The Global Resource Observatory (GRO)

The Global Resource Observatory is largest single research project being undertaken at the GSI, it investigates how the scarcity of finite resources will impact global social and political fragility in the short term. The ambitious three year project, funded by the Dawe Charitable Trust, will enable short term decision making to account for ecological and financial constraints of a finite planet.

GRO will include an open source multidimensional model able to quantify the likely short term interactions of the human economy with the carrying capacity of the planet and key scarce resources. The model will enable exploration of the complex interconnections between the resource availability and human development, and provides projections over the next 5 years.

Data and scenarios will be geographically mapped to show the current and future balance and distribution of resources across and within countries. The GRO tool will, for the first time, enable the widespread integration of the implications of depleting key resource into all levels of policy and business decision-making.

Interested in how technology innovation impacts people’s lives.

I have a particular interest in the way in which social network structure influences dynamic processes operating over the netowrk, such as adoption of behaviour or spread of disease. More generally, I am interested in using complex systems methods to understand social phenomena.

In this paper, we explore the dynamic of stock prices over time by developing an agent-based market. The developed artificial market comprises of heterogeneous agents occupied with various behaviors and trading strategies. To be specific, the agents in the market may expose to overconfidence, conservatism or loss aversion biases. Additionally, they may employ fundamental, technical, adaptive (neural network) strategies or simply being arbitrary agents (zero intelligence agents). The market has property of direct interaction. The environment takes the form of network structure, namely, it takes the manifestation of scale-free network. The information will flow between the agents through the linkages that connect them. Furthermore, the tax imposed by the regulator is investigated. The model is subjected to goodness of fit to the empirical observations of the S\&P500. The fitting of the model is refined by calibrating the model parameters through heuristic approach, particularly, scatter search. Conclusively, the parameters are validated against normality, absence of correlations, volatility cluster and leverage effect using statistical tests.

I am fascinated by unraveling water-scarcity patterns. I am an expert in Integrated Assessment Modelling and Water Footprint Assessment. The concepts and tools that I have developed and applied all aim at availing knowledge at scales relevant to decision-makers in the water sector. During my PhD at the University of Twente I evaluated how spatiotemporal patterns of water availability relate to patterns of water use for a river basin in the semi-arid Northeast of Brazil. I have used agent-based modelling and developed the downstreamness concept to analyze the emergence of basin closure. This concept is helpful to water managers for identifying priority locations for intervention inside a river basin system. As a postdoc I continued to evaluate the relation between water use and availability and further broadened my scope to a wider range of related topics.

Becky is a Research Associate at the Imperial Centre for Energy Policy and Technology (ICEPT). She investigates economic, social and technical aspects of energy policy in the UK and abroad.

Becky’s current research is focussed on transitions in the UK bioenergy system and on biofuels for aviation. She is involved with two major projects: Bioenergy Value Chains: Whole Systems Analysis and Optimisation, an EPSRC SUPERGEN Bioenergy Challenge Project; and Renewable Jet Fuel Supply Chain Development and Flight Operations (RENJET), a project for EIT Climate-KIC. Becky has also worked on projects for the UK Energy Research Centre – International Renewable Energy Agency (UKERC-IRENA) collaboration, investigating issues such as economic value creation, policy evaluation metrics, innovation theory and rural electrification. She is particularly interested in the role of renewable technologies for developing countries, having lived and worked in Mali and Senegal.