Three major UK utility providers form new partnership with the National Digital Twin programme in critical step toward resilient infrastructure in developing a Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo). The collaboration will apply the UK’s state of the art capabilities in systems engineering, digital asset management and modelling to the climate crisis to plan a more resilient built environment, keeping us all safer in the face of flooding and extreme weather. Professor Jim Q. Smith has joined this collaboration and will lead the elicitation of the vulnerability of asset owners' critical infrastructure relevant to assessing and mitigating the deepening threats posed to water, telecommunications and power supply as a result of increasing flooding risks induced by climate change.

Congratulations to Emeritus Professor David Firth who has been announced as RSS president for 2023-24.
https://www.rss.org.uk/news-publication/news-publications/2021/general-news/david-firth-confirmed-as-next-rss-president/

Congratulations to Jere Koskela who has recently been announced as a winner of the Bernoulli Society's New Researcher Award, in recognition of his innovative research in probability. The Award will be announced at the 42nd Conference on Stochastic Processes and their Applications to be held in Wuhan, China, June 27 - July 1, 2022, and it comes with a an invitation to present an Award Lecture at this Congress. A really significant honour - http://www.bernoulli-society.org/prizes/267-bernoulli-society-new-researcher-award

An EPSRC Research Software Engineer Fellowship has been awarded to Dr Heather Turner in which she will establish the role of Research Software Engineers in creating more sustainable and inclusive large-scale software projects. The RSE project will foster the next generation of R project developers, creating a more sustainable and inclusive base for the future. Further details here (link to https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/research_software_engineers)

The Statistics Department has recently been awarded funding from NERC for the project "Statistical inference and uncertainty quantification for complex process-based models using multiple data sets". Principal Investigator Richard Everitt, will collaborate on the project with other members of the Department (Rito Dutta, Christian Robert and Martyn Plummer), the Ecology group at the University of Reading, and with the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science.

Making responsible decisions about landscapes is facilitated by the use of complex models able to represent multiple competing demands on land use. Decisions about land use require that trade-offs between competing demands be identified, and their consequences through time be characterised. Models consisting of stochastic computer simulations are increasingly used to make realistic predictions about real world processes from socio-ecological systems involving land use. dels attempt to simulate all relevant aspects of a real physical system, they may involve many parameters, some of which will be difficult to set correctly. The final objective of these models is to assess the possible consequences of management decisions, such as the placement of wind turbines, thus it is crucially important that the uncertainty introduced by calibrating parameter values be understood.

In order to make informed decisions, one needs to be able to consider the effects of a number of complex interacting temporal and spatial processes (e.g. hydrological, ecological, agricultural, economic, climate). The project will develop new techniques in Approximate Bayesian Computation to enable parameter estimation for models for these processes, taking into account the impact of model misspecification. This project is part of the Strategic Priorities Fund on Landscape Decisions. https://landscapedecisions.org/