Events Calendar

A new kind of knowledge discovery for societal priorities:

Title: Case study on climate extremes, uncertainy, and impactsSpeaker: Auroop R. Ganguly, Senior R&D Staff at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)Abstract:
A new kind of knowledge discovery from data (KDD) is needed across multiple science and engineering disciplines to provide actionable predictive insights on urgent societal priorities. The new KDD is motivated from three considerations: (a) availability of massive data from remote or in-situ sensors and models, (b) enhanced understanding of nonlinear and non-stationary processes with feedback and noise, and (c) criticality of risk-informed decisions under uncertainty. The three pillars of the new KDD are (a) interdisciplinary data sciences blending disciplines ranging from statistics and computer science to nonlinear dynamics and information theory, (b) physics-based or process-oriented computational simulations along with their evaluations and combinations, and (c) decision sciences which include uncertainty quantification and reduction, risk assessments, attributions, and optimization. The first part of the presentation describes the new KDD with applications to societal priorities ranging from transportation security, remote sensing, population mapping, infrastructure risks, social theories, and climate change. The second part of the presentation focuses on climate extremes, defined as regional shifts in the statistics of weather patterns or changes in the intensity-duration-frequency of severe events, which in turn may be caused or exacerbated by natural climate cycles or climate change. First, the science of climate extremes is discussed, with an emphasis on how the new kind of KDD can address acknowledged gaps in the science. A comprehensive characterization of uncertainty from greenhouse gas emissions and climate models to regional assessments of hydrology and societal impacts is motivated. New science insights as well as the implications for preparedness decisions and mitigation policies are discussed with specific examples. Bio-Sketch
Auroop R. Ganguly is a Senior R&D Staff at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where he has been employed for more than five years. He has published more than fifty peer-reviewed and more than hundred articles in multidisciplinary journals ranging from PNAS and Physical Review E to domain journals in water resources, hydrometeorology, transportation, and operations research, as well as conferences and book chapters. He has published an edited book entitled Knowledge Discovery from Sensor Data by CRC Press, co-organized multiple ACM and IEEE workshops on sensor-based knowledge discovery and climate change, as well as sessions on nonlinear dynamics and climate impacts at AGU and AMS meetings. His research has been funded by US federal agencies like DOE, DHS, DOD / DARPA, besides the private sector. He led the ORNL team which provided science support for a climate change war game reported in the journal Nature as well as climate support for the US DOD's Quadrennial Defense Review. He has received two significant event awards from ORNL for a DARPA-funded project on evaluation of complex models and for the climate change war game. He is a member of the invited reader panel for the journal Nature and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering. He has held visiting and adjunct appointments at the University of South Florida and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville where he taught courses in hydrology as well as applied time series, spatial statistics and knowledge discovery. He has advised PhD students as supervisor and co-supervisor, in addition to post-masters and post-doctoral associates, as well as undergraduate and high-school students. His students have won two best student or runner-up paper awards and one best doctoral poster award. He has received two Outstanding Mentor awards from US DOE and ORNL, as well as two certificates of appreciation for mentorship. He has been invited to multiple NSF panels and workshops as well as DOE and DHS workshops. He has about five years experience at Oracle Corporation and a best-of-breed company eventually acquired by Oracle, where he developed time series and forecasting algorithms besides managing analytical products for demand planning, marketing, and supply chain. He has a PhD from the Civil and Environmental Engineering department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Technology (Honors) in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur.

Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Evangeline Reyes