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PTBOiS

POSRS

  

 

20-12-2013

 

MODEST

international working group on

MODelling of Economies and Societies in Transition

 

Co-ordinators:

Zbigniew Nahorski and Jan W. Owsiński

nahorski@ibspan.waw.pl     owsinski@ibspan.waw.pl

Newelska 6, 01-447 Warszawa, Poland; Facsimile: (48 22) 38 10 105

 

Newsletter

 

sent out irregularly, mainly on the basis of what's new

Edited etc. by Jan Owsiński

 

 

Issue no. 16, Autumn 2013


Please note:

MODEST 2014 on September 25th-26th, 2014,

Thursday-Friday,
at Palais Staszic, right in the heart of Warsaw

 

Contents:

1. MODEST 2012 meeting in Warsaw

2. Invitation to next MODEST 2014 in Warsaw

3. Proposals and suggestions
 

1. MODEST 2012 meeting in Warsaw

 

The most recent Workshop of MODEST, traditionally affiliated with the bi-annual Polish BOS conference, this time BOS 2012, took place on September 18-19 (Tuesday-Wednesday) 2012 in Warsaw. The (broader) BOS 2012 meeting was organised jointly with the Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The themes that had been envisaged for the MODEST meeting were:

  • "ICT and (local) development" - largely based on the already existing bilateral Polish-French cooperation, but, of course, all of those interested were invited to join

  • "Banking & finance: trust, connectivity and resilience" - against the background of the recent and the currently looming international crises, but not only...

  • "Environment & economy: getting rid of paradoxes, political agenda and the dirt?" - have we learned anything new as of late?

The Workshop brought, as always, very interesting presentations and discussions, which could well take advantage of the presence of many other scholars, participating in the BOS Conference. The publication, though, was performed in a different manner than usually – there was no separate MODEST-related volume or journal issue (the latter being the case of the previous BOS conference in Bydgoszcz, BOS 2010). Instead, individual papers were directed to a number of journals, and, after having passed respective refereeing procedures, have been or are being published in these titles. We hope to be able to report on the entire set of the MODEST 2012 papers in the next issue of our Newsletter.
 

2. Invitation to next MODEST 2014 in Warsaw
 

The subsequent MODEST Workshop shall take place again in Warsaw, on September 25th-26th, 2014 (Thursday-Friday), and again at Palais Staszic, in the very heart of the historical city core of Warsaw. It will be, as usual, affiliated with the bi-annual BOS Conference of the Polish Operational and Systems Research Society, BOS 2014. Like in the previous cases, it is intended to run the MODEST Workshop as a series of sessions within the BOS conference, gaining through interaction with this broader forum.

The proposed themes for the Workshop – not precluding any other issue, pertaining to modelling and analysis of the transformation phenomena – are (i) the continuing crisis and its impact for the transforming economies (and, indeed, the more general transformations needed), with special emphasis on the role of financial institutions; (ii) the actual status and role of the information society / knowledge economy paradigms under different change circumstances; and (iii) the summary net impact and mechanisms of the greening of economy.
 

We indeed look forward to your active contributions and participation in the event.


3. Proposals and suggestions

 

In addition to the themes for the upcoming MODEST Workshop, we return, once again, to the possible subjects of joint work within the MODEST community. Thus, in the previous Newsletters we forwarded some suggestions concerning the potential fields of collaboration, e.g. within the framework of bilateral or European projects. We come back herewith to these ideas, with additional information and one more domain of potential joint work. Let us emphasise that in all those fields not only definite research work is, of course, being carried out, but, actually, some collaborative work is, as well, underway.

 

These activities, and the related ideas, concentrate around the following four themes (which, of course, do by no means limit the potential scope of concepts for future collaborative work):

  • modeling for the evaluation of the consequences of and design of changes in the Common Agricultural Policy; there are already a number of models that supposedly do the job, but what virtually all of them lack is the micro- or landscape, or community dimension (or, at a bare minimum – the one of a municipality); on the other hand there is also a gap on the real macro scale meaning aggregate effects for the EU and the world; in conditions of the current crisis the knowledge of potential consequences of various policies and instruments at the scale of the real processes, and not only somewhat abstract aggregates, becomes even more important;

  • assessing and modeling the role of ICT in development (place and role in the feedback loop), especially in terms of development dynamics from various starting points, and the possibility of short-cuts; here, as well, the local and regional dimension is of importance; again, this applies equally to the macro- and the real micro- dimensions, in economic and spatial terms;

  • modeling the consequences of policies related to the “green paths”, and the possibility of making (or leaving open and effectively available) the truly “optimum” choices and avoiding the “green paradoxes”, without bearing too much of economic and social costs that would impair short - and medium - term competitiveness; this involves an intricate interplay of time horizons, investment and risk, mainly associated with energy;

  • the recent events on the world scene, oil prices and global-warming-related undertakings included, show it very clearly that the respective models are indeed necessary, and, at that, a variety of them, that could grasp the different aspects and perspectives on these issues;

  • development of the methodologies related to decision making under uncertainty in situations of emergency, with the use of decision rules, decision trees, fuzzy and intuitionistic logic, and respective linguistic representations; this set of methodological tools might be of high value in devising decision support systems for the high-risk operations with limited information and high uncertainty.

Should you be interested in collaboration on these themes, or in coining other ones of potential interest to members of MODEST, please, contact us about it.

 

  

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