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FICUS: a Spatiotemporal Risk Analysis System
Wednesday, September 26, 2018, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM EDT
Category: Webinars

Observations on the Implementation of a General Purpose Spatiotemporal Risk Analysis System Supporting Black Swan Theory

A recording of this session can be found here on the UCGIS Webinar channel. 

Dr. Ehlschaeger's presentation can be downloaded from here (pdf). 

Risk analyses for geospatial activities are constantly undermined by plans that have been created by multiple organizations for unfamiliar geographies, involving imprecise data model and uncertain model parameters. Moreover, those responsible often have little capacity to communicate about complex geo-temporal patterns with fellow information creators, analysts, and planners across the globe. Over the past decade, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Colorado State University, and the US Army Corp of Engineers’ Engineer Research & Development Center has been collaborating to construct a neighborhood-scale social, infrastructural, and environmental modeling system that quantifies the uncertainty of all input data, propagates that uncertainty through tightly coupled space-time models, and visually presents uncertainty information and intuitive insights to planners and analysts. The Framework Incorporating Complex Uncertain Systems (FICUS) is a computational framework that supports all the functions of a general purpose geographic and temporal analysis system with a focus on risk analysis. FICUS minimizes the Uncertain Geographic Context Problem (UGCoP), propagates uncertainty using the Object Modeling System as its computational framework and contains interdependent urban infrastructure network models to forecast network failures. It can tightly couple models from R, Python, and NetLogo as well as most popular programming languages, and it itself is free and open source.

This presentation will discuss the theoretical and practical benefits of using an uncertainty quantifying, uncertainty propagating, and uncertainty visualizing geographic information system for risk analysis with a case study in the Philippines. We will focus our discussions on the techniques that minimize or can even eliminate UGCoP, calibration and validation in a multi-verse risk analysis paradigm, and cognitive issues of understanding risk using Black Swan Theory.

Presenter:   Dr. Charles (Chuck) Ehlschlaeger is a geographer with the Engineering Research & Development Center – Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (ERDC-CERL) of the US Army Corps of Engineers.  He also teaches within the geography department at UIUC and the GIS Program at Johns Hopkins University.

You can find additional details about FICUS and Dr. Ehlschaeger here

A recording of this session can be found here on the UCGIS Webinar channel.

Dr. Ehlschaeger's presentation can be downloaded from here (pdf).