Talk:Kuopio Risk Assessment Workshop 2008

Post your questions and comments here

If you have any questions and or comments regarding anything related to the workshop, please post them here and we will try to sort them out. -- Mikko Pohjola 10:10, 5 February 2008 (EET)

Draft Lecture outline -- Jouni 16:19, 6 February 2008 (EET)

Lecture 1: Introduction to Open Risk Assessment (ORA) Jouni

• Forget everything you knew about risk assessment
• During this week, we will describe a new approach to risk assessment. It has new developments from the theoretical foundation all the way to practical computer tools.
  • a new ontological foundation
  • strictly object-oriented approach
  • a new structure for objects
  • traditional methods for processing information, but organised in a more systematic way
  • tools that enable open collaboration
  • data sources that are directly available and applicable
• ORA is about information processing. The information is about the real world.
• It is practical to describe the ORA work as processes, and the information as products.
• General processes: observation, info collection, synthesis, management
• A major aim of the system is to make the work systematic, reuse existing pieces of information, and save time and resources.
• What is the most efficient way of doing ORA?
• Practical way: short discussions only; all questions put into wiki and answered by the following day.
• critical scientific disciplines you should be aware of
  • decision analysis
  • probability theory
  • graph theory
  • pragma-dialectics argumentation theory

Lecture 2: Mikko

• purpose of ORA
• process, product and use
  • Why is it practical to use processes and products?
• open participation
  • why open participation?
    • Acceptability
    • Efficiency
    • Relevance
• basic concepts
  • Refer to the Glossary. Do we need specific terms to be defined here?

Lecture 3: Information structure of ORA Jouni

• name, scope, definition, result
  • data, causality, unit, formula
  • data connections vs. causal connections
  • content, description and discussion
• (name, purpose, structure, rationale)
• (purpose, structure, state, performance)
• (probabilities, conditional probabilities and joint probabilities)

Lecture 4: Information structure: dimensions Mikko

• causal network
• variable, assessment, context (class) (complexity dimension)
• (meta levels (abstraction dimension): )
  • (process composite object: doing, describing, managing (tools), and developing descriptions)
  • (zero (real world), )
  • (1 descriptions and info processing, )
  • (2 process descriptions)

Lecture 5: Participation and communication as a part of ORA process Mikko

• discussion, commenting and argumentation
• argumentation theory (pragma-dialectics)
• argument is always about a statement
  • validity of an argument
  • attack
  • defend
  • signature

Lecture 6: Jouni

• moderation and quality control
• reader, contributor, moderator, board of moderators
• different levels of protection
  • openly available page
  • page closed; discussion available
  • discussion managed by moderator, contributions via nuggets

Lecture 7: Evaluating performance of ORA Mikko

• evaluation as an inherent part of the process
• properties of good RA
  • Content
  • applicability
  • efficiency
• relations between properties and information structure

Lecture 8: Uncertainties Jouni

• probabilistic (real) uncertainties: informativeness, calibration about result
• model "uncertainties": about definition
• relevance: about scope
• variability vs uncertainty