ModSim 2011

CRICHTONA — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 05:41:07 +0000

Dr Hazel Parry attended ModSim 2011 in Perth, Western Australia, as a local (Australian) session chair during December 2011.

Dr Parry promoted the activities of the CRCNPB by giving a five minute introduction to the audience on the activities of the CRCNPB and how it had supported the session. She also promoted the activities of the CRC network B-DEMoN: Biosecurity Dispersal Ecology Modelling Network.

Prior to the meeting, Dr Parry encouraged attendance of CRCNPB members at this conference to give papers in this session.

The networking opportunities that were established by Dr Parry (an informal discussion session and a dinner) allowed plenty of time to discuss what was learnt from the presentations and to develop ideas. Much discussion focused on the relative merits of different dispersal modelling approaches, given particular research questions or hypotheses.

Specific methods with which to simulate dispersal, such as the application of dispersal kernals versus individual-based approaches was also discussed.

From this several ideas emerged to collaborate, both within the CRC and more widely. One example is to develop a proposal for a thematic issue of Environmental Modelling and Software journal on the subject of Spatial Population Modelling.

International collaboration opportunities for a number of participants in the CRCNPB were facilitated by the attendance of several international speakers and an international session chair. The session also fostered collaboration amongst existing CRCNPB participants interested in dispersal modelling for invasion ecology both with one another and with others outside the CRCNPB.

Modelling and Simulation with Mathematical and Computational Sciences

VANMEURSA — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 22:56:43 +0000

Modelling and Simulation with Mathematical and Computational Sciences (MODSIM) is uniquely a multi-disciplinary gathering of modellers – from a range of modelling disciplines (statistics, mathematics, computer science, economics, etc) and a diverse range of applications. This provided Dr Low Choy a useful venue for soliciting feedback on her recent research into encoding expert judgements, since expert elicitation is a highly multi-disciplinary and a small but emerging field. Dr Low Choy’s involvement in MODSIM provided useful experience: as session organiser for two strands—on Bayesian statistics and on expert elicitation (including coordinating refereeing of conference papers); presenter of an oral presentation; co-author of two other presentations; and main presenter of a workshop on Expert Elicitation by Design (based on a recent paper, Low-Choy et al, 2009, Ecology).

Dr Low Choy presented a (12 minute) paper on Expert elicitation and its interface with technology: a review with a view to designing Elicitator. Interesting feedback on the talk mostly came from novices to the elicitation field interested in trialling the software. Because of this feedback, Dr Low Choy realised that the workshop planned for the final day, which was originally pitched to elicitation practitioners needed to be modified to target beginners. The workshop provided interesting insights: that researcher interest is growing across many fields (from vulcanology to materials science and planning emergency response), and that software and courses for beginners are lacking.

In 2009, the conference streams were deliberately constructed to encourage multi-disciplinary cross-fertilisation, with no adjacent talks sharing the same modelling discipline. This meant Dr Low Choy was exposed to interesting new approaches. For instance: game theory was used to assess whether small changes in decisions really make a difference in the end-game; to help recover a re-introduced native bird population that was not progressing past fledgling stage, a risk assessment utilised model-based estimates of the probability of survival based on different scientific hypotheses, weighted by expert support for said hypotheses. This has influenced Dr Low Choy’s thinking on decision-theory, a framework for evaluating performance of statistical designs (such as those used for pest surveillance), and on model selection within the Bayesian framework.

CRC for Plant Biosecurity - MODSIM

ModSim 2011

Modelling and Simulation with Mathematical and Computational Sciences