciences, Physics, and Engineering

Thursday, March 12, 2015 at 4:00 pm
Joyce Powell Leadership Room, Memorial Union
Prof. Juan M. Restrepo, Department of Mathematics
Accounting for uncertainties has led us to alter our expectations of what is predictable and how such predictions compare to nature. A significant effort, in recent years, has been placed on creating new uncertainty quantification techniques, rediscovering old ones, and the appropriation of existing ones to account for uncertainties in modeling and simulations. Is this nothing more than a greater reliance on statistics techniques in our regular business? Some of it is. However, as this presentation will recount and illustrate, there are important changes on how we perform the business of modeling and predicting natural phenomena: Bayesian inference is used to combine models and data (not just to compare models and data); sensitivity analyses and projection techniques influence mean-field modeling; data classification techniques allow us to work with the more general state variables, which subsume dynamic physical variables; we exploit complex stochastic representations to better capture multiscale phenomena or to capture the small-scale correlations of big data sets.
Jansen