News


2024

Feb 1 Reed shares AGU Fellows Speak Perspective in the February Hydrology Newsletter

“Hydro-Fellows Speak” contributions provide a chance for those who have recently been selected for AGU honors to share their perspective on life, research, and lessons learned along the way. In this perspective, Reed suggests investing in the following three actions can help position you for success: (1) make time to continuously explore new ideas, (2) invest in growing productive collaborations, and (3) help others find their own success.

Jan 26 Reed participates in NCA5 Webinar – Complex Systems and Compound Extreme Events

USGCRP is hosting a series of webinars on the findings of the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5). The NCA5 chapter webinars share the findings of each chapter from the authors themselves. Each virtual one-hour event includes Q&A discussions. This webinar is focused on Chapter 18. Sector Interactions, Multiple Stressors, and Complex Systems and the report focus on Compound Events. Interconnected networks of people, their livelihoods and housing, infrastructure, and nature influence climate risks and are increasingly vulnerable to climate impacts. Compounding and cascading interactions between sectors, hazards, and geographies magnify the impacts of climate change, especially for already-overburdened communities. Effective decision-making and climate responses benefit from collaborative approaches that incorporate diverse types of knowledge and address the challenges of complex climate risks.

2023

Dec 1 Karimi et al ‘Diagnostic Framework for Evaluating How Parametric Uncertainty Influences Agro-Hydrologic Model Projections of Crop Yields Under Climate Change’ honored with WRR Editor’s Choice Award

The Editors of Water Resources Research award the annual Editors’ Choice Award for papers that are considered to be of extremely high quality and significance.

Nov 28 600 years of tree rings reveal climate risks in California

An interdisciplinary collaboration used 600 years of tree rings from the San Joaquin Valley to reconstruct plausible daily records of weather and streamflow scenarios during that period. Modeling based on those scenarios revealed the region has experienced vast variability in climate extremes, with droughts and floods that were more severe and lasted longer than what has been seen in the modern record. This new approach, combining paleo information with synthetic weather generation, may help policymakers and scientists better understand – and plan for – California’s flood and drought risks and how they will be compounded by climate change.

Nov 14 Reed invited speaker for the CSIRO Sustainability program

CSIRO is Australia’s national science organisation and one of the largest and most diverse scientific research organisations in the world. Our research focuses on the biggest challenges facing the nation. They also manage Australia’s national research infrastructure and collections.

May 3 Reed featured in Wall Street Journal informational video ‘The Fate of Urban Freshwater’

The future of freshwater is transforming as cities grow and the climate changes. Water-recycling programs work toward reshaping the current linear strategies around natural resources into cyclical ones that minimize waste.

April 22 Collaborative paper lead by Matteo Giuliani ‘Unintended Consequences of Climate Change Mitigation for African river basin’ honored as a 2023 National Champion Finalist for the Frontiers Planet Prize

In order to mobilize nations and the global community of scientists conducting research on the planetary boundaries, the Frontiers Research Foundation, created the Frontiers Planet Prize on Earth Day, 2022– a global competition for scientists and research institutions to propose solutions to help the planet remain within the safe operating space of any one or more of the 9 planetary boundaries.The collaborative paper Giuliani et al was selected as the top contribution and finalist from Italy. A total of 20 National Champion Finalist papers were honored across all areas of science from which the 4 International Champions were awarded 1-million Swiss francs each.

March 9 Dave Gold wins UCOWR top 2023 dissertation in Natural Science & Engineering

David Gold, postdoctoral researcher in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been awarded the National Outstanding Dissertation Prize for Natural Science and Engineering by the Universities Council on Water Resources (UCOWR). Gold’s research focuses on infrastructure planning under conditions of uncertainty, such as those stemming from climate change and population growth. A key focus of his work is the human dimensions of water supply planning problems, including equity, power dynamics, and financial risk.

March 2 Reed and Characklis research groups provide an infrastructure investment briefing to Tampa Bay Water

Tampa Bay Water supplies wholesale drinking water to Hillsborough County, Pasco County, Pinellas County, New Port Richey, St. Petersburg and Tampa. TBW supplies water to more than 2.5 million people through their member governments.Tampa Bay Water was created in 1998 after a two-year process that resulted in contracts and legislation that changed the name, structure and operations of the West Coast Regional Water Supply Authority. The creation of Tampa Bay Water ended the region’s ‘water wars’ and created a new alliance between the six governments in west-central Florida.

January 26 Reed co-chairs US scientific leadership report on biological, climate science

A new government report – co-led by Patrick Reed, the Joseph C. Ford Professor in Cornell’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering – will help the U.S. realize emerging scientific opportunities over the next decade by providing strategies for upholding international research leadership in biological and environmental science.The report, “U.S. Scientific Leadership: Addressing Energy, Ecosystems, Climate, and Sustainable Prosperity,” was published in December by the Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee’s Subcommittee on International Benchmarking. Reed co-chairs the subcommittee, which produced the report at the request of the U.S. Department of Energy.

2022

November 14 Reed invited speaker to the World Bank Learning Session on Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty

Climate change, poverty, and inequality are the defining issues of our age. The World Bank Group is the biggest multilateral funder of climate investments in developing countries. And we intend to go further in helping countries reduce poverty and rise to the challenges of climate change.

November 2 Reed invited speaker to the Helmholtz Einstein International Berlin Research School in Data Science (HEIBRiDS) seminar

In 2018 the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) and the Helmholtz Association established HEIBRiDS, the Helmholtz Einstein International Research School in Data Science. As an interdisciplinary program, HEIBRiDS trains young scientists in Data Science applications within a broad range of natural science domains, spanning from Earth & Environment, Astronomy, Space & Planetary Research to Geosciences, Materials & Energy and Molecular Medicine. The mission of HEIBRiDS is to educate new generations of researchers, who, as skilled data scientists, understand the demands and the challenges of the disciplines in which data science has become indispensable.

September 23 Reed keynote speaker at International Federation of Automatic Control’s Workshop on Control Methods for Water Resources Systems

This workshop provides an environment where researchers, practitioners, and representatives of industry applying control methods to water resources management can meet, exchange ideas, and present innovative solutions. Contributions of focus include: (1) studies of present and future methods for modelling and identification of water resources systems; (2) planning and control methods that allow for multi-purpose use, for instance, the management of lakes and reservoirs; (3) modelling and control of water distribution networks; and (4) case studies of the application of innovative modelling and control methods to water resource systems.

September 19 Reed elected AGU Fellow

Patrick Reed, Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering, was elected as an American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Fellow. He joined 53 other individuals in the 2022 Class of Fellows. Since 1962, the AGU Union Fellows Committee has selected less than 0.1% of members as new Fellows. AGU notes that Fellows are selected because they have made outstanding achievements and contributions by pushing forward the frontiers of our science. Fellows embody AGU’s vision of a thriving, sustainable, and equitable future powered by discovery, innovation, and action.

August 25 Reed invited panelist in eCornell Keynote ‘Engineering a Livable Future for Everyone’

Humanity is at a critical juncture. While advances in transportation, urban infrastructure systems, and technology have led to unprecedented innovation, we still have a long way to go to build a society that is more equitable, sustainable, and socially just. The myriad challenges we face in population growth, urbanization, and the acceleration of climate change require thought leadership and action, where research and expertise from a variety of disciplines is translated into impactful practice. Join our panel from Cornell Civil and Environmental Engineering for an engaging and interactive kickoff to our Keynote series on thriving communities and global health.

August 23 Andrew Hamilton’s resilient CA water portfolio planning research highlighted in LA Times

The problems also aren’t unique to Southern California. Land subsidence, in particular, is posing significant threats to water infrastructure in the Central Valley, which is sinking faster than any other part of the state.The land beneath one federally managed aqueduct known as the Friant-Kern Canal, which moves water from the Fresno area toward Bakersfield, has sunk about 13 feet since its completion about 70 years ago. As a result, some sections of the canal have seen their carrying capacity reduced by more than 50%. Earlier this year, federal, state and local officials gathered to break ground on the first phase of a $500 million project to shore up that sinking canal, which was showing visible cracks and other signs of damage. The project “symbolizes the importance of strong partnerships so that we can address critical repair needs on our state’s aging water infrastructure,” Department of Water Resources director Karla Nemeth said at the time.

July 20 Reed invited speaker for the National Academies Urban Sustainability Infrastructure Workshop

An ad hoc committee will plan and organize a workshop to explore state-of-the-art analytical tools that could advance urban sustainability through improved prioritization of public works projects. This workshop will bring together diverse stakeholders to discuss the optimization of work plans given constrained resources, the evaluation of best-value delivery methodologies for targeted public works projects, sensing, information and communications technologies in conjunction with descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive models for decision making, and the potential socioeconomic impact of investment choices including recent trends to make equity central to sustainability efforts.

June 30 UNC and Cornell research on designing inter-utility cooperative investment agreements featured in Smart Water Magazine’s June 2022 Issue No 13

A growing population, urbanization and economic growth are increasingly putting more and more pressure on urban water supply systems. These facilities are also threatened by the effects of climate change, such as water quality deterioration, longer periods of droughts or more frequent flooding. Are inter-utility agreements the answer to these rising challenges? Urban water utilities in the United States, but also anywhere in the world that faces similar challenges in supply and demand and in affordably financing infrastructure improvements, are partnering with neighbouring utilities to help mitigate their risks. This cooperation between water utilities was the topic of research chosen by a group of academics from the North Carolina Research Triangle to identify the viability of both fixed and adjustable capacity agreements.

June 14 Reed invited speaker in Alphabet X  seminar on challenges and recent innovations for addressing risk and resilience in Food-Energy-Water systems

At X, projects prototype, experiment and iterate to derisk their moonshot technologies and build the foundation for a strong business. When the signals are right, innovative science and technology projects move on from the Factory to the next stage of their journey. Throughout the course of history, we’ve seen that when people set their minds to wildly ambitious goals, the seemingly impossible starts to become possible. Moonshot thinking is about just that — pursuing things that sound undoable, but if done, could redefine humanity. At X, we’re trying to build a “moonshot factory”, a place where the processes and culture make it easier to make radical breakthroughs — repeatedly. Here are the guiding principles that have been most helpful to us in X’s first 10 years, and we encourage others to use them too.

June 9 Reed invited speaker to share MultiSector Dynamics Research Vision and recent Reed Group research with the Papo Conexus initiative lead by several national Brazilian groups and their international network of collaborators

A NEXUS perspective promotes understanding of the interdependencies between the water, energy and food sectors, influencing policies in other areas as well, such as climate, biodiversity and cities. The NEXUS perspective seeks solutions that involve multiple disciplines, thus escaping the silos of knowledge, enabling the identification of mutually beneficial responses and favoring the potential for cooperation between all sectors. Papo Conexus aims to bring national and international speakers to discuss topics related, preferably, to this NEXUS. The network participating in this initiative includes Brazilian national (UFC, UnB, USP) and international (University of Wageningen, University of Georgia, Potsdam University, SupAgro Montpellier) universities and Brazilian national (FUNCEME, INPE, CPTEC) and international (Karlsruhe Institute) research institutes. of Technology).

May 19 Texas Advanced Computer Center (TACC) Highlights WaterPaths Work Designing Inter-Utility Agreements in the Research Triangle, NC

A new study of water supply in the North Carolina Research Triangle found that agreements between water utilities can help mitigate their risks. The research used supercomputer allocations on the Stampede2 system of the Texas Advanced Computing Center awarded by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is funded by the National Science Foundation. The findings are generalizable to any place where water providers allocate regional water resources among users that face challenges in supply and demand and in affordably financing infrastructure improvements.

May 11 Reed Invited Speaker to the South Florida Water Management District’s Resiliency Working Group

The South Florida Water Management District is strongly committed to addressing the impacts of climate change, including rising sea levels, changing rainfall and flood patterns.  The current resiliency efforts focus on assessing how sea level rise and extreme events, including flood and drought events, happen under current and future climate conditions, and how they affect water resources management. The District is also making significant infrastructure adaptation investments that are needed to successfully implement its mission of safeguarding and restoring South Florida’s water resources and ecosystems, protecting communities from flooding, and ensuring an adequate water supply for all of South Florida’s needs. Working to ensure the region’s water resources and ecosystems resiliency, now and in the future, is part of everything the District does.

May 11 Andrew Hamilton’s resilient CA water portfolio investment partnerships research highlighted on NPR

Study warns of potential inequities from water infrastructure investments–The research paper advised that more robust financial planning at the start of major multi-agency water infrastructure projects can help ensure that all partners share the resulting water and financial outcomes. More and more often, water agencies throughout California are being asked to work together to bolster water infrastructure. For instance, the Friant-Kern Canal is currently being repaired thanks to a partnership between the state and federal government and local water agencies, local groundwater sustainability agencies have been tasked with community engagement for the sake of groundwater management, and Governor Newsom’s Water Resilience Portfolio Initiative sets out a plan for spending billions over the next decade on water storage and conveyance projects.

May 4 Eos Research Spotlight:Assessing Water Infrastructure Investments in California

With water scarcity increasing around the globe, arid regions are striving to develop more flexible and diversified water supplies. For example, California’s 2020 Water Resilience Portfolio Initiative recommends improving and expanding the state’s conveyance and storage infrastructure as well as developing groundwater banking and other means of more flexibly sharing water. The success of such initiatives depends in large part upon the ability of water providers to collaboratively finance and build new infrastructure. To date, most water supply and storage planning has relied on models that analyze average, project-level outcomes. But new research by Hamilton et al. in California’s southern Central Valley suggests these tools no longer suffice, especially when planning under future climate uncertainty.

April 7 Study examines financial risks of water resilience planning in California

Partnerships between water utilities, irrigation districts and other stakeholders in California will play a critical role in funding new infrastructure under the Water Resilience Portfolio Initiative announced in 2020 by Gov. Gavin Newsom, but a new study warns that benefits might not be evenly distributed without a proper structure to the partnership agreements. California’s initiative is a multi-billion dollar effort that encourages different water utilities and irrigation districts to work together to build shared infrastructure to reduce the effects of droughts, but a number of questions remain regarding how best to structure these agreements. In a new research article, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Cornell University explored partnership agreements in the context of the Friant-Kern Canal, which delivers water to irrigation districts and municipal utilities in the southern Central Valley of California.

February 10 ‘MultiSector dynamics’ studies how human, Earth systems interact

A new report co-authored by a Cornell researcher will help to steer the emerging field of multisector dynamics for years to come, shaping a strategy for the greater scientific community to better project the outcomes of human interactions with the natural world. The report outlines a vision for research approaches to better address the ways in which human systems – such as the economy, urbanization, technology and agriculture – co-evolve with Earth systems, such as climate, natural resources and wildlife.

MultiSector Dynamics: Scientific Challenges and a Research Vision for 2030” is an 82-page report developed for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

 

February 1 Study urges global cooperation to protect water, food security in African river basins

An international team led by the Environmental Intelligence for Global Change Lab at Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with researchers from Cornell University’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tufts University, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, has found that it is important to carefully coordinate global climate change mitigation policies to reduce unintended impacts to the water-energy-food nexus in African river basins. The study, published Feb. 1 in Nature Climate Change, explores more than 7,000 future scenarios that combine different climate and socio-economic projections with alternative mitigation policies. Results show that policy fragmentation between developed and developing countries in their approach to addressing carbon emissions from land-use changes can increase vulnerabilities in African basins.

 

January 20 Reed Appointed as an Editor in the American Geophysical Union’s Earth’s Future Gold Open-Access Journal

Earth’s Future is a transdisciplinary, Gold Open-Access journal. The journal examines the state of the planet and its inhabitants, sustainable and resilient societies, and the predictions of our common future. “I’m excited to join the tremendously talented editorial board of Earth’s Future as an Editor. This will provide me with an opportunity to engage research communities interested in better understanding deeply uncertain changes in coupled human-Earth systems, multisector dynamics (e.g., the food-energy-water nexus), and systems-based approaches to sustainability, energy transitions, and climate change”, said Reed.

 

2021

November 1 David Gold Invited Speaker at Equity in Water Resources Planning, part of the 2021 Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty Society Webinar Series

Regional cooperation among water utilities is a powerful mechanism for improving supply reliability and reducing cost in urban water supply systems. Coordinated drought mitigation and cooperative investment by urban water utilities can efficiently exploit existing water supplies and reduce or delay the need for new supply infrastructure. When included as part of adaptive planning strategies, cooperative mechanisms can improve robustness in the face of uncertainties stemming from a changing climate and population growth. Many existing approaches assume a “social planner’s” perspective when evaluating cooperative infrastructure investment and water portfolio management pathways, seeking to optimize regionally aggregated measures of system performance. These approaches assume cooperating parties will compromise their individual interests to achieve improved robustness for the regional system as a whole. This assumption underestimates the potential for partner defection from regional compromises and the potential for conflict. Alternatively, game theoretic approaches focus on the discovery of “stable” alternatives that balance the benefits of cooperation among regional partners. These strategies represent useful tools for conflict resolution but rely on strong assumptions about the preferences of each actor. Further, these strategies do not capture the underlying power dynamics within a water supply system that may spark conflict. This work contributes a new simulation-optimization centered framework for exploring defection, stability, and regional power dynamics in robust cooperative water supply investment pathways. Our framework uses multi-objective optimization as an exploratory tool to discover how cooperating partners may be incentivized to defect from regional agreements and identify how the actions of each regional actor shape the vulnerability of its cooperating partners. Our methodology is demonstrated on the Sedento Valley, a highly realistic regional urban water supply test case. The Sedento Valley results reveal complex regional power dynamics and suggest ways to improve cooperative stability. Results from this work are broadly applicable to water supply pathway planning problems generally.

 

 

October 29 David Gold Invited Speaker at the 2021 IEEE Vis Conference Session on Visualization Challenges in Deep Uncertainty

The energy sector faces many deep uncertainties about the future, including climate change, growth in energy demand and technologic capabilities, and cybersecurity. Deep uncertainty is characterized by a level of uncertainty where we do not know how to model a system or how to value the desirability of outcomes. Methodologies exist to evaluate the level of uncertainty in a problem, and to help reason on risk and decisions; however, traditional making and visualization techniques may not be applicable when facing deeply uncertain problems. In this application spotlight, we provide an overview of deep uncertainty and the unique challenges it poses, the need for decision making under deep uncertainty (DMDU) methodologies, followed by several lightning talk topics. Our speakers discuss the challenge of visualizing deep uncertainty, deep uncertainty in power sector resilience planning and how to visualize alternatives across a wide range of possible futures, and specific visual analytic tools relevant to deep uncertainty planning. David’s presentation can be found here.

 

October 26 Reed Invited Speaker at the 2021 New York Scientific Data Summit Providing a Vision for Innovating Water Planning under Deep Uncertainty using AI and High Performance Computing

The New York Scientific Data Summit (NYSDS), established by Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and led by its Computational Science Initiative, connects researchers, developers, and end-users from academia, industry, and government to exchange ideas, foster cross-disciplinary collaboration, and build a community around common data research interests. As part of its continuing effort to accelerate data-driven discovery and innovation in science and industry, NYSDS 2021 will focus on the mathematical/algorithmic, machine learning/AI, and high-performance computational challenges of high-consequence decision-making in large-scale, complex, and highly uncertain systems. Technical presentations will cover the mathematical/algorithmic, machine learning/AI, and high-performance computing challenges that need to be overcome to make progress.

July 28 Reed Group (Cornell) and Characklis Group (UNC) Brief Tampa Bay  Water Authority Board on New Infrastructure Pathway Planning Decision Support Tool

Tampa Bay Water has been working with Cornell University and the University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill to build a water supply infrastructure planning decision support tool to help identify timing of when new supply sources should be online as demand for water in the region increases. This decision support tool combines yield and reliability of the regional system with a full financial model, allowing decision makers to look at different future scenarios of projects and their implications on the uniform rate. This new decision support tool can analyze a range of future uncertainties, including member government demands and climate, while simulating how different configurations will perform under these varying conditions. The model includes key financial metrics information for the Board to consider and use to make informed decisions regarding timing of projects and debt issuance.

June 17 CEE engineers author Science perspective on climate-induced relocation

Global environmental changes such as climate change, sea level rise and land use are increasing the likelihood of relocation for potentially millions of people. Current approaches to planned relocation are likely to be woefully inadequate, according to Patrick Reed, the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, who co-authored a Science magazine perspective offering key considerations and strategies for needed actions. In the piece, the authors argue that given the highly uncertain tradeoffs and consequences of different options for planned relocation, scientific efforts should be careful of claiming to adequately predict the future.

March 26 Study exposes global ripple effects of regional water scarcity

Water scarcity is often understood as a problem for regions experiencing drought, but a new study from Cornell and Tufts universities finds that not only can localized water shortages impact the global economy, but changes in global demand send positive and negative ripple effects to water basins across the globe. The study, “Evaluating the economic impact of water scarcity in a changing world,” was published March 26 in Nature Communications, and uniquely captures the interdependent effects of global trade consistently with differences in regional climate policies as well as river basin-specific capacity to address water scarcity risks.

January 25 Reed awarded $1.4 M grant to advance human-natural system modeling

A Cornell engineer is advancing the field of ‘multi-sector dynamics’ with a new $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy that will focus on techniques for better projecting the outcomes of human interactions with the natural world. Patrick Reed, the Joseph C. Ford Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, received the grant in collaboration with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Integrated Multisector Multiscale Modeling project. As scientists and policy makers increasingly turn toward mathematical modeling to help inform their decision making, the project aims to better predict how human systems – such as the economy, urbanization, technology, and agriculture – co-evolve with Earth systems, such as climate, natural resources and wildlife.

2020

December 11 Collaborative work lead by Andrew Hamilton (UNC) on snowpack-based index insurance risk tradeoffs for hydropower featured in EOS Editor’s Highlight

There has been an increasing number of papers in Water Resources Research on financial instruments to manage climatic variability. Hamilton et al. [2020] introduce a new index insurance instrument to help hydropower producers who depend on snow melt to cope with the risks of variable snowpack. This is a critical risk in snow-dominated regions such as California, where a significant fraction of the streamflow every year comes from a small number of large winter storms that do not always occur. The authors use analysis of the relationship between snowpack and revenues to build a risk model. They examine the financial structure of a hydropower company and the possible attitudes of risk managers to debt and revenue risk. This can limit the extent to which a loss of revenue caused by drought reduces the long-term financial viability of a utility, improving outcomes for the public.

November 19 Julie Quinn and Antonia Hadjimichael Eos Research Spotlight for their work in the Upper CO evaluating the scenario neutral assumption in DMDU

Effective management of water resources depends on accurately predicting future water supplies and demands that regularly fluctuate because of population growth, climate change, and many other factors. To deal with large uncertainties in these considerations, water resource planners often use what is known as a scenario-neutral approach in their projections. Now Quinn et al. question whether this approach is truly scenario neutral. The authors argue that sensitivity analyses incorporate implicit assumptions about the ranges of and correlations among factors that have large uncertainties and that these assumptions could, in turn, influence conclusions regarding which factors are most important and which policies will therefore be the most robust, essentially negating the approach’s neutrality.

November 18 Rebecca Smith’s Walter Orr Roberts Public Lecture explaining how the Bureau of Reclamation is applying MORDM in the Colorado River Basin

The Colorado River is critically important—it supplies water to over 40 million people, irrigates over 5 million acres of agriculture, and supports hydropower, environmental, and recreational resources. The Colorado River Basin is also incredibly complex—it spans seven U.S. states and two Mexican states, has highly variable hydrology, and is overallocated. Long-term planning in the Colorado River Basin has always been challenging due to uncertainties in hydrology, demand, policy, and different management priorities among stakeholders. These challenges are now exacerbated by the need to account for potential impacts of climate change. This context is best described as deep uncertainty, where a wide range of assumptions about future conditions are plausible, multiple management perspectives are expressed, and it is impossible to identify the best assumptions about conditions or priorities. This talk presents studies conducted by Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Modeling and Research Team that demonstrate uncertainty in climate and hydrology and explore Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU) techniques to help address planning challenges.

November 10 Reed conference opening plenary speaker for DMDU 2020 discussing Learning & Actions in Adaptive Pathways

The Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU) is a multi-disciplinary association of practicing professionals, scholars and students working to improve processes, methods, and tools for decision making under deep uncertainty, facilitate their use in practice, and foster effective and responsible decision making in our rapidly changing world. Our society is unique in its focus on developing, disseminating, and using these DMDU approaches across multiple policy domains such as energy, health, social and economic well-being, defense, water, environment, and transport.

September 17 Reed plenary speaker for the UK Operational Research Society OR62 Conference

The UK Operational Research Society is the home of the operational research and analytics community. They are a member-led organisation supporting professional operational researchers across industries and academia. We promote the understanding and use of operational research in all areas of life, including industry, business, government, health and education. The society is a registered charity which does everything from helping OR specialists push the boundaries of the discipline through publications and events to undertaking outreach work aimed at helping everyone from business leaders to schoolchildren find out about the benefits of OR.

September 16 The Aerospace Corporation Highlights Reed Group Collaborations Over Last Two Decades of Satellite Portfolio Design Innovations using Multi-objective Evolutionary Optimization

Beginning as a small group in the early 2000s, the team developed industry-leading expertise in evolutionary computation through collaboration with university researchers in civil engineering studying similar multi-objective problems. “It’s a mutually beneficial relationship,” said Dr. Matthew Ferringer, an Associate General Manager at Aerospace and who has spearheaded the effort. “The corporate university partnership program gave us seed money to invest in student projects, which paid dividends for research and code sharing.” Ferringer’s doctoral advisor Patrick Reed from Cornell University has been a key collaborator, along with another of his former students Jon Herman, now a professor at the University of California, Davis. The academic connection helped the team gain access to a supercomputer at the University of Illinois, enabling them to test their theories and apply the findings to ongoing constellation design work.

July 15 Reed research on satellite constellations wins gold at the ‘Humies’

A collaborative paper between Patrick Reed, the Joseph C. Ford Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and The Aerospace Corporation has won the top 2020 Gold Medal prize in the global “Humies” competition hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group in Genetic and Evolutionary Optimization. Reed’s Humies prize corresponds to a $5,000 award and designation of the top evolutionary algorithm-derived breakthrough that exceeds prior human benchmarks in the evolutionary computation area of artificial intelligence for 2020. His 10-minute competition entry video can be viewed on the Humies website.

July 14 Reed is 2nd author on JWRPM paper awarded the Best Seminal Paper of 2020

The Best Seminal Paper is awarded annually in the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management for a single paper that has been recognized in strongly advancing the field and has strongly shaped contributions since its publication.

“State of the Art for Genetic Algorithms and Beyond” , JWRPM, 136(4), 412-432.

July 10 Keyvan Malek’s Work Highlights Climate Change Forces Farmers to Pick Low Yields or Revenue Instability

Climate change will leave some farmers with a difficult conundrum, according to a new study by researchers from Cornell and Washington State University: either risk more revenue volatility or live with a more predictable decrease in crop yields. As water shortages and higher temperatures drive down crop yields in regions that depend heavily on seasonal snow, the choice to use more drought-tolerant crop varieties comes at a cost, according to model projections detailed in the paper “Water Rights Shape Crop Yield and Revenue Volatility Tradeoff for Adaptation in Snow Dependent Systems,” published July 10 in Nature Communications.

July 1 Tom Wild’s Sambor Work Honored With the Quentin Martin Best Practice Oriented Paper Award 

Quentin Martin Award is presented annually to the authors of the outstanding practice-oriented paper in the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management (JWRPM). The publication may cover any relevant topic in the field of water resource planning, management, or operations, but it must clearly demonstrate the application of advanced or advancing methods to the solution of a real-world water resource problem. See follow up in The Guardian “Cambodia Scraps Plans for Mekong Hydropower Dams

 

June 26 National Center for Supercomputing Applications Feature Reed Group Petascale Accomplishments on Blue Waters

Building upon remote sensing work focused on global flooding they conducted using NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer in 2015, Patrick Reed, the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, and his team discovered the right combination of factors to make a four-satellite constellation not only possible but economically feasible. The publication of the team’s results earlier this year, including in Nature Communications, has had the science community buzzing. Reed believes a large part of the response to the work is its practicality. This work has also recently been named one of eight global finalists for top human competitive result using genetic and evolutionary computation in 2020 (the Humies).

May 18 Antonia Hadjimichael Highlights the Challenging and Complex Dynamics of Water Scarcity in the Upper Colorado

In order to account for the myriad laws, climate patterns and water demands, among other factors, Hadjimichael and co-authors used the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s model to simulate more than 1 million potential scenarios, depicting the Colorado River basin and its dependents in a collection of possible futures. The simulation offers a diverse view of each dependent’s vulnerability to a water shortage. One key finding: Different local stakeholders experience the same drought in potentially very different ways, even when they are located near each other or possess similar rights to the water. This poses a challenge because studies that look at average vulnerabilities across groups – such as farmers, residents or businesses – or regions would miss critical details.

May 12 Reed Invited  Remote Speaker for the Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty Summer Seminar Series

DMDU is a multi-disciplinary association of professionals dedicated to improving decision making under deep uncertainty. Deep uncertainty exists when parties to a decision do not know, or cannot agree on, the system model that relates action to consequences, the probability distributions to place over the inputs to these models, which consequences to consider and their relative importance. Deep uncertainty often involves decisions that are made over time in dynamic interaction with the system. To learn more about the society, check out the website here.

March 12 Reed Invited  Remote Speaker at the Symposium on Vulnerability and Urban Resilience: Socio-hydrological Risks in Mexico City (MEGADAPT)

The symposium brought together distinguished academics, authorities and social actors to analyze the role of sustainability sciences in reducing water vulnerability and managing urban resilience in Mexico City. The symposium is part of the activities that are ending the “MEGADAPT” research project that has been developed collaboratively by the National Laboratory of Sustainability Sciences (LANCIS) and the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University , with funding from the National Science Foundation.

February 25 Reed Invited Seminar Speaker for the Computational Urban Sciences Group at Oak Ridge National Lab

The Computational Urban Sciences Group is comprised of a multi-disciplinary set of scientists carrying out applied research at the intersection of computing and complex urban systems in the emerging environment of smart cities, energy infrastructures, a modernizing electric grid, smarter and sustainable mobility, responsive buildings, changing impacts of severe weather and climate, data driven emergency response, and resiliency. The advances are enabled by the growing body of technologies that includes big-data, high-performance computing, modeling and simulation, machine learning, and visualization.

January 16 Nature Research Highlight for the Reed Group and The Aerospace Corporation Discovery of Low Cost, Long Life Near Continuous Global Coverage Satellite Constellations

A four-satellite network takes advantage of forces that would hamper other spacecraft. Engineers have discovered orbits that allow satellites to harness forces that would disrupt other craft — making it possible for a four-craft constellation to monitor almost the entire globe at once.

January 14 US NSF Research Highlight for the Reed Group and The Aerospace Corporation Discovery of Low Cost, Long Life Near Continuous Global Coverage Satellite Constellations

“This research project is important for geoscientists, information technologists, and researchers in many other areas of science and engineering,” says Edward Walker, a program director in NSF’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. “The discovery has important implications for global commerce and national defense vital to our country. NSF funds high-performance computing instruments such as Blue Waters, which includes software and human experts to assist scientists in using the instrument, to enable discoveries that would not be possible otherwise.”

January 10 Reed Group and The Aerospace Corporation Discover Low Cost, Long Life Near Continuous Global Coverage Satellite Constellations

Now, a National Science Foundation-sponsored collaboration led by Patrick Reed, the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering, has discovered the right combination of factors to make a four-satellite constellation possible, which could drive advances in telecommunication, navigation and remote sensing. And in an ingenious twist, the researchers accomplished this by making the forces that ordinarily degrade satellites instead work in their favor.

2019

December 2019 Integrated water infrastructure investment pathways work by Reed and Characklis research groups honored with the 2019 INFORMS ENRE Best Publication Award in Natural Resources

The ENRE Best Publication Awards are given annually to the best refereed journal articles in the areas of interest of ENRE, published two calendar years prior to the year in which the award is given. The objective of the award is to recognize the contributions of ENRE members to the respective research areas. Nominated publications will be judged by separate committees of three members for each area with respect to impact and originality.

December 12 Reed presents the Fall 2019 AGU Paul A. Witherspoon Lecture on Conflict, Coordination, and Control in Water Resources Systems Confronting Change (see video)

Globally, our operation and planning of water resources systems must evolve to better confront the fundamental challenges posed by meeting rapidly evolving human demands and increasingly severe hydroclimatic extremes. Addressing these challenges requires an understanding of how our current institutions constrain adaptive actions and the resulting consequences of these constraints on the coupled human-natural system dynamics. Discovering strategies for better balancing multi-sectoral human demands and adapting to increasingly severe extremes requires modeling advances that permit high fidelity representations of state-action-consequence feedbacks while also accounting for the information available to the actual managers of water resources systems. Moreover, we must acknowledge that the actual state-action-consequence feedbacks are deeply uncertain given the myriad of ways that socioeconomic and climatic pressures may evolve in the future.

November 22 Reed invited speaker at Tecnológico de Monterrey for the Social Policy and Public Entrepreneurship Research Area

Through diverse interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives, the Social Policy and Public Entrepreneurship group looks for ways and strategies to ensure the continuation of social processes in the future. It studies basic resources such as water, its relation to life in the cities and its general role in sustainability. Social transformation is analyzed from four points of view: a) The theory about social changes; b) Education; c) Local-global linkage; and d) The “trans” criterion of contemporary social phenomena, especially from the trans-national perspective. Ethical issues, peace and sustainability are studied from an interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary perspective encompassing philosophy, literature, law and international relations. We also study the relationship between development and sustainability as well as cultures of peace. In economic and social aspects, we focus on: evaluation of governmental programs, elections, poverty and inequality, social responsibility and transparency, migration and remittances as well as sub-national public finance.

November 4 Reed invited speaker at KWR in Utrecht, Netherlands discussing urban water supply investment pathways

‘Bridging Science to Practice’ is KWR’s motto. KWR researchers work at the interface of science, business and society. Their strength lies in their translation of scientific knowledge into applicable, practical solutions for end-users in the Dutch and international water sector. They have built a solid reputation as top-level innovation accelerators and international network builders, and increasingly play a coordinating role in national and international collaborations.

September 17-19 Reed invited speaker and panelist for Planning for Change in CA hosted by CA Department of Water Resources

The Department of Water Resources will hold a Climate Change Vulnerability and Adaptation Summit designed to inspire water management and climate change technical communities to work together to achieve water resilience for California. Decision makers will discuss prominent future climate change uncertainties and threats and the role of those risks in ongoing and future water management activities.

July 31 Reed selected as AGU 2019 Paul A. Witherspoon Lecturer

The Witherspoon Lecture Award recognizes significant and innovative contributions in hydrologic sciences by a mid-career scientist, which includes the awardee’s research impact, innovative interdisciplinary work, application of research to socially important problems, and inspired and dedicated mentoring of young scientists, and acknowledges the awardee shows exceptional promise for continued leadership in hydrologic sciences, according to AGU.

June 11 Reed Invited Plenary Speaker in the 1st Binational Meeting on Sustainability, Vulnerability, and Adaptation to Climate Change, Merida, Mexico

The sustainability challenges of the region demand an enhancement of collaborative governance in policy-making, particularly in of large development projects. The purpose of this first meeting is to bring together top-level academics, policy makers and civil society representatives to exchange experiences on: (1) What are the major challenges the region faces in the  assessment of sustainability, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change? (2) How can evidence based policy making be strengthen in the region within the context of the SDGs and Agenda 2030? and (3)  Which are the most efficient mechanisms for mainstreaming leading edge approaches (such as Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU)) into the sustainable development policy instruments?

April 30 Reed Invited Seminar Speaker for the Notre Dame Environmental Fluids Program

The Environmental Fluid Dynamics Group studies flow and transport in a diverse range of environmental systems, including the atmosphere, the oceans, lakes, streams and subsurface environments (e.g. groundwater, oil) as well as the interfaces that connect these diverse systems. Our work focuses on understanding the fundamental processes in these systems in such a way as to improve our ability to work harmoniously with Nature so as to better design infrastructure to mitigate against natural disasters, better manage and remediate air and water quality across all environments, improve our ability to forecast weather in extreme environments and develop sustainable plans to deal with future conditions that will evolve under climate change.

April 5 Reed Invited Seminar Speaker at MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change

The Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change is MIT’s response to the research, analysis and communication challenges of global environmental change. The program combines scientific research with policy analysis to provide independent, integrative assessments of the impacts of global change and how best to respond.

March 29 Jon Lamontagne’s Nature Climate Change paper highlighted in the LA Times emphasizing the importance of the next decade of action

That’s not just because the impacts of rising temperatures — from severe storms to surging seas — are already apparent. It’s also because limiting future damage requires bold moves to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions today.

March 25 Reed Invited Seminar Speaker in the Princeton Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment  (C-PREE)

C-PREE provides a nexus for interdisciplinary research and policy analysis aimed at addressing the world’s environmental problems. C-PREE tackles key issues such as global climate change, air and water pollution, loss of biodiversity, psychology of decision making, and sustainable agriculture. Its faculty consists of experts across a range of disciplines who are both leading scholars and have served as practitioners in government, NGOs, and the private sector.

March 12 Jon Lamontagne’s Nature Climate Change paper highlighted in National Geographic

A new scientific analysis of millions of possible climate futures found only a narrow window to keeping global warming to levels the international community has deemed safe. Out of 5.2 million possible climate futures, carbon emissions must reach zero by 2030 in every country in the world if we are to stay at less than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) by 2100 of warming, the target set by the United Nations to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, from rising seas to deadly heat waves.

February 27 Reed Invited Speaker at Technion Israel Institute of Technology Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Grand Water Research Institute operates as the Israeli national institute for research in the science, technology, engineering and management of water resources. Established in 1993, the mission of the GWRI is to be a center of excellence of international caliber, the leading water research institute in Israel.

February 19 Reed Invited to Present on Emerging Multiobjective Stochastic  Control and Decision Support for Food-Energy-Water Systems at the Pacific Northwest National Lab

PNNL develops and applies a wide range of atmospheric, climate, human, and Earth system modeling tools to address complex questions at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Many of these tools are state-of-the-art community models that include contributions from researchers around the world. PNNL’s focus is on increasing the accuracy and utility of these models, often by leveraging our measurement capabilities to represent human and Earth systems with increasing detail, complexity, and fidelity.

January 14 Reed Invited to Present a Colloquium at TU Delft on Complex Adaptive Infrastructure Systems

The Art of Complexity: Errors, Actions, & Tradeoffs in Infrastructure Systems Design
At present, mounting concerns related to the resilience and robustness of major US infrastructure systems has motivated a transition in our national research agenda towards convergence research. In short, this transition seeks to accelerate transdisciplinary research efforts that will have direct translational value for improving our infrastructure investment and management choices. This talk reflects my recent efforts to work with several US federal agencies to help them shape their near term research investments. I highlight how historical science innovation perspectives have strongly shaped our current struggles and ambitions for better understanding the complexity of societal infrastructures. I use a selection of recent examples drawn from the confluence of emerging high performance computing capabilities, complex systems science, and artificial intelligence to illustrate how our evolving problem solving capabilities hold promise and simultaneously require caution in how they are used to shape societal choices.

January 10 Reed Honored with the Cornell College of Engineering’s Research Excellence Award

Each year faculty are presented with Research Excellence Awards from Cornell Engineering. The annual awards recognize the importance of leadership in innovative research.

2018

December 27Scientific American feature on Complex Systems in Climate Change drawn from Ch 17 of NCA4 where Reed served as a co-author

When Hurricane Harvey’s record-busting rains drenched Texas in August 2017, they triggered a cascade of chaos. Widespread flooding turned roads into rivers, impeding evacuations and access to emergency services. Stormwater swept up pathogens from wastewater treatment plants and toxins from Superfund sites, posing health threats. Phone and internet services failed in some areas, and 300,000 people in Texas lost power. Harvey also temporarily shut down a quarter of U.S. oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, raising gas prices.

December 10Reed Group Efforts to Explore Ecological Alternatives to the Sambor Mega Dam in the Southern Mekong

To show the Cambodian government better options, Wild and Reed created a modeling platform that helped the team discover an alternative dam design, called the Sambor Ecological Alternative, with design and operational features that would improve sediment and fish passage while maintaining significant hydropower production. Collaborating with a broader interdisciplinary team that included fish biologists, a dam engineer, a geomorphologist, a geographer, a lawyer and an economist, the team explored alternative siting, design and operation choices, and the specific tradeoffs in balancing energy and ecological objectives that would result.

Effective November Reed Awarded the Joseph C. Ford  Endowed Chair

Joseph C. Ford was a graduate of the Sibley School of Mechanical Engineering at Cornell in the class of 1911. He was a manufacturing executive and a director of Wisconsin Telephone, the First National Bank of Madison and Ray-O-Vac Co. In addition, he was founder and chair of the Madison Community Trust Fund and founder and president of the Celon Co. The Joseph C. Ford Professorship in Mechanical Engineering was established in 1958 through a bequest in the will of his wife, Vera Veerhusen Ford, for the purpose of providing a distinguished professorship in mechanical engineering and in such specialized fields in the College of Engineering as the university may determine. Because of the growth of the endowment, the board of trustees voted in 1980 to authorize the appointment of two or more concurrent holders of the Joseph C. Ford Professorships.

November 5Reed Invited Keynote Speaker for the Department of Energy Earth and Environmental System Modeling PI Meeting

The goal of Earth and Environmental System Modeling (EESM) is to simulate and understand DOE-relevant predictability of the Earth system, by describing processes and process interactions over multiple time and space scales. EESM investments focus on model development, model analysis, and understanding the role of multi-sector interactions with the physical-human system. The vision for EESM is to provide DOE with the best possible information about the evolving Earth system, so that, e.g., energy assets and infrastructures remain robust throughout their lifetimes.

August 24Professor Andrea Castelletti Gives Ezra Roundtable on Reservoir Control in Italian Sub-Alpine Lake District (click for video of seminar)

This work is focusing on the role of more- and better-informed decisions as well as coordination mechanism design, including financial risk hedging tools, to improve existing water management practices. In the Northern Italy lake district, extensive model-based analyses show that a soft-path approach can substantially mitigate the impact of changing climate, and help contrasting increasingly frequent and impacting droughts with little financial investment but a substantial shift in the existing water governance.

August 1Reed an Invited Speaker at the 2018 CUAHSI Biennial Meeting Focusing on Food-Energy-Water

Food, Energy and Water are basic for human welfare and prosperity. A recognized grand challenge is meeting these societal needs in an environmentally sustainable way despite changes in population, climate and land use. Recent funding initiatives recognize that food, energy, and water form a coupled system requiring integrated multidisciplinary approaches. As water provides the connections among intertwined food, energy and environmental systems, Hydrologic Science can play a major role in addressing these grand challenges. The 2018 Biennial features keynote lectures and sessions that highlight ongoing research in hydrologic science and provide perspectives on future challenges.

June 21Reed an Invited Seminar Speaker in the Seoul National University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

The research areas in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering are Geo-informatics, Traffic Engineering, Structure and Construction Management, City Planning and Design, Hydraulic Engineering, Geotechnical Engineering, and Environmental Engineering. Currently, our society confronts various difficult issues on energy saving infrastructure, environment deterioration, global climate change, ever increasing traffic congestion, and rapid change to aged society. The CEE in SNU has recently established our new proactive vision to accommodate the national and social demand to resolve and relieve these issues, and to establish human and environment oriented infrastructures in the future.

June 19Reed Invited Plenary Speaker at the 2018 Korean Society for Climate Change International Conference, Jeju South Korea

The KSCC had a special program related to Climate Change Adaptation in Water Resources and sponsored by Seoul National University.  The special program consisted of three dedicated sessions: (1) Robust & Adaptive Decision Making Under Climate Change, (2) Sharing of Climate Change Adaptation Experiences, and (3) Uncertainty in Climate Change Assessment.

May 16 – Natural Heritage Report on Potential Impacts of Sambor Dam on the Mekong including Reed Group Analysis of Hydropower-Sediment-Ecosystem Tradeoffs  Highlighted in Press

Government-commissioned report says proposed site at Sambor reach is the ‘worst possible place’ for hydropower due to impact on wildlife. The report, which was commissioned by the government in Phnom Penh, has been kept secret since it was submitted last year, prompting concerns that ministers are inclined to push ahead regardless of the dire impact it predicts on river dolphins and one of the world’s largest migrations of freshwater fish. The proposed hydropower plant would require an 18km-wide barrier across the river at Sambor, Kratie province. This quiet rural district is best known as a place for watching Irrawaddy dolphins, whose critically low numbers have just shown their first increase in 20 years.

April 16 – Jon Lamontagne’s recent Earth’s Future paper demonstrating how to discover consequential climate change scenarios highlighted in Nature Climate Change News & Views

Recently Lamontagne et al.1 demonsUse my Cornell NetID trated the application of scenario discovery6 to one of the integrated assessment models (IAMs) used to generate a SSP. This exploratory modelling approach combines factorial design and cluster analysis. First, the analyst varies the input assumptions of a model systematically to run it as many times as needed to generate a comprehensive database of model realizations. The database is then examined according to criteria of interest. In the case of Lamontagne et al., the criteria are radiative forcing and average global policy cost over the period 2020–2095. This makes it possible to isolate all model realizations with high forcing and high cost.

April 6 – Julianne Quinn Honored with the 2018 UCOWR Best Dissertation Award

Juilanne Quinn ’17, a postdoctoral associate in the Reed group, has been named the first place recipient of the Universities Council on Water Resources (UCOWR) 2018 Ph.D. Dissertation Award in the category of Natural Science and Engineering. Each year, UCOWR recognizes two outstanding Ph.D. dissertations on water issues, one in Water Policy and SocioEconomics, and the other in Natural Science and Engineering.

March 22 – Reed Invited as a Seminar Speaker for the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University

Students and research faculty at Arizona State University’s School of Computing is Part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, one of six schools in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, are exploring a wide range of cybersecurity issues, including social media analysis, data security on the web and mobile devices, data forensics and the use of blockchain technology — the technology that underlies digital currencies such as Bitcoin and Dash.

March 19 – Reed Invited as a Speaker in the Atkinson Center for Sustainability’s Climate Change Seminar Series: “Do We Fully Understand the Challenges and Implications of Climate Change Scenarios?” (online video available)

This university-wide seminar provides important views on the critical issue of climate change, drawing from many perspectives and disciplines. Experts from both Cornell University and other universities will present an overview of the science of climate change and climate change models, the implications for agriculture, ecosystems, and food systems, and provide important economic, ethical, and policy insights on the issue. The seminar is being organized and sponsored by the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, the Cornell Institute for Climate Smart Solutions, and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.

March 12-14 – Reed Invited as a Instructor and Speaker for the Summer School in Water Resources Systems Analysis, Facultad de Ciencias Fisicas y Matematicas, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile

Water resources systems are complex entities to manage, as they involve multiple and often conflicting objectives interacting under uncertainty from both natural and human sources. When formulated as optimization problems, water resources models are often limited by simplistic representation of objectives and uncertainty. This summer school comprises six short-courses which cover many aspects of decision making in water resources systems under uncertainty, with emphasis on optimization and economic tools to better represent and balance the variety of objectives (economic, social, and environmental) involved.

February 23 – Reed Invited as a Seminar Speaker for the WaterSystems GroupSchool of Civil, Environmental & Mining Engineering, The University of Adelaide

The WaterSYSTEMS Research Group carries out innovative research in areas such as sustainable water resources and water infrastructure design, management and operation. The group applies and develops techniques that enable improved decision-making in complex, multi-objective and uncertain environments related to natural and engineered water systems.

February 22 – Reed Invited as a Seminar Speaker for the Integrated Catchment Assessment and Management (iCAM) Centre, Fenner School of Environment and Society , Australian National University, Canberra

iCAM (the Integrated Catchment Assessment and Management Centre) is a highly interdisciplinary research group consisting of social scientists, economists, hydrologists and interdisciplinary modelers. Our stakeholders are also varied and range from business groups, farmers, government and non-governmental organizations. iCAM’s mission is to develop and integrate the knowledge required to clarify management and policy options for sustaining vital water and related resources.

February 19-21 – Reed Invited as a Seminar Speaker and Visitor for the MDO Lab Group, in the School of Engineering and Information Technology, University of New South Wales, Australia

The MDO group is led by Professor Tapabrata Ray and currently has eight core members. The members of this group have been working on a number of theoretical and applied areas such as decision making in presence of uncertainty, identifying solutions of interest from large trade-off sets, development of efficient algorithms for multi/many objective optimization, development of efficient constrained handling schemes, rule and policy mining, shape representation and optimization. The group has several collaborations with academics working in diverse areas of computational intelligence and engineering, within Australia and internationally.

January 14-19 – Reed Invited to Participate in the Schloss Dagstuhl Workshop on Personalized Multiobjective Optimization

Since multiobjective optimization has focused almost exclusively on serving a single “decision maker”, providing solutions merely as potential (not actual) alternatives, it is not presently a technology that can serve mass markets with mass solutions. A new approach is needed if we are to fulfil the demanding aims of mass-customization, product/service variation and personalization we see today in areas such as engineering, planning, operations, investment, media and Web services, and healthcare. Taking the first steps, this Dagstuhl Seminar explored an “Analytics” perspective already proven in handling large-scale pervasive data, and seek to build the scientific foundations for delivering efficient and effective (even optimal) mass-personalization.

2017

November 16 – Reed Invited Seminar Speaker at the Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy

Recent Reed Group efforts in developing exploratory modeling and scenario discovery frameworks for consequential climate futures were featured in the seminar. The Centre for Environmental Policy aims to have a global impact on energy and environmental security policy, management of environmental quality, and sustainable transitions in environmental governance, through collaborative research and engagement supporting efforts on environment, energy and health throughout the College.

November 13 – Reed Group Rhodium Framework Featured on Training Day at the 5th DMDU in Oxford

Julie Quinn introduced Project Platypus and the Rhodium framework for Many-Objective Robust Decision Making. This training session provides guidance for those who wish to apply DMDU tools to the analytical problems they face. But just as importantly, the agenda also seeks to help people working with the output of DMDU tools, so that they might derive better understanding and value in applying these results.

September 1 – Professor Reed invited to speak at 5th Arab-American Frontiers of Science, Engineering, and Medicine in Morocco

Professor Patrick Reed of Civil and Environmental Engineering has been invited by the US National Academies to serve as an invited speaker in the session on “Smart Agriculture” at the 5th Arab-American Frontiers of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. The symposium will be held November 2-4 in Rabat, Morocco. In each topical area, the symposium chairs have invited two U.S. speakers and two speakers from the Middle East and North Africa region. The speakers have been selected to frame challenges and facilitate discussions. There is also a competitive application process for non-speaking attendees to be selected to participate.

July 18-20 – Reed Invited Speaker and Panel Chair for Snowmass Climate Change Impacts & Integrated Assessment XXIII

Since the summer of 1995 the Energy Modeling Forum has organized a 2-week annual workshop, Climate Change Impact and Integrated Assessment (CCI/IA), that brings together climate change experts to discuss the state of the art in climate policy analysis. These annual workshops take place in Snowmass, Colorado. The Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) at Stanford University organizes these workshops for a consortium of sponsors including the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institute of Environmental Studies of Japan, the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics, Electric Power Research Institute, and Exxon Mobil Corporation.

June 22 – Reed Invited Speaker and Advisory Board Member for the EPSRC Water Informatics Science & Engineering Centre for Doctoral Training

The WISE CDT was awarded a £5.2M award from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) aimed at securing the future supply of graduates. The EPSRC funded centres bring together diverse areas of expertise to train engineers and scientists with the skills, knowledge and confidence to tackle today’s evolving issues and future challenges. They also provide a supportive and exciting environment for students, create new working cultures and forge lasting links with industry. Water Informatics: Science and Engineering (WISE) Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) provides students with the opportunity to develop and carry out PhD-level research. A CDT has the added benefit of taught courses to give students a solid background in their chosen discipline. This CDT is a partnership between the Universities of Exeter, Bath and Bristol and Cardiff University.

May 30-June1 – Reed Invited to Participate in International Workshop on Coupled Human Natural Systems Hosted By Tübingen University, Germany

This workshop included 25 invited participants from several countries around the world including Germany, the Netherlands, the US, the UK, Canada and Chile. Participants brought diverse perspectives on coupled human-natural systems from resource economics, engineering, finance, hydrology, and ecology. Key topics of focus included adaptive decision making, agricultural impacts on water resources, energy networks, and ecosystem function. The broader goal of the workshop is to develop a network of researchers capable of advancing our understanding and management of the complex co-evolutionary dynamics of coupled human and natural systems.

April 22 – Reed Group OpenMORDM Tradeoff Analysis Featured in PBS Documentary on New Orleans Climate Risk

The half-hour PBS documentary, “Managing Risk in a Changing Climate”, takes viewers to coastal Louisiana, where threats associated with climate change leave communities like New Orleans facing tough choices under deep uncertainty. The film was produced by WPSU under the guidance and support of the Network for Sustainable Climate Risk Management (SCRiM). Featuring some of the nation’s leading climate experts and a diverse array of stakeholders from the New Orleans region, the documentary investigates how decision makers can better inform choices about managing risk from rising sea levels and storms by working with researchers and community members. The film captures the many scientific disciplines that come together to help address the economic, social, environmental, and ethical issues associated with managing risk in a changing climate.

April 13 – Reed Invited Seminar Speaker at Michigan State BEACON Center

The BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action is an NSF Science and Technology Center founded with the mission of illuminating and harnessing the power of evolution in action to advance science and technology and benefit society. Research at BEACON focuses on biological evolution, digital evolution, and evolutionary applications in engineering, uniting biologists who study natural evolutionary processes with computer scientists and engineers who are harnessing these processes to solve real-world problems.

March 6-7 – Reed Invited Participant in Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee’s Workshop Envisioning 20 Year Grand Challenges

The purpose of this meeting was to identify the “Grand Challenges” for the Department of Energy’s BER research over the next 20 years. The breakouts engaged participants in an open, thoughtful and creative discussion. Capturing the key ideas that come from the discussions in the breakout sessions will be critical to the success of the workshop in informing visions for needed research investments.

February 10 – Local Cambodia Daily News Article on Sambor Dam and NHI Decision Support Efforts That Include Reed Group Member Tom Wild

This week, a spokesman for the ministry, Victor Jona, said the memorandum had not been signed “because at least we need to see the study by NHI [Natural Heritage Institute] first…. We have to see the results first.” Mr. Jona did not say when the results would be ready.”

January 10 – Reed a member of newly awarded $20 Million US DOE Consortium focused on Coupled Human Natural Systems

“A $20 million, five-year project with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) looks to create a state-of-the-art framework of computational tools that will help to assess the impacts of weather-related variability and change. This project looks to integrate multiple existing models to capture important energy-water-land interactions and feedbacks between the natural and human systems.”

January 3 – Reed Group awarded with best paper presented at the 26th AAS/AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meeting

“The American Astronautical Society (AAS) and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) are honoring Cornell Professor Patrick Reed and his collaborators Lake Singh, Marc DiPrinzio, and Will Whittecar from The Aerospace Corporation for submitting the best paper to the 26th AAS/AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meeting. Each year the Space Flight Mechanics Committee recognizes a single paper as the top technical contribution presented at the AAS/AIAA joint international event.”


2016

November 16 – Reed Leads Technical Session in the World Bank Hosted 2016 Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty Meeting

“The session explored the critical question: “Do we understand how alternative strategies for operating complex infrastructure systems influences their initial designs as well as their long term evolution?”. Understanding the interplay between short-term adaptive operations and their influence on long-term planning is particularly relevant for irreversible decisions for long-lived infrastructures that present complex ecological impacts, and must reliably meet multi-sectoral demands (e.g., reservoirs, energy production/transmission, transportation networks, etc.). This session will draw on a suite of multi-sector examples to clarify emerging innovations and persistent challenges related to bridging the planning and management divide.”

November 1 – Reed Part of Cornell Team Launching New PhD Program in Systems

“Work with world-renowned faculty who are forging new ways to solve complex socio-technical problems in research areas such as the integrated modeling and simulation of the behaviors of complex natural and engineered systems, their design and the operation for resilience, robustness and scalability, the characterization of the societal and behavioral context in which we find such systems, as well as their local and global consequences. Because of the nature of systems science and engineering, the research takes on a collaborative approach with faculty from many different disciplines both in traditional engineering areas as well as those outside of engineering such as health care, food systems, environmental studies, architecture and regional planning, and many others.”

October 8 – Reed Invited as Plenary Speaker at Symposium on Search-Based Software Engineering

“The annual symposium dedicated to Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE), in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, studies the application of meta-heuristic optimization techniques to various software engineering problems, ranging from requirements engineering to software testing and maintenance. The symposium builds on the flourishing interest in SBSE and provides a welcoming forum for discussion and dissemination that will strengthen the rapidly-growing international SBSE community. SSBSE 2016 will be collocated with 32nd IEEE Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution”

October 1 – Reed is Co-PI on $3 Million NSF INFEWS Award Focused on California

“The interdependence of water availability, agricultural production, and electric power generation is well established, yet significant challenges remain for understanding how decisions or resource disruptions in any one of these sectors impact the system as a whole. Nowhere is this challenge more pressing than California, which, despite chronic water scarcity, continues to lead the nation in agricultural production by a factor of two. In California, nonstationary climate is expected to increase the frequency and severity of drought, with highly uncertain impacts on the availability of surface water. The subsequent effects on statewide electricity generation and agriculture in California’s Central Valley will be closely linked. “

August 24 – Reed Invited as Plenary Speaker at the Smart Systems for Water Management Symposium and Summer School in Monte Verità, Switzerland

“This Symposium and Summer School aims at exploring the perspective of urban water demand management for the next years. Several topics are going to be addressed, with a particular attention on modelling and understanding the behaviour of water consumers, the drivers of such behaviour, the role of social norms, economic leverages and water demand management strategies to promote behavioural change, and the role of Information and Communication Technologies to support the design, implementation and deliver smart solutions for urban water demand management.”

August 1 – Reed Invited as Frontiers in Geoscience Speaker at Los Alamos National Lab

“The Frontiers in Geoscience Colloquia is organized by the Earth and Environmental Sciences (EES) Division of LANL. EES is the intellectual home of Earth Sciences at Los Alamos, and has over 200 staff working on a complex set of earth science problems. The goal of the Frontiers in Geoscience seminar series is to bring to Los Alamos innovative scientists conducting research in fields of study that are complementary and potentially promote collaborations.”

July 11 – Reed Invited to Give Seminar to Argonne National Lab’s Environmental Sciences Division

“Emerging water scarcity concerns in southeastern US are associated with several deeply uncertain factors, including rapid population growth, limited coordination across adjacent municipalities and the increasing risks for sustained regional droughts. Managing these uncertainties will require that water utilities identify regionally coordinated, scarcity-mitigating strategies that trigger the appropriate actions needed to avoid water shortages and financial instabilities.”

May 11 – Reed Group Receives Honors at the 2016 International Environmental Modeling & Software Congress

“Professor Reed is being awarded the 2016 Biennial Medal for Exceptional Research Contributions to Environmental Modeling and Software by the International Environmental Modelling & Software Society (iEMSs). As part of this award, he will also become a Fellow in the Society. Two or three medalists are selected every two years globally. Also former Reed group member Joseph Kasprzyk is receiving the 2016 Early Career Research Excellence from iEMSs. The early career research award is given to individuals judged to be making exceptional research contributions and who graduated with a PhD degree or equivalent within seven years of being nominated for the award.”

March 29 – Reed Group Member Greg Garner’s Work Clarifies Climate Risk Tradeoffs

“Balancing the impacts of climate change risks for all involved may not be within the realm of economics or physics, but a novel approach may help to achieve a better compromise, according to Penn State and Cornell climate researchers. Rather than look at one aggregated number, the researchers used an integrated assessment model to look at the multidimensional trade-offs of four goals — to increase global economic growth, to achieve reliable temperature stabilization, to minimize climate damages and to minimize abatement costs.”

March 10 – Tom Wild and Pete Loucks Interviewed for Circle of Blue Mekong Feature

“Water flows in the lower Mekong River in Vietnam are so feeble that salt water from the South China Sea is pushing through the delta, up to 40 kilometers (25 miles) inland along the river’s main stem and more than 70 kilometers (43 miles) inland on tributaries. The salt, damaging to crops, is a disaster for rice farmers in the delta, which accounts for half of Vietnam’s rice production. Not only a short-term emergency, the drought is also magnifying longstanding fault lines in the six-country basin. Even before the strong El Nino of the last six months turned off the rain spigot, the water resources of the Mekong River were under immense pressure. A cascade of major dams are planned or under construction on both the river’s main stem and its tributaries. In the eyes of governments and developers, the dams are hydropower cash registers and a cure for daily blackouts. To environmental and civil society groups, however, the dams are a scourge: uprooting communities, flooding forests, threatening one of the world’s great warehouses of biodiversity, and endangering the livelihoods of tens of millions of people who catch fish for food.”

February 10 & 11 – Reed Invited Speaker in Imperial University Workshop on Risk and Uncertainty in Decision Making

“The workshop focused on decision making problems and discussed frameworks and/or tools to help structure and solve these problems in order to enable learning across disciplines with a view to highlighting areas for future research and collaboration with external partners to address capacity gaps. The opportunity will allow an exploration of the ways in which uncertainties and complexities in evidence can be factored into decisions; particularly exploring the tools and techniques available and the contexts in which they might be applied more effectively.”

February 8 – Reed Invited Speaker in Oxford University’s Oxford Water Network Evening Seminar

“The Oxford Water Network is the University’s response to global water challenges, building upon existing and emerging water science excellence. The network is a multi-disciplinary research community, harnessing Oxford University’s diverse strengths to address the challenge of managing water in a complex and uncertain world. Oxford’s scientists are developing a research agenda to address key challenges of water security, advancing knowledge to inform policy and planning, and developing instruments to improve practice in partnership with government, research and business communities.”

February 1 – Chesapeake Bay Program Invites Reed to Discuss the State-of-the-Art in Decision Making Under Uncertainty

“The workshop focused on aiding the Chesapeake Bay Program in exploring what tools exist to help support high complex model-based technical and management challenges. Discussions extended across sensitivity tools, model diagnostics, basic uncertainty assessment, and frameworks for integrating uncertainty into management decisions.”


2015

December 8 – Reed Group Member Tom Wild’s Collaborative Mekong Work with the Natural Heritage Institute Highlighted in the New York Times

“To allow sediment through the proposed Sambor Dam in Cambodia, the Natural Heritage Institute in San Francisco advocates a bypass channel for environmental releases of water to help river ecology and the full opening of dam gates in certain seasons to flush sediment.”

November 3 – Reed Group are Featured Users in New Cornell Lead $5 Million Aristotle Cloud Computing Project

“Scientists will use the federation to solve data challenges. “We plan to use Aristotle to exploit cloud-based parallelism and perform asynchronous, interactive analysis of complex environmental models that generate thousands of data files” said Patrick Reed, a Cornell University Civil and Environmental Engineering researcher who collaborates with University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Penn State engineers. “We will use Aristotle to enhance our decision management tools so that we can solve problems of increasing complexity such as helping cities to better manage their drought risks.””

November 3 – Reed Participates as a Plenary Speaker in the 3rd Annual Workshop on Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty

“Dr. Reed advocated that as a field concerned with “deep uncertainties”, it is logically consistent to include a more direct acknowledgement that our choices for dealing with computationally demanding simulations, advanced search algorithms, and sensitivity analysis tools are themselves subject to failures that could adversely bias our understanding of how systems’ vulnerabilities change with proposed actions.”

October 16 – Reed Invited Speaker at RAND on Balancing Robustness and Multi-Stakeholder Conflicts When Addressing Water Scarcity

“Dr. Reed presented results that show how sampling of deeply uncertain factors in the computational search phase of Many-Objective Robust Decision Making (MORDM) can aid in the discovery of management actions that substantially improve the robustness of individuals as well as the overall region to water scarcity. Cooperative water transfers, financial risk mitigation tools, and coordinated regional demand management provide important tools to decrease robustness conflicts between geographically clustered water utilities. The insights from this work have general merit for regions where adjacent municipalities can benefit from cooperative regional water portfolio planning.”

October 2 – Reed Invited Speaker at the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan

“Dr. Reed presented computational innovations in the Many-Objective Visual Analytics framework demonstrated on recent successful applications in urban water portfolio planning in Research Triangle in NC as well as assessing the vulnerability of our global portfolio of space-based rainfall satellite missions to infrastructure collapse.”

September 15 – Reed Invited Speaker at the 2015 iSEE Congress at the Univeristy of Illinois

“Dr. Reed discussed the vulnerabilities in our global observations and information systems that are critical for managing Food-Energy-Water challenges. He recommended a shift to a more active design and evaluation of global information systems from a holistic systems perspective — jointly documenting emerging natural dynamics, their socio-economic contexts, and key scientific insights. Sustained and holistic monitoring of evolving FEW systems is fundamentally important for clarifying their risks as well as documenting the ex post validity of science informed policies aimed at improving their sustainability.”

July 28 – Reed Provides Briefing on State-of-the-Art Planning under Deep Uncertainty to the Southern CA Metropolitan Water District’s Integrated Resources Planning Committee

“Dr. Reed provided a critical review of the current bottom up planning efforts undertaken by MWD and provided recommendations on future efforts. The growing recognition of challenges posed in understanding the magnitude and impact of population pressures, climate change, and water portfolio investments are shifting major utilities towards new planning frameworks that directly address deep uncertainty.”

July 23 – European Commission Highlights Reed Group Research on Vulnerabilities in Observing Rainfall from Space

“Loss of satellites providing rainfall data could have a negative effect on global flood management, according to new research. However, this could be mitigated by improved international co-operation and the use of more modern satellite technology, the authors say. The study examined the consequences for flood management of the loss of four of the existing 10 dedicated rainfall measuring satellites.”

June 24 – Inside HPC Video highlight of Reed Briefing on using Supercomputing to Advance Space-based Earth Science

“This project is a multi-institutional collaboration between Cornell University, The Aerospace Corporation, and Princeton University advancing a Petascale planning framework that is broadly applicable across space-based Earth observation systems design.”

May 11 – Reed invited speaker at World Bank Panel Addressing “Resilient Solutions for Long Run Climate Change”

“The World Bank through its Climate Policy team and the Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) is bringing together experts to address the IEG recommendation and share practical resilient solutions for addressing the risks of long-run climate change to development. The experts will also identify major gaps and challenges for adaptation due to existing regulatory, land-use planning, financial and market incentives; and options they have devised to overcome these challenges.”

April 29 – Reed invited panelist for US NRC Board on Earth Sciences and Resources 2015 Meeting “Earth Data Science in the Era of Big Data and Compute”

“The complexity, diversity, and volume of Earth science data have increased significantly over recent decades. Discovery, access, and interaction with big data collected from numerous sources are increasingly used to explore natural, human and social systems at unprecedented scales while providing us with tremendous opportunities to gain dynamic insight into complex phenomena through big compute (e.g. cloud and high-performance computing) approaches. Though such data have started playing important roles in many Earth science and engineering domains and promise to enable a wide range of decision-making practices with significant societal impacts, Earth data science remains to be established for advancing Earth science and engineering and education in the era of big data and compute.”

April 25 – Reed invited panelist in Cornell’s 150th Anniversary panel event “Is the Future Secure and Sustainable?”

“From our crops to our commutes and our computers, how secure and sustainable is the infrastructure upon which modern human life operates? Cornell scientists and engineers will discuss what the coming years hold for bridges and highways, food systems, energy development, data and internet security, and water availability. An audience Q&A session will follow.”

March 26 – Reed invited to present in the University of Wisconsin Madison Weston Roundtable Seminar Series

“The Weston Roundtable is a weekly lecture series with leaders in sustainability science, engineering, and policy. The unique, discussion-heavy format aims to build a community around policy-relevant sustainability science and engineering topics.”

February 12 – Study: Global rainfall satellites require massive overhaul

“Circling hundreds of miles above Earth, weather satellites are working round-the-clock to provide rainfall data that are key to a complex system of global flood prediction – with flooding only expected to increase as a consequence of climate change. A new Cornell study warns that the existing system of space-based rainfall observation satellites requires a serious overhaul. Particularly in many developing countries, satellite-based flood prediction has weak spots, which could lead to major flooding that catches people by surprise. What’s more, four of the 10 dedicated rainfall satellites are past their warranty, further increasing risk of disaster.”


2014

December 11 – Tom Wild Joining Reed Group as an ACSF Post Doctoral Fellow Exploring the Sustainability Tradeoffs of Proposed Reservoirs in the Mekong

“The Mekong River is an epicenter of energy opportunity and environmental risk. The river basin is undergoing intensive hydropower dam development to meet the energy demands of a rapidly growing population, with approximately 30 large dams already operational and at least another 100 in the works. These dams could degrade the most productive freshwater fishing region in the world, which feeds 60 million people. Working with faculty fellow Patrick Reed and the Natural Heritage Institute, Thomas Wild will develop a decision support framework to identify and evaluate alternative dam siting, design, and operating policy options that could generate substantial hydropower, while minimizing impacts on valuable ecosystems. The researchers will partner with key government ministries in Laos and Cambodia to increase the project’s impact.”

October 28 – Hadka and Reed Featured by NCSA for Benchmarking New Exascale Scalable Multiobjective Solver using Many-Objective Urban Water Planning under Uncertainty

“The researchers tested the performance of their solver using different core counts from 512 to 524,288 cores (aka, benchmarking). They designed the LRGV case to be extremely difficult by only allowing 20 minutes to find the best solution possible. The goal is to go from months to minutes while producing better results with the new algorithm running on Blue Waters. This benchmarking found that the solver performs better in parallel than in serial because of its ability to learn and adapt itself—detecting when the search stagnates, for example—as it discovers problem characteristics. The scalability of algorithm increases as the amount of time to simulate the consequences of each scenarios increases. That means the Borg MOEA is prepared to solve extremely large, complex problems on future, even bigger supercomputers. “

August 15 – Reed and Characklis Awarded Collaborative NSF/USDA $2.2 Million WSC for Robust Water Planning in the Southeast US

“The objective of our proposed research is to advance portfolio-based water management in the Southeast by addressing four core knowledge gaps: (1) we must better account for how climate change and LU/LC trends in the Southeast impact regional hydrology and drought vulnerability (hydroclimate knowledge gap); (2) we need to assess and improve methods by which water managers can reconcile their multiple, and often conflicting, objectives (e.g., conservation vs. financial stability) while effectively exploiting portfolio-based management strategies composed of a broad range of supply and demand management assets (portfolio design gap); (3) we must analyze how the current fragmented approach to Southeast water supply management can be modified to create more efficient cooperative regional systems involving multiple communities (regional management gap), and; (4) we must provide a framework for adaptive management of regional systems tradeoffs as well as their vulnerabilities to assumptions about the future that are deeply uncertain (e.g., demand growth, climate change impacts) (computational synthesis gap). “

July 18 – Reed Selected as Featured Speaker at Current Challenges in Computing Conference Focused on Decision Sciences

“The Current Challenges in Computing Conference brings together a selected research community’s premier leaders to contribute their thoughts in compelling conversations on current trends, and to explore the emerging advancements possible through high performance computing. Now in our fifth year, we are proud to announce our keynote and featured speakers in this year’s chosen scientific field, Decision Science.”

June 30 – Reed Group Member Jon Herman Wins Student Presentation Award at iEMS 2014

“During each iEMSs conference, students can participate in a competition for the best presentation. In San Diego the winners were: Jon Herman – Balancing robustneess to future uncertainty between cooperating regional water utilities; Tommaso Stella – Reimplementation and reuse of the Canegro model; and Lu Wang – Modelling of CO2 solubility in salty aqueous solutions at geological sequestration conditions.”

June 16 – Hadka and Reed Awarded Patent on Serial Auto-Adaptive Borg MOEA

“The Borg MOEA is not a single algorithm; instead it represents a class of algorithms whose operators are adaptively selected based on the problem. The adaptive discovery of key operators is of particular importance for benchmarking how variation operators enhance search for complex many-objective problems.”

April 28 – Reed Selected to Participate in Congressional Briefing on High Impact US Supercomputing Research

“On April 28 the four co-chairs of the House Science and National Labs Caucus—Reps. Randy Hultgren, Chaka Fattah, Ben Ray Luján, and Alan Nunnelee—sponsored a briefing on the value of federal investment in high-performance computing. Reed was selected with 4 other scientists to describe the breakthrough research they have been able to achieve thanks to high-performance computing systems like Blue Waters”

April 16 – Former Reed Group Member Joe Kasprzyk Wins 2014 UCOWR Best Dissertation in Science and Engineering

“Kasprzyk’s dissertation, “Many Objective Water Resources Planning and Management Given Deep Uncertainties, Population Pressures, and Environmental Change,” proved outstanding to the UCOWR Review Panel and Board of Directors. In his dissertation, Kasprzyk addressed the challenges of managing environmental systems in a manner that benefits conflicting objectives, such as cost and performance.”

February 28 – Video of Reed Group Collaborator Dr. Matthew Ferringer’s Ezra’s Roundtable Seminar on Innovating Design

“From aiding our understanding of climate change, to providing precise location and time information anywhere on the earth, satellite constellations have become a critical part of our global infrastructure. The architecting of these complex systems, whose costs can exceed billions of dollars, are traditionally accomplished through a slow evolutionary process of incremental learning and implementation. In the previous decade, decision support research at The Aerospace Corporation has led to a paradigm shift in the way we conceive, design, and architect satellite constellations serving national security, civil and commercial space programs. The framework originally developed to support the decision making associated with satellite constellations has been extended to accelerate innovation for a variety of other fields. Changing the way we think about complex design and planning decisions has been met with may challenges and successes over the years and today’s seminar is about that journey.”

February 12 – Reed Selected for Blue Waters Science and Engineering Team Advisory Committee

“The SETAC will be expected to provide guidance on the overall vision of Blue Waters through various functions. With access to Blue Waters operation monitoring, the committee will be able to better provide guidance for delivering the best possible performance to enable achieving science and engineering teams’ objectives. They will be able to make recommendations on technical directions, strategies, and management while identifying potential challenges for petascale applications. As users themselves, the SETAC will also provide advice for solving common issues that arise from moving applications to Blue Waters and from system software at scale. Members will also be expected to offer suggestions on how to improve communications between the project and its science and engineering communities and the general public.”


2013

December 23 – Reed Group Member Jon Herman Wins Fall 2013 AGU Outstanding Student Presentation Award

“The Fall AGU meeting had more than 22,000 attendees across all areas of Earth science. Hydrology represents one of the largest of the technical communities that attend the international meeting with hundreds of speakers presenting across a large number of technical sessions. Jon Herman was selected among 14 other students honored in the hydrology area.”

December 16 – Reed Group and RAND Collaboration Featured at the New Virtual RDMLab

“Many objective robust decision making (MORDM) combines concepts and methods from many objective evolutionary optimization and robust decision making (RDM), along with extensive use of interactive visual analytics, to facilitate the management of complex environmental systems. Many objective evolutionary search is used to generate alternatives for complex planning problems, enabling the discovery of the key tradeoffs among planning objectives. RDM then determines the robustness of planning alternatives to deeply uncertain future conditions and facilitates decision makers’ selection of promising candidate solutions. MORDM tests each solution under the ensemble of future extreme states of the world.”

November 24 – Reed Group Research Exploring Water Quality Trading Challenges Featured by UNESCO Global Water Forum

“Our results provide several insights. First, market designs based on the assumption that the market can achieve the least-cost solution, ignoring the presence of complexities in decision making and interactions, might be misleading in practice. Expectations about what these markets can attain and of gains from WQT should, therefore, be tempered. Second, our results point to a need for agencies to assist in the development of trading.”

October 16 – Dr. Reed leading team exploring how to improve space-based observation of global precipitation

“Researchers use Blue Waters to make satellites more efficient and effective. We rely on global satellite service for communications, navigation, and environmental monitoring, but have you ever thought about how satellites stay in orbit?”

October 1 – Dr. Reed’s College of Engineering New Cornell Faculty Feature

“Patrick Reed has made a career out of managing water resources, an interest that began with a powerful event. While getting his degree in geological engineering at the University of Missouri, Reed’s hometown, St. Louis, was hit by the ‘93 flood of the Mississippi.”

June 25 – Policy issues plague hydropower as wind power backup

“Operational conflicts may be significantly reduced if the time length of the guide curve schedule was altered, yet such regulatory changes prove quite challenging given the institutional barriers surrounding water rights in the U.S.,” said the researchers, who also include Patrick M. Reed, professor of civil engineering, Cornell University.”

May 29 – Reed selected to partcipate in the US National Academy of Engineering’s 2013 Frontiers of Engineering Symposium

The total number of participants at the symposium will be 100 engineers, generally 30-45 years old from industry, universities, and government labs. Attendees will represent the full range of engineering fields. The symposium will consist of four formal sessions—each with speakers’ presentations and discussion of engineering research and pioneering technical work in particular areas—and a break-out session. The four broad topics that will be covered at the 2013 symposium are: Designing and Analyzing Societal Networks, Cognitive Manufacturing, Energy: Reducing Our Dependence on Fossil Fuels, and Flexible Electronics.”

April 22 – Reseachers using supercomputer to improve satellite precipitation observation

Civil engineering’s Reed leads effort to enhance scientists’ understanding of global precipitation using NSF’s Blue Waters supercomputer. The team will receive 140 million core hours on the Blue Waters’ 512,000 computer cores over the next year.The research team will use Blue Waters to tackle the problem of large gaps in precipitation data for large parts of the world.”

March 29 – Penn State, Princeton, and The Aerospace Corporation Exploit Blue Waters to Advance Space-based Earth Science

Patrick Reed and his team from Penn State, Princeton and the Aerospace Corporation, use Blue Waters to transform understanding and optimization of space-based Earth science satellite constellation designs. “Blue Waters has fundamentally changed the scale and scope of the questions we can explore,” he said. “Our hope is that the answers we discover will enhance flood assessment, drought monitoring, and the management of water resources in large river basins world-wide.”


2012

November 1 – Reed will serve as an invited plenary speaker for EMO 2013 in Sheffield, UK

“The 7th International Conference on Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization has invited Dr. Patrick Reed, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering to serve as one of the conference’s invited plenary speakers. The bi-annual international conference draws a broad international audience from the many disciplines currently advancing evolutionary multi-criterion optimization. EMO 2013 expands the conference’s focus to embrace algorithmic advances, multi-criterion decision making, and real world applications.”

August 28 – Civil engineering grad student Kasprzyk wins presentation award

“Joe Kasprzyk, a graduate student in civil engineering, won a student presentation award at the International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software in Leipzig, Germany.”

May 11 – Civil engineering’s Reed wins ASCE Huber Research Prize

“Patrick Reed, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Penn State, has been named the winner of the 2012 Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). The honor is awarded to civil engineers younger than the age of 40 and is given to only five people per year. The ASCE cited Reed for his “pioneering advances in multi-objective systems analysis that have significantly advanced engineering practice related to hydrologic prediction, observation network design and risk-based water supply management.”

April 13 – Reed Awarded PSEAS Outstanding Advising Award

“The PSEAS Awards recognize the outstanding efforts in teaching, research, advising, staff, service and work with students. Four members of the faculty will receive the Outstanding Advising Award: Leland Engel, instructor and director of mechanical engineering design projects; Patrick Reed, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering; Margaret June Slattery, assistant professor of bioengineering; and Terry Speicher, assistant professor of engineering at Penn State Berks.”


2011

December 9 – Fernandez Wins Award Studying Balance Between Wind Power and Hydropower

“Alisha Fernandez, a doctoral candidate in energy and mineral engineering and National Science Foundation (NSF) graduate fellow, was awarded the Dennis J O’Brien United States Association for Energy Economics (USAEE) Best Student Paper Award for her paper “Evaluating ecosystem and wind-following services for hydroelectric dams in PJM.” The paper also was accepted for publication in of the Journal for Regulatory Economics in 2012.”

October 13 – Apptimation Completes Proof of Concept with Malaysia AirlinesSee related article

“Working with Malaysia Airlines, Apptimation has successfully proven the applicability and value of its multi-objective evolutionary algorithm approach to one of the world’s most complex problems, that of airline connectivity optimization.”

July 7 – College pledges cooperation with Italian university

“A newly signed memorandum of understanding between the Penn State’s College of Engineering and Italy’s Politecnico di Milano paves the way for formal teaching and research collaborations between the two institutions.”

May 3 – Civil engineering’s Kollat wins best dissertation award

“Josh Kollat, doctoral student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has won Best Dissertation in the category of natural science and engineering in the 2011 Universities Council on Water Resources (UCOWR) National Ph.D. Dissertation Award Competition.”

April 18 – Rachel Urban one of fifteen engineering students to win NSF graduate research fellowships

“Rachel Urban a first year Masters student in Civil and Environmental Engineering has received her NSF graduate fellowship to explore how geophysics can be used to enhance the management of groundwater systems. Her work will be co-advised by Drs. Patrick Reed and Kamini Singha.”

April 5 – Webstream of Reed’s Vision for the Future of Earth Observation at European Geophysical Union

“Major space agencies are planning new satellites that will provide new and additional space-based observations of the water and energy cycles components. It is expected that these observations will lead to improved applications (e.g. in agriculture, water and energy management) and scientific understanding the Earth’s climate….”

Link for EGU Union Symposia Session Details

Feb 24 – DOE grant joins climate modeling with local, regional empirical data

“Local and regional researchers collect large amounts of high quality data on climate change and its effects, but the researchers that create the economic and climate models do not always…”


2010

Nov 30 – Engineers’ software uses evolutionary concepts to solve problems

“A team of engineers from Penn State and The Aerospace Corporation have created a set of software tools that takes its cues from natural evolution and applies them to solving large, complex planning problems…”

Nov 2 – Massive computing effort to evaluate national hydrological models

“A team of Penn State civil engineers has received one of the largest single-year allocations of supercomputing hours made for 2010…”

May 10 – Two civil engineering students win EPA STAR fellowships

“Two graduate students from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering have received Science To Achieve Results (STAR) fellowships from the Environmental Protection Agency…”

Jan 18 – Mixed water portfolio helps thirsty cities

“Computer simulations for drought-prone areas reveal that when urban water planners combine three approaches of buying water — permanent rights, options and leases — the city avoids surplus water and high costs, and reduces shortages, according to civil engineers…”


2009

Sept 28 – New Web site melds watershed science with social networking

“Taking some cues from popular social networking Web sites, a team including a Penn State civil engineer, the University’s Center for Environmental Informatics and Drexel University has developed a Web service that allows users to search for water-related datasets and share their own work in the mid-Atlantic region…”

Jan 27 – Civil engineering’s Reed wins achievement award

“Patrick Reed, professor of civil and environmental engineering, has been selected for an Outstanding Achievement Award by the Environmental and Water Resources Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers …”

Jan 8 – Penn State University leaves of absence 2009-10

“…Patrick M. Reed, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, to collaborate with researchers at the Centre for Water Systems, University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, to develop a framework for discovering how to increase both the reliability and adaptability of water supply systems…”


2008

Nov 25 – Massive supercomputing grant to be used in water management research

“Patrick Reed, associate professor of civil engineering at Penn State, has been awarded a large resource allocation (LRAC) grant on the largest open science supercomputer in the world…”

July 15 – Promotions in academic rank, effective July 1, 2008


2007

Mar 6 – Civil engineering’s Reed, Brennan each receive NSF CAREER Awards

“Patrick Reed, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Rachel Brennan, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, have each received grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Career Development (CAREER) Program for their proposals…”

Jan 30 – Project to examine Susquehanna River Basin, Chesapeake Bay

“A team including researchers from Penn State, Drexel University and Johns Hopkins University has received two grants to establish a test bed focusing on the Susquehanna River Basin and its impact on the Chesapeake Bay…”