Osamu Akashi/Japan: Osamu received his M.Sc in 2005 from Kyoto University, Japan where he is currently a first year Ph.D student.

His main fields of scientific interest include modeling human activity, social systems and their impacts on the global environment, especially on climate change. At IIASA he will continue his work on a global CO2 emission model. In this model, energy related technology/devices are analyzed. The model will help to decide how many such devices will be introduced by a market mechanism. As a result of the model analysis, amounts of future energy use and CO2 emissions will be estimated.

Suzanne Carter/South Africa: Suzanne graduated with a B.Sc Hons in Environmental and Geographical Science in 2002 from the University of Cape Town. She is currently a second year Ph.D student at the same institution, after upgrading her MSc project in 2003. The title of her thesis is “Approaches to quantifying and reducing uncertainty in GCM’s over southern Africa”. The research characterises daily circulation dynamics, using pattern recognition software. Model biases will be corrected using an algorithmic regression, specific to the southern African domain.

Her main fields of scientific interest include translating climate modelling to useful formats for adaptations work and profiling extreme weather events in terms of disaster management. At IIASA she will be looking at the impacts climate change will have on the South African wine industry - focusing particularly on the future supply of water - using three downscaled Global Circulation Model projections for 2046-2066.

His main fields of interest are Cultural Theory, the concept of fairness, and controls affecting the international distribution of technology, particularly technology that has both peaceful and hostile applications (dual use). While at IIASA, Sam will concentrate on contributing to current research at the Institute on governance and fairness. He will be working on the Governance and Fairness project in the Risk, Modeling and Society section of the Population and Society Theme.

During his YSSP assignment he will explore methods of inducing and reducing the exhaustive set of gradual rules using the ordinal properties of data, regression problems with monotonic functions, simplifying the induced functions and variable-precision rough approximation for noisy data.

Bartosz Kozlowski/Poland: Bartosz received his M.Eng.Sc. from Warsaw University of Technology in 2004. The subject of his thesis concerned applications of wavelet analysis to data mining with emphasis on time series analysis, mainly forecasting. He is currently a second year Ph.D. student at Warsaw University of Technology.

His main fields of scientific interest include data mining, operational research, decision support, forecasting, and wavelet analysis. During his stay at IIASA he will contribute to the further development of the SMT (Structured Modeling Technology), in particular to providing data mining based techniques for analysis of complex models.

Amit Kumar/India: Amit graduated in 1995 from Mangalore University in Civil Engineering. He is currently a final year Ph.D. student at Delhi College of Engineering, University of Delhi, India. Title of his thesis is “ Assessment of disaster mitigation through seismic retrofitting of existing buildings” The research study focuses on developing earthquake retrofitting techniques for earthquake prone areas of India and assessing the losses and damage associated with buildings. The expected outcome of the research is developing a tool for policy makers to assess the feasibility of seismic disaster mitigation.

His main fields of scientific interest include disaster management, seismic risk assessment using mathematical modeling and GIS & Remote Sensing. At IIASA he will be working on CATSIM to develop financial implications of disaster risk mitigation.

Hai Thi Minh Nguyen/Vietnam: Minh Hai graduated in Computer Science from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST). The title of her Master's thesis was “Parallel Clustering Algorithms for Categorical and Mixed Data”. She is currently a second year Ph.D student at JAIST. Title of her thesis is “Effective and Efficient Parallel Data Mining Algorithms for Solving Real Life Problems”.

Her main fields of scientific interest include data mining, parallel techniques and their application for solving real life problems. At IIASA, she will use the techniques of data mining to explore the methodology and tools for accessing the impact of climatic factors on crop yields and forecasting long-term climate change.

Unmesh Patniak/India: Unmesh obtained his Masters Degree in Economics from Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune, India in 2001. Currently he is enrolled for the Doctoral Program in Economics at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India. The tentative title of his thesis is “Climate Change and Vulnerability in India”.

His research interests include environmental and development economics (specifically issues relating to poverty and vulnerability). During his visit to IIASA as a YSSPer he will be working on vulnerability and impacts on households and the poor to current and future hazards.

His main fields of scientific interest include: conservation ecology, systems ecology, ethno-ecology, human behavior and perceptions concerning environment, modeling, complex systems, integrated and interdisciplinary approaches, and participative methods. Whilst at IIASA Martin willl be working on knowledge elicitation in the context of integrated watershed management.

Jing Zheng/China: Jing graduated in Geography from Beijing Normal University in 2004. He is currently a first year Ph.D student at the College of Resources Science and Technology, Beijing Normal University. The focus of his thesis is on the effect of land use/land cover change on hydrological response mechanism and its modeling.

His main fields of scientific interest include hydrology modeling, land /land cover change, remote sensing and integrated disaster risk management. At IIASA he will be working on studying the impact of land use/land cover change on surface runoff in the Shenzhen Region of China, as well as gaining insight and skills in hydrological modeling.

Responsible for this page: Barbara Hauser
Last updated: 10 Aug 2005