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Bayes@Lund2018 – for the 5th time!

Bayes@Lund 2018 – a Mini-conference on Bayesian Methods at Lund University, 12th of April, 2018

You are welcome to participate in the fifth edition of Bayes@Lund! The purpose of this conference is to bring together researchers and professionals working with or interested in Bayesian methods. Bayes@Lund aims at being accessible to researchers with little experience of Bayesian methods while still being relevant to experienced practitioners. The focus is on how Bayesian methods are used in research and the industry, what advantages Bayesian methods have over classical alternatives, and how the use and teaching of Bayesian methods can be encouraged.

To participate you need to register in advance, please register for Bayes@Lund 2018 here: https://goo.gl/forms/Ra7WXl6UaGBOCuL63

 

Please see the conference web page for more info: https://bayesat.github.io/lund2018/

Call for Presentations and Short Tutorials

As last year we invite you to submit a talk to Bayes@Lund, but new for this year is that we also invite you to submit Short tutorials.

 

A talk is a 20 minutes presentation on any topic related to Bayesian methods, but not restricted to:

  • Case studies. Have you used Bayesian methods in your research? Describe what you did, and how it worked out.
  • Method development. Are you developing novel Bayesian methods that you want to share?
  • Teaching Bayes. Do you have experiences teaching Bayesian methods. What was the challenges, and do you have any useful tips?

Short tutorials are 10/20/30 min long tutorials where you introduce the audience to a  tool, package or methodology you find useful. It doesn’t need to be something you’ve developed, just something you want to show the audience!

 

As the audience will be highly heterogeneous, the talk and tutorials are expected to be accessible and engaging for a multidisciplinary audience.

 

To contribute a presentation or short tutorial for Bayes@Lund please send in the title of your talk/tutorial with an abstract (not more than 100 words) to rasmus.baath@gmail.com. For a short tutorial, also indicate how much time you need (10/20/30 min). The final date for submission is the 11th of February.

 

Invited speakers: Paul-Christian Bürkner and Jukka Ranta

This year we are happy to announce that the first invited speaker is Paul-Christian Bürkner, researcher at the University of Münster, Department of Psychology. Paul is an expert in Bayesian statistical modelling and he is the creator of the well known BRMS software package that makes it easy to do advanced Bayesian modelling

We are equally happy to announce that the second invited speaker is Jukka Ranta, professor at the Finnish Food Safety Authority, and docent of biometry from Helsinki University. Jukka’s research is focused on Bayesian modelling to do Quantitative Risk Assessment in food safety applications. He has also taught several courses in Bayesian statistics at the University.

Important Dates

Final date for presentations submission: 11th of February
Notifications to presenters: 18th of February
Final date for registration: 1st of April
The conference: 12th of April

Program, Info & registration

Please see the conference web page: https://bayesat.github.io/lund2018/ or contact us at:

Rasmus Bååth, Lund University Cognitive Science, DataCamp Inc: rasmus.baath@gmail.com
Ullrika Sahlin, Lund University Centre of Environmental and Climate Research: ullrika.sahlin@cec.lu.se

All best,
Rasmus Bååth & Ullrika Sahlin

January 2, 2018

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The perfect gift for Xmas – a game about guessing

This game is a blessing, to practice your skills in guessing. Accuracy and precision, are good for a decision. Although being uncertain might seem less, it can lead to success.

Relax your winter holiday with computer games about uncertainty

The Climate-KIC Ideator project Gaming for better decisions under uncertainty is led by Ullrika Sahlin at CEC. The project aims to develop games to make people curious to know more about uncertainty. These games are designed to be entertaining for most ages.

– Working with gamification as a method for science communication has brought me new perspectives. I will use these games when I give lectures to high school students during the science fair in March – they will love it, says Ullrika Sahlin.

– There is an increasing need in society to be able to express, communicate and understand uncertainty. There is also a need to encourage scientific experts to learn more about expressing their own uncertainty, to feel more comfortable using probability and learning how to avoid being over or under confident, Ullrika continues.

Download the games from https://uncertaingames.itch.io/ where you also can see video recordings of the games.

This text was taken from the CEC-news feed 

December 22, 2017

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Games about uncertainty and decision making

Gaming for better decisions under uncertainty is a project with the goal to develop a game that motivates people to learn about uncertainty analysis and decision making in an entertaining way. The idea was to use a game environment to explain the benefits of expressing uncertainty when making predictions and possible ways to make decisions under uncertainty.

The goal has been achieved. A group of experts have met and identified the content for the game. Three modules cover tasks related to expressing and understanding uncertainty using prediction and decision problems from daily life that players can relate to. The modules has been documented and populated with several short games/apps which is available online.

The fourth module cover fictional game scenario that involves decision making under climate uncertainty, where there is a need to consider the balance between social, economic, and environmental impacts. Multi criteria decision analysis without and with uncertainty is demonstrated on a climate mitigation decision problem on choosing a bus technology. The concepts resilience and robustness to uncertainty is illustrated on a climate adaptation decision problem related to flood management.

The prototypes have been tested on independent test persons. The project has identified several ideas and needs of further development of existing and new game prototypes. A conclusion is that existing initiatives to train experts in expressing and understanding uncertainty can benefit from gamification to gain more interest. A continuation can help to better link to these. There is also a high value in developing the case-studies on climate decision problems under uncertainty further so they can better serve societal decision makers. We conclude that the output from this project can serve as a start for such development closer to decision makers and stakeholders.

The project has been externally evaluated by the Assessment and Methodological Support Unit at EFSA, who conclude that games like this stimulating learning by scientific experts would be useful for organisations working with scientific assessments.

Gamification provide new means of communicating science and it has been both challenging and rewarding to put together games that are entertaining but with a clear goal to introduce a theory or concept. Several needs and ideas for future developments has been identified.

This project has been reported. Here follows different links to our reporting. Further info – turn to Ullrika Sahlin

Project web page: https://www.cec.lu.se/research/gaming-for-uncertainty

Project duration Oct-Dec 2017

Financed by Climate-KIC Nordic and co-financed by Formas project Scaling up uncertain evidence.

Project Performance Report 2017 

Final Report

ShinyR code can be found here: https://github.com/Ullrika/GamingForUncertainty

The playeish type of games are found here https://uncertaingames.itch.io/

Check them out!

BeanGuesser_video from Ullrika Sahlin on Vimeo.

FrequencyGuesser_video from Ullrika Sahlin on Vimeo.

ProbabilityBee_video from Ullrika Sahlin on Vimeo.

Quiztimate_video from Ullrika Sahlin on Vimeo.

December 15, 2017

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Highly productive meeting on gamification for uncertainty and decision making

For two days in November experts on decision theory, statistics and risk analysis met at Lund University to

  • Come up with ideas for a game to motivate people to learn more about expressing uncertainty and making decisions under uncertainty
  • Identify target theory and concepts to demonstrate in the game
  • Test the ideas on game prototypes

It was a successful meeting with many stimulating discussions. Great help was provided by the testing persons: Cecilia Bengtsson, Elin Bonnevier, Peter Olsson and Tove Ryden Sonesson. An operational game will be ready by the end of 2017. Curious to know more – contact me. Project web site.

Ullrika

We mixed short crash talks with creative ideas.
Igor Linkov gave an excellent presentation on resilience as a concept in Multi Criteria Decision Making.
November 30, 2017

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Test our forthcoming game for uncertainty!

Do you want to be part of a testing group for the development of a computer game about expressing uncertainty and making decisions?

This is something for you who

  • Has an ability to give constructive feedback on your experience of playing a simple computer game
  • A tiny interest in knowing more about how to guess with uncertainty and choose between decisions where there is uncertainty (only applicable for those attending the meeting, which now is over).

Gaming for uncertainty is an ideation project at Lund University financed by Climate-KIC with the aim to develop an entertaining game that motivates people to want to learn more about what it means to express uncertainty and make decisions. The game include simple daily life problems and a case-study related climate change adaptation.

We seek independent reference persons who can test the prototypes for the game developed within the project.

As participant of the group you are expected test and provide feedback on game prototypes via internet during the period 1 –  22 December.

Sign up your interest on this link https://goo.gl/forms/0GfojHwFxSdI5DPy1 and we will contact you.

Contact: Ullrika Sahlin Centre for Environmental and Climate Research, Ullrika.Sahlin@cec.lu.se

 

November 16, 2017

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Trusting expert judgments – seminar Oct 25th 2017

Welcome to a seminar on the book Trusting Judgments

 

The seminar was led by the participants and gently facilitated by Ullrika. We went go through the book chapter by chapter. It was a very useful and inspiring day. Thank you all for coming. The old Bishop house in Lund is an excellent place for smaller workshops.

This is a seminar supported by the strategic research environment BECC and arranged by the BECC action group “Evidence relying on simulation models and expert judgment”

Biskopshuset

Why this book

This book is intended for people in government, regulatory agencies and business who routinely make decisions and who rely on scientific and technical expertise. So-called evidence-based decision-making has become more popular over the last decade, but often the evidence we need for these decisions is unavailable. Time, money and the pressing nature of many decisions prevent us from collecting much of the information we need. In its place, decision-makers turn to experts to estimate facts or make predictions. The status of scientific and technical experts has evolved over the last 100 years or more to provide unprecedented opportunities for experts to influence decisions. The hidden risk is that scientists and other experts overreach, often with good intentions, placing more weight on the evidence they provide than is warranted. The tendency to overreach is pervasive and more significant than many scientists and decision-makers like to admit. Much of the evidence for these phenomena is drawn from well-established research on decision theory and cognitive psychology. This book documents the extent and importance of this issue, and then outlines a suite of simple, practical tools that will assist decision-makers to make better use of expert estimates and predictions. It provides the means to discriminate good advice from poor, and to help decision-makers to be reasonably and appropriately skeptical. The book promotes a change in attitude towards expert predictions and estimates such that they are treated with the same reverence as data, subjected to the same kinds of cross-examination and verification. By requiring a little discipline from their experts, decision-makers can avoid the most pervasive pitfalls of expert judgements and assure themselves of relatively reliable and accurate expert information.

The author of the book

Mark Burgman is Director of the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Conservation Biology.  Previously, he was Adrienne Clarke Chair of Botany at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He works on expert judgement, ecological modelling, conservation biology and risk assessment.  He has written models for biosecurity, medicine regulation, marine fisheries, forestry, irrigation, electrical power utilities, mining, and national park planning.

The book

Trusting Judgements: How to Get the Best out of Experts by Mark Burgman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2015. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316282472

Ch1. What’s wrong with consulting experts?

Ch2. Kinds of uncertainty

Ch 3. What leads experts astray?

Ch 4. Dealing with individual experts

Ch 5. The wisdom of crowds revisited

Ch 6. Tips to get the best out of experts

 

September 20, 2017

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Gaming for better decision making – one winner at Climate-Kic Nordic Ideation Day

The project Gaming for better decision making was one of the winners at the Climate-Kic Nordic Ideation Day in Aarhus August 23 2017.

Ullrika recieves the award from the Climate-Kic community.

Ullrika was there pitching it in front of a jury. Great day with a lot of positive feedback and useful connections.

Gaming for better decisions under uncertainty is a project with the aim to develop a computer game that motivates people to learn about uncertainty analysis and decision making in an entertaining way. The game will explain the benefits of expressing uncertainty when making predictions and possible ways to make decisions under uncertainty.

Extraction of the poster used at the Ideation Day.

The game will include prediction and decision problems from daily life that players can relate to, and a fictional game scenario that involves decision making under climate uncertainty, where there is a need to consider the balance between social, economic, and environmental impacts. A case-study on climate decisions under uncertainty will be developed on flood protection in the municipality of Vejle, Denmark. We will benefit from previous experience in serious gaming at Aarhus University.

By the end of 2017 we will have an operational game prototype.

The game is expected to result in

– a greater interest to learn more about uncertainty among experts and decision makers

– a wider use of subjective probability for uncertainty

– a tool to initiate discussions on how to adapt uncertainty analysis to your decision problem

Partners: Lund University, DTU, Aarhus University, Vejle municipality

People (to be updated):

Ullrika Sahlin, Associate Professor, Lund University, Sweden. Uncertainty analysis in risk and environmental impact assessment.

Anthony O’Hagan Emeritus Professor, the University of Sheffield, UK. Eliciting expert knowledge using subjective probability; e-learning to train experts to express uncertainty accurately and rigorously.

Igor Linkov, Adjunct Professor, Carnegie Mellon University. Expert on decision making with applications on climate adaption and development of serious games of decision making.

Igor Kozine, Senior Researcher and Miroslava Tegeltija, PhD Student. Technical University of Denmark (Danmarks Tekniske Universitet). Quantitative and semi-quantitative approaches to uncertainty representation.

Matthias C. M. Troffaes. Expert on decision making under uncertainty with imprecise probability; applications in engineering and environmental sciences; avid gamer. Associate Professor (Reader), Durham University, UK.

External reviewer:

EFSA, Assessment and Methodological Support Unit, Olaf Mosbach-Schulz. Implementing uncertainty analysis in food and feed risk assessment. Training programs on probabilistic judgements for external experts.

August 23, 2017

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