Ongoing global changes bring fundamentally new scientific problems requiring new concepts and tools. A key issue concerns a vast variety of practically irreducible uncertainties, which challenge our traditional models and require new concepts and analytical tools. The uncertainty critically dominates, e.g., the climate change debates. In short, the dilemma is concerned with enormous costs vs massive uncertainties of potential extreme impacts. Traditional scientific approaches usually rely on real observations and experiments. Yet no sufficient observations exist for new problems, and "pure" experiments and learning by doing may be very expensive, dangerous, or simply impossible. In addition, available historical observations are often contaminated by "experimentator", i.e., our actions, policies. The complexity of new problems does not allow to achieve enough certainty just by increasing the resolution of models or by bringing in more links. They require explicit treatment of uncertainties using "synthetic" information composed of available "hard" data from historical observations, results of possible experiments, and scientific facts as well as "soft" data from experts' opinions, scenarios, stakeholders, and public opinion. As a result of all these factors, our assessment will always have poor estimates. Finally, the role of science for new problems will increasingly deviate from traditional "deterministic predictions" analysis to the design of robust strategies against involved uncertainties and risks.
The workshop aims at contributing to a better understanding between practitioners dealing with management of uncertainty, and scientists working on either corresponding modeling approaches, or on methods that can be adapted for improving understanding and management of uncertainty. In particular, the workshop will focus on the following issues:
Participation in the workshop
Strong international and interdisciplinary participation is encouraged
for this workshop so that participants can introduce and be introduced
to various perspectives and approaches in the above listed research and
applications areas.
The number of participants of the workshop must be limited, therefore participation is by invitation only. The invitations for the workshop will be distributed before June 15, 2004 to authors of accepted presentations.
Prospective participants are kindly requested to complete as soon as possible (but not later than May 31, 2004) the preregistration procedure which is composed of two elements:
Dates, organizational details
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