Jobs:Job-00045
Apply before: 15 December 2019
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Posting:
Position: PhD opportunities
Apply before: 15 December 2019
See attached file:
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Center on Persuasive Systems for Wise Adaptive living (PERSWADE) is seeking outstanding PhD candidates who have transdisciplinary background and are passionate about turning scientific knowledge into action.
The research can focus on one of the following topics, depending on your interests and skills:
Systems of systems, network of networks – how uncertainty propagates across scales
in systems?
- Dynamics of public opinion in a changing environment – how analyzing social media
we can understand behavior and preferences and how can we influence them?
- Standards and documentation ‐‐ how do we make our models and modeling process
(including participatory modeling) reproducible, how can we learn from it, and how can we make such standards adopted by the modeling community?
- Networks and cascades of power – if the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, how
can the system change?
- Optimization of socio‐technical systems – what can we achieve if behavior change is
one of the control parameters, which can be changed along with design and performance of supply systems? Particular applications will be tailored to the interests and passions of the student, but will be concerned with such topics as resource scarcity, climate change, food security, energy efficiency, health and healthcare, etc.
Two Thematic PhD Positions
PhD1 ‘Disasters and urbanization’: Natural disasters impact individuals, communities and
cities across Australia on a regular basis. Bushfires, storms and floods may have catastrophic
consequences, especially in urban and sub‐urban areas with high density of population and
properties. The growing frequency and severity of these hazards and the booming population
trends call for smart urban expansion strategies, which support socio‐economic resilience and
minimize expected losses. Engagement of various stakeholders and search for synergies
between private and public adaptation actions becomes central in the agenda of the
Australian government, calling for the development of economic tools to quantify the impact of adaptation actions at various levels. While individual level actions – such as purchasing
insurance, hazard‐proofing a house and relocating to a safer place – reduce expected
damages and improve resilience, this autonomous adaptation has limits. To be able to assess
where these limits are, how they change over time, and how public policies can enhance
autonomous adaptation, we need to quantify aggregated impacts of autonomous adaptation.
This PhD project will develop a computational spatial agent‐based model that traces the
impacts of public and private adaptation to climate‐driven hazards. This simulation model will serve as an aggregation vehicle to trace changes in damages across scales as individuals and
communities dynamically adapt to natural hazards. We focus on the impact on the housing
sector since losses to real estate constitute the largest share of the direct damage from
catastrophic events such as bushfires, storms and floods.
PhD2 ‘Housing bubbles and economic expectations’: Housing markets are vital in supporting and redistributing wealth. Given unprecedented urbanization one could expect increase in property and land prices that potentially undermine inequality. At the same time, housing markets are known to experience sudden crashes raising the question about macro and microeconomic forces shaping economic bubbles. Price expectations of heterogenous economic agents and their interactions along the economic and social networks drive markets dynamics from the bottom up. At the same time, macroeconomic cycles also influence the housing sector. This PhD project will develop computational agent‐based models to study economy as an adaptive complex system, focusing on housing markets in particular.
