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UGA Environmental
Informatics and Control Program




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Research Programs
Areas of Interest
Current Projects



>Environmental Foresight and Forecasting Environmental Change
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Adaptive Community Learning
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Watershed Management
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Quality Assurance of Models
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Analysis of Uncertainty, Structural Error, and Reachable Futures
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Reconciling Models with Data (System Identification
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Attainability and Inclination in the Behavior of Environmental Systems
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Monitoring the Environment in Real Time
>Control of Microbial Ecosystems
>Infrastructure Vulnerability and High-Performance Integrated Control (H-PIC)

>Sustainability in the Water Sector (Spotting "Hot Technologies" for
Sustainable Cities)

>Engineering for Sustainable Development (Cities as Environmental Goods)
>Read or Print all Projects


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 Research Program

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Environmental Foresight and Forecasting Environmental Change. Begun in 1993, the International Task Force in Forecasting Environmental Change completed its work in 2002 with publication of the Monograph Environmental Foresight and Models: A Manifesto (Elsevier, Oxford) [see outline at http://www.elsevier.com/locate/isbn/008044086X]. The deliberations of the Task Force have in large part determined the agenda of our current program in Environmental Informatics and Control. They have assisted us in formulating the kinds of questions we see at the cusp of the turning point in the use of models in Environmental Science and Technology. The issue, in essence, is not one of proceeding from gathering the data, to developing a model, and then to making projections of future behavior. It is rather the reverse: of determining whether future patterns of behavior — as imagined by stakeholders or as specified by policy-makers (including behavior in the more distant future) — are technically "reachable", given our current understanding, with all its flaws and uncertainties. It is about identifying those parameters in the map of the science base (the model) key to the reaching of such feared or desired futures, for it is these "scientific unknowns" that may therefore emerge as priorities for attracting further scrutiny. Our premise is that knowledge, and hence the structure of our models, is evolving continuously. Contemplating future possibilities and options must be conducted in a setting in which structural change, dislocations, and shifts of behavior are the norm. A large part of the purpose of model-building must accordingly be to maximize the probability of detecting the first signs of these changes in the accumulating records of past behavior, to characterize them, and thus to generate possible patterns of future behavior, if such dislocations of structure were to be propagated into the future. The Monograph sets out the beginnings of an approach to exploring environmental futures under these presumptions. We are now building upon those beginnings, taking a strategic look at the coming needs of environmental modeling (in general). We are also, unexpectedly, mapping these problem-solution couples from environmental science onto the landscape of problem-solution couples in the biomedical sciences, in particular, in order to examine structural change in the organization and function of the human liver (in collaboration with the Medical School of the University of California, San Francisco).