SMS scnews item created by Justin Koonin at Mon 19 Oct 2009 1254
Type: Seminar
Distribution: World
Expiry: 20 Oct 2009
Calendar1: 20 Oct 2009 1500-1600
CalLoc1: Carslaw 157
Auth: jkoonin@bari.maths.usyd.edu.au

3pm  Carslaw 157
Tuesday 20th October

Speaker: James Edwards

Title: Towards a mathematical understanding of group decision making

It is common for individuals belonging to a group to collaborate and reach a
collective decisions. Such collaboration need not be through language, for
example the actions of decision making individuals may influence those
around them, implicitly leading to a decision being made by the group.

Examples of this type of individual / group decision making include
elections and markets in human society, or foraging and house-hunting in
insect society.

I will discuss the problem and construct a model to investigate it. Using
the model I will show how surprisingly deep insights into group decision
making have been found.

Speaker: Lewis Mitchell

Title: An introduction to data assimilation and ensemble Kalman filtering

A fundamental problem in numerical weather prediction is how to
estimate the current state of the atmosphere. With the number of
observations available generally being orders of magnitude smaller
than the model dimension, this is highly non-trivial. Data
assimilation is a way of combining imperfect observations of a system
with a numerical model to produce an estimate of the state of the
system.

In this talk, we will introduce one of the state-of-the art tools in
data assimilation, the ensemble Kalman filter, and show how it arises
from Bayesian estimation and/or variational approaches. We will
illustrate its use through some simple climatic models.


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