UnCoDe - 'UNcertainty and COnfidence in safety arguments: effect on expert DEcision makers'
Sponsored by Leverhulme Foundation: October 2010 - March 2013
Funding to CSR, City University : £239,175
Summary:
This interdisciplinary project seeks progress in understanding and improving complex decision making, involving communication of uncertainty among experts, as it takes place in regulatory approval for complex systems with high societal impact (high benefits, high potential risk).
We address the two, often conflicting, requirements that arguments for approval should be rigorous and complete, describing uncertainty in rigorous mathematical terms, but they should lend themselves to be processed correctly by the human mind. Our focus is on the needs of the decision makers as consumers of these complex arguments.
The chosen application area is probabilistic safety claims concerning software, an area that is difficult and contentious. For example, it plays a crucial part in the uncertainties about approval of the next generation of nuclear reactors.
We aim to produce both new knowledge about the cognitive processes involved in this kind of decision making, and concrete aid for producing better "safety cases".
Multidisciplinary work in this project involves:
- probabilistic reasoning for reliability and safety, especially for software, and contributions to the practice of safety cases in industry
- empirical and theoretical research on risk perception and communication, judgmental forecasting, decision making under risk and uncertainty
City University Personnel: Prof. Lorenzo Strigini (Principal Investigator), Prof. Robin Bloomfield, Prof. Bev Littlewood, Dr. Eugenio Alberdi, Dr. David Wright; Prof. Peter Ayton (Psychology Department)
For further information on the above project, contact: Prof. Lorenzo Strigini ( strigini@csr.city.ac.uk ) Tel. 020 7040-8245.