Confirmed speakers

We are honoured to present two keynote speakers, Dr Daniel Hikuroa and Prof Marek Druzdzel. In addition we have invited distinguished speakers from our varied topic areas and we are pleased to be able to confirm the following speakers:

• Mahina-a-rangi Baker
• Prof. Roger Cooke
• A/Prof Nick Golledge
• Dr Anca Hanea
• Dr Gill Jolly
• A/Prof Tina Nane
• Prof James Renwick

Keynote speakers

Dr Daniel Hikuroa, Ngāti Maniapoto, Tainui, Te Arawa,

The University of Auckland

Dr Daniel (Dan) Hikuroa  is an established world expert on integrating indigenous knowledge and science and has undertaken many projects including co-writing the 2014 State of the Hauraki Gulf Environment Report, geothermal developments, co-writing iwi environmental management plans, hazard and vulnerability assessments and industrial waste rehabilitation. Dan was the Research Director for Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga from July 2011 - December 2015. He is currently a senior lecturer in Māori Studies Te Wānanga o Waipapa, University of Auckland, teaching a course on Tikanga and contributing to courses in natural hazards and disasters, and the Science Scholars programme in the Faculty of Science. He is working on many research projects that seek to realise the dreams or solve issues for Māori communities. He is involved in a number of community roles, including: hāpu representative member on both the Waitomo Caves Management Committee and Waitomo Caves Environmental Advisory Group; independent scientific adviser for various iwi and hapū and on the Science Advisory Panel for the SouthSci Participatory Science Platform project. He also serves on the Statutory Māori Advisory Board for the Environmental Protection Authority, Environmental Advisory Group for Watercare and as science adviser for Foundation North.

Prof Marek Druzdzel

Marek Druzdzel is a professor in the School of Computing and Information and in the Intelligent Systems Program and the director of the Decision Systems Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh.  He holds a joint appointment as a visiting professor in the Computer Science Department, Bialystok University of Technology, Poland.  He received his M.S. degrees in Computer Science (1985) and Electrical Engineering (1987) from the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands (both with distinction) and his Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy (1992) from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.  Prof. Druzdzel is a recipient of the Faculty Early Career Development Grant (known as CAREER grant) from the National Science Foundation (1996-2000), Outstanding Mentor Award (1997), and University of Pittsburgh’s Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award (2007).  He is also a fellow of the Collegium of Eminent Scientists, Kosciuszko Foundation and recipient of the 2009-2010 and 2015-2016 Fulbright Awards for teaching and research at the Bialystok University of Technology.  His research interests concentrate on probabilistic and decision theoretic methods in decision support systems and human aspect of decision support.  His laboratory is widely known for the graphical modeling software GeNIe and SMILE, recently commercialized and available for academic teaching and research use at http://www.bayesfusion.com/.  More details about Prof. Druzdzel’s research interests and publications are available on line at http://www.pitt.edu/~druzdzel.  At the meeting Marek will talk about Bayesian Networks in Risk Modelling and Decision Making.

Mahina-a-rangi Baker   Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Raukawa ki te tonga, Ngāti Toarangatira  Mahina-a-rangi is passionate about enabling mana whenua involvement in environmental decision-making and supporting kaitiakitanga, particularly around relationships with freshwater catchments. She has a background in kaupapa Māori research and environmental risk analysis and is due to submit a PhD in Resource and Environmental Planning on mātauranga Māori quantitative modelling. Mahina-a-rangi runs a small environmental consultancy managing a team of team of Māori scientists and resource management experts to deliver support to iwi and hapū entities. She is currently Pou Takawaenga Taiao, Environment Manager for Te Ātiawa ki Whakarongotai. She is also a member of the Kahui Wai Māori, a forum that provides independent advice to the government on freshwater management policy development. Mahina-a-rangi will talk about her work developing and operationalising a mātauranga Māori framework and futuring tools, including Bayesian Belief Networks, that indigenous communities can apply in decision-making, including risk analysis processes. The case studies in which this framework and tools were operationalised will demonstrate a distinctly Māori scientific approach to futuring, including the analysis of risk, in various decision-making contexts including catchment management and resource consenting of significant construction projects. Roger Cooke  Roger Cooke is the Chauncey Starr Senior Fellow at Resources for Future in Washington and an emeritus professor at TU Delft. He supervised the development of Non-Parametric continuous-discrete Bayesian Networks (NPBNs) for the Dutch Ministry of Transport. Subsequent development was under contract with Shell, AIRBUS and the National Institute for Aerospace. In 2008 he was elected fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis. Roger Cooke is the patron and greatest endorser of the Classical Model, which is frequently referred to as the Cooke's method for structured expert judgment. His short course on Expert Judgment has been given several times at NASA Langley and NASA Headquarters. In 2010 he was named lead author in the 5th assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the chapter on Risk and Uncertainty. In 2011 he received the Lifetime Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society for Risk Analysis. He currently works on uncertainty quantification in conceptual design for AIRBUS and on value of information of Earth Observation Missions for NASA Langley. He consults for expert judgment studies on invasive species (NOAA), food borne diseases (WHO) and efficacy of public health measures (Robert Wood Johnson, CDDEP) and nitrogen loading in the Chesapeake bay (EPA). Roger will be joining us by video conference to present results from a recent analysis of 49 post 2006 Structured Expert Judgment studies where experts assessed a median value in addition to other percentiles of their distributions for unknown variables and calibration variables. The results show that prediction errors are substantially reduced by combining experts’ quantified uncertainties rather than combing their point predictions. As a consequence, Roger and co-authors conclude that two tenants of decision science folklore are decisively refuted: (1) If we are just interested in point prediction we needn’t quantify uncertainty and (2) combining medians is as good as medians of combinations.  Nick Golledge Nick is an Associate Professor in the Antarctic Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in the numerical simulation of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and particularly, their response to changing external forcings over time. Recent work has focused largely on policy-relevant timescales and societally-relevant questions such as the future ice-sheet contribution to global mean sea level. Entwined with this is the role that systemic feedbacks between ice sheets, ocean, and climate, might play in influencing future ice sheet evolution and the manifestation of future climatic changes. Nick currently holds a Royal Society Te Aparangi Discovery Fellowship, is a Lead Author on the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC, and leads the 'Future Projections' Expert Group of the Antarctic Science Platform. Anca Hanea Anna is a senior researcher based at the Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis (CEBRA) at the University of Melbourne. Her background is in applied mathematics and risk modelling. She has a PhD in Applied Probability (more specifically about theoretical the and practical aspects of Bayesian Networks) from the Technical University of Delft. She was instrumental in building a COST European network for Structured Expert Judgement (SEJ) elicitation and aggregation, and related standards for the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). Anca is the president elect of the Australasian Bayesian Network Modelling Society and is chairing the SEJ elicitation session(s) at this conference. She will talk about a recent application of Bayesian Networks partly quantified with SEJ, which is part of a joint project between Cawrthron Institute in New Zealand and CEBRA. Gill Jolly Dr Gill Jolly is currently the Manager of the Earth Structure and Processes department at GNS Science, which includes many of the scientists researching plate tectonic processes, volcanology, earthquakes and tsunami. Her main research interests include volcanic risk assessment, risk communication and enhancing the link between science and policy. Between 2014 and September 2019, Gill was the Director of the Natural Hazards Division at GNS Science. She led a team of over 150 people who were responsible for research and monitoring of New Zealand’s geological hazards and for providing advice to the NZ government. During this time, she led the team through the response to the November 2016 M7.8 Kaikōura Earthquake.  In 2019 she was co-opted onto the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor’s Forum to bring her expertise in natural hazards and crisis response and act as a conduit between the natural hazards research community and senior decision-makers. Gill will talk about the use of science advice in decision-making, particularly in relation to the rapid assessment of hazard and risk during a natural hazards response. Tina Nane Tina is an Assistant Professor of Applied Probability at the Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics, Delft University of Technology. She has a PhD in Statistics from Delft University of Technology. Her current research primarily focuses on uncertainty quantification and analysis, both data-driven and by employing expert opinions.  Tina was an active member of the COST European network for Structured Expert Judgment (SEJ). She has developed and is the instructor of the TU Delft’s online courses “Decision Making under Uncertainty: Introduction to Structured Expert Judgment” and “Decision Making Under Uncertainty: Applying Structured Expert Judgement”. At this conference, Tina will present a cross-validation analysis of a recent SEJ study. Her talk will be part of the SEJ elicitation session.   James Renwick James is Professor and Head of School School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington. He has nearly four decades’ experience in weather and climate research. His main field is large-scale climate variability and climate change, including the El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle, the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds, and the impacts of climate variability and change on the Pacific, New Zealand and the Antarctic. James was a lead author for the last two Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and is a Convening Lead Author for the new 6th IPCC Assessment. He was recently awarded the Prime Minister’s 2018 prize for Science Communication