National Workshop: Collaborative Research in Engineering and Geoscience: Process-driven Risk Assessment and Mitigation in the Context of Sustainable Development

Furbish/0525781（与Mauldon/CMS-0529898配对）范德比尔特该奖项支持一个国家研讨会，以探索和阐述工程与地球科学之间的研究合作的新机会，主题是可持续发展背景下的过程驱动的风险评估和缓解。研讨会的参与者将代表广泛的专业，背景和职业阶段。为期三天的研讨会将于2005年夏季由范德比尔特大学主办，其成果将是向国家科学基金会和研究界提交一份关于这种合作的科学和社会需求的报告，以及一份优先跨学科研究领域的清单。研讨会的主题将集中在评估过程驱动的系统风险和可靠性，以及在系统行为的背景下降低和缓解风险的策略。要检查的系统涉及自然和设计的组件，并可能需要在时间尺度上的系统行为建模，其中工程设计寿命接近地质和地球物理过程的“深”时间。研讨会组织者的目的是超越目前主要基于现有物理和环境条件的系统行为评估方法，而是专注于评估活动过程而不是当前状态的下一代方法和工具，并结合相关时间依赖过程的动态建模来预测未来的行为。此外，讲习班组织者设想“风险和可靠性”适用于环境和生态系统的健康和运作，以及在传统工程意义上适用于人类和社会风险以及设计系统的可靠性。组织者认为，某些专题领域将立即从工程和地球科学界之间的交流中获益，因为这些社区的联合专业知识可能会直接产生进步，或者因为这些领域涉及目前处于危险之中的系统（例如沿海土地和湿地）。迫切需要发展和加强工程和地球科学界的跨学科合作努力，这些努力的重点是：（一）在进步和创新需要两个学科的知识和观点的关键领域进行合作研究;（二）发展和改善这些社区之间的教育联盟;以及（iii）将工程和地球科学专业知识联合应用于美国和世界范围内日益增加的社会重要性和复杂性问题。这种需要的理由是令人信服的。未来几十年，美国和世界范围内的人口增长将导致对资源的需求，包括可居住空间，以前所未有的规模，与此同时，对旨在实现这些资源的可持续利用的战略和技术的需求也是前所未有的-平衡资源和生境的利用与它们的长期保护和保存，生态系统和人类一样。这些问题从根本上涉及工程和地球科学的交叉，并明确指出需要将这些学科的现有知识和专门知识结合起来，以解决风险、缓解战略和未来发展的可持续性问题，以及需要发展新的思维方式来思考复杂的自然和工程系统，以及它们在从几分钟到几十年和几个世纪的时间尺度上的耦合行为。

Furbish/0525781 (paired with Mauldon/CMS-0529898)VanderbiltThis award supports a national workshop to explore and set forth emerging opportunities for research collaboration between engineering and geoscience under the theme of Process-Driven Risk Assessment and Mitigation in the Context of Sustainable Development. Workshop participants will represent a broad cross-section of specialties, backgrounds and career stages. The product of the three-day workshop, to be hosted by Vanderbilt University during the summer of 2005, will be a report to NSF and the research community on the scientific and societal needs for such collaboration, and a list of priority cross-disciplinary research areas. Intellectual Merit The workshop theme will center on assessments of process-driven system risk and reliability, and on risk reduction and mitigation strategies in the context of system behavior. The systems to be examined involve both natural and designed components and may necessitate modeling of system behavior over time scales wherein engineering design lives approach the "deep" time of geological and geophysical processes. The workshop organizers mean to aim beyond current approaches to assessment of system behavior that are based largely on extant physical and environmental conditions, and instead focus on next-generation methods and tools that assess active processes rather than current state, and incorporate dynamical modeling of relevant time-dependent processes to anticipate future behavior. In addition, the workshop organizers envision "risk and reliability" as being applied to the health and functioning of environmental and ecological systems, as well as being applied in a conventional engineering sense to human and social risks and designed-system reliability. The organizers believe that certain topical areas are poised to gain immediately from exchanges between the engineering and geoscience communities, either because advances are likely to emerge directly from the joint expertise of these communities, or because these areas involve presently at-risk systems (e.g. coastal lands and wetlands). Broader Impacts A pressing need exists to develop and strengthen cooperative cross-disciplinary efforts in the engineering and geoscience communities - efforts that are focused on: (i) collaborative research in key areas where advances and innovations will require the knowledge and perspectives of both disciplines; (ii) developing and improving educational alliances between these communities; and (iii) applying engineering and geoscience expertise jointly to problems of increasing societal importance and complexity, both in the U.S. and worldwide. The reasons for this need are compelling. Projected population growth within the U.S. and worldwide over the next several decades will lead to demands for resources, including habitable space, at unprecedented scales, and with this an equally unprecedented need for strategies and technologies aimed at achieving the sustainable use of these resources - balancing utilization of resources and habitat with their protection and preservation for the long-term well-being of ecological systems and humans alike. These concerns fundamentally involve the intersection of engineering and the geosciences, and point clearly to the need to mesh existing knowledge and expertise of these disciplines in addressing questions of risk, mitigation strategies and sustainability of future development, as well as the need to develop novel ways of thinking about complex systems, natural and engineered, and their coupled behavior over times scales ranging from minutes to decades and centuries.