We believe it is an opportune time to bring together leading researchers with differing viewpoints to discuss and exchange ideas on the issue of epistemic uncertainty. Specifically, we wish to bring together traditional probabilists, Bayesians, generalized information theorists, and decision theorists. These researchers will be joined by leading reliability engineering and risk analysts who face the issue of epistemic and aleatory uncertainty in the assessment of high consequence engineered and natural systems. The workshop is being organized and sponsored by Sandia National Laboratories.

Albuquerque Mariott Hotel
2101 Louisiana Blvd NE
Albuquerque, New Mexico
telephone: 505-881-6800

August 6-7, 2002

To focus attention and discussion on the topic of epistemic uncertainty, the organizing committee has constructed a sequence of challenge problems. All of the invited papers and submitted papers will solve at least some of these problems. Each of the challenge problems deals with the representation and aggregation of mixtures of epistemic and aleatory uncertainty and the propagation of these mixtures through a simple mathematical model. The first model is given by an algebraic equation and the second model is given by a linear ordinary differential equation. The problems are intended to serve as a common focus and challenge for experimentation, discussion, and comparison of multiple approaches to the problems. We are interested in the problem sets only to the extent they are surrogates for real problems. Each author chooses which of these problems they address in their paper. More detail concerning the problem sets and their context in engineering and risk analysis is given in (www.sandia.gov/epistemic/challenge.htm)“Challenge Problems: Uncertainty in System Response Given Uncertain Parameters”.

Both invited and submitted papers will be given at the Workshop. There will be 16 invited papers given by internationally known researchers in the field. Submitted papers will be chosen from extended abstracts submitted by individuals. Extended abstracts should solve one or more of the Challenge Problems, or describe in detail how they would solve selected problems. There will be no wide-spread call for submitted papers; only a dozen or so papers will be accepted. The Workshop will have very limited attendance, roughly 50 people, in order to foster in-depth discussions among the participants.

To submit a paper, send an extended abstract to William Oberkampf, wloberk@sandia.gov, Chair of the organizing committee. The extended abstract should be attached to the email as an Acrobat PDF file. All of the submitted papers that are accepted will be presented as part of a Poster Session. At the Poster Session, each author will informally discuss their paper and answer questions from those present. Submitted papers can concentrate on solving one or more of the Challenge Problems, or the paper can pick one of the Challenge Problems and focus on important issues related to epistemic uncertainty. For example, authors can focus on issues such as: construction of input parameter uncertainty representations based on expert opinion, the rate of convergence of new mathematical representations using sampling methods to compute output uncertainty, and interpretation and use of system response uncertainty for decision making. Extended abstracts should be submitted no later than April 1. All extended abstracts will be review by the organizing committee and notification of acceptance/rejection will be emailed to the authors no later than April 19.

All authors, invited papers as well as submitted papers, are encouraged to have draft copies of their paper available at the Workshop. However, this is not a requirement. At the authors discretion, the final version of papers presented at the Workshop will be reviewed for publication in a special issue of the journal Reliability Engineering and System Safety. The Guest Editor for the special issue will be Jon Helton, a member of the organizing committee. For consideration in the special issue, the final version of the paper will be due on October 1, 2002.

Prof. Bilal Ayyub, University of Maryland
Prof. Yakov Ben-Haim, Israel Institute of Technology
Prof. Vicki Bier, University of Wisconsin
Prof. Roger Cooke, Delft University of Technology
Prof. Gert de Cooman, Universiteit Gent
Dr. Scott Ferson, Applied Biomathematics
Dr. Jon Helton, Sandia National Laboratories
Dr. Mac Hyman, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Prof. George Klir, State University of New York, Binghamton
Dr. Igor Kozine, RISO National Laboratory
Prof. Vladik Kreinovich, University of Texas at El Paso
Prof. Anthony O'Hagan, University of Sheffield
Dr. John Red-Horse, Sandia National Laboratories
Prof. Timothy Ross, University of New Mexico
Dr. Peter Walley, consultant, Australia
Prof. Ronald Yager, Iona College