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Professor John Cacioppo (right) discusses a project with Ken Olliff, Director of Strategic Foundation Initiatives. (Photo: Dan Dry)
MacArthur Foundation awards planning grant to improve decision-making in energy policy
Scholars will use two-fold definition of science to better understand human virtue
University Launches Arete Initiative, New Intellectual Incubator
MacArthur Foundation awards planning grant to improve decision-making in energy policy
The University of Chicago is launching a large-scale collaboration to develop a computational modeling tool that will help a wide range of organizations in climate and energy policy decision-making.
A $350,000 planning grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation supports the effort, called CIM-EARTH (Community Integrated Model of Economic and Resource Trajectories for Humankind). Additional internal support comes from the University and Argonne National Laboratory.
"Governments, industries and individuals worldwide are linked in a single energy system whose emissions affect climate worldwide," said Ian Foster, Director of the Computation Institute, a joint effort between Argonne and the University. "Yet none have a direct economic incentive to act alone in curbing emissions. Overcoming these hurdles to ensure a long-term, sustainable and equitable energy future is arguably the single biggest challenge facing humankind today."
Foster, the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor in Computer Science, will lead the project, working closely with Elisabeth Moyer, Assistant Professor in Geophysical Sciences; Kenneth Judd, the Paul H. Bauer Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a public policy research center associated with Stanford University; David Weisbach, the Walter J. Blum Professor of Law and Kearney Director of the Program in Law and Economics; and Todd Munson, a Computational Mathematician at the Computation Institute and Argonne.
The new modeling framework will analyze and predict the effects of climate policy decisions, designed to alleviate the environmental impacts of energy use (for example, a carbon tax) on the global economy. Understanding the relationship between the earth's physical systems and human economies as well as social behavior lies at the heart of the need for this kind of modeling tool.
According to Foster, this is because policy decisions impact, and in turn, are impacted by "the global economy, agriculture, environment, public health and international security (each a complex system in its own right), which depend on yet further interactions and will have widely varying effects across different economic sectors and geographic regions."
Said University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer, "There is a growing urgency for energy policy reform, but it would be short-sighted to make any serious changes without a thorough understanding of the technical, economic and social implications. CIM-EARTH will equip policymakers around the globe with a multi-dimensional analysis of their options, which is our best chance at implementing effective, long-term solutions."
Over the last decades, models of human economic and social behavior linked with climate models have emerged as vital tools for policymakers. However, these existing models, according to Judd, have major shortcomings.
"Their ability to address key issues is limited by computational methods that do not exploit high-performance architectures," said Judd. "This has resulted in oversimplifications of complex economic interactions. They can solve the models, but do not address the uncertainties inherent in the parameter estimates."
Using supercomputers housed at Argonne, the CIM-EARTH group will combine the best of modern computational, physical and economic science to construct the most sophisticated and accessible tool available. The tool will allow for more complex and realistic modeling of economic and social behavior, including human adaptation and responses to climate change.
The group seeks not only to create a new tool, but also to create a new "community modeling framework" by making all code open-source. This open approach will allow scientists from around the world in such culturally diverse disciplines as economics, social sciences, climate science and computational science to participate in the model's refinement. "Those outside of the modeling community will also work together to create and implement the model," Foster said.
With this grant, the CIM-EARTH team will engage in a 12-month planning process focused on refining the scientific plan, assembling a global team of scientific collaborators, engaging policymakers and potential funders, and testing key assumptions through prototypes.
They will work with a variety of individuals from non-scientific constituencies, including non-governmental organizations, governmental agencies, think tanks, international organizations, industry and philanthropists, who will be involved in shaping this project from its earliest stages.
The MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. In addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows, the Foundation works to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places and understand how technology is affecting children and society. More information is available at http://www.macfound.org.
The CIM-EARTH team worked closely with the Arete Initiative (http://arete.uchicago.edu), a new program designed to foster large-scale, interdisciplinary research sponsored by the University of Chicago's Office of the Vice President for Research and National Laboratories and the Office of the Provost, to develop and launch the project. For more information, visit http://www.cim-earth.org.
Scholars will use two-fold definition of science to better understand human virtues
by William Harms
w-harms@uchicago.edu
University of Chicago News Office
Using a $4.2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, University scholars are seeking intellectual contributions from scientists and humanists for an interdisciplinary project on virtue.
Project leader Jean Bethke Elshtain, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor in the Divinity School, will join Don Browning, Professor Emeritus in the Divinity School, as co-principal investigators, along with scientific advisor Howard Nusbaum, Chairman of Psychology, to launch the New Science of Virtues Project.
The project leaders are seeking proposals from scholars around the world to examine how the ideas from the natural sciences and the humanities can be brought together to understand human virtue. These scholars hope the project will generate new knowledge, informing often ambiguous, inherited moral, political and religious systems.
"A new science of virtue is needed and timely because philosophical and religious virtue theory historically has almost always assumed understandings of human nature," Browning said. "Today many natural sciences are throwing light on the naturalistic dimensions of human virtue, sometimes without reductionism and increasingly with philosophical sophistication and openness to dialogue with the humanities."
As a philanthropist, the late John Templeton was interested in promoting projects that helped draw together the perspectives of science and religion. "As Sir John once argued, bridging this divide requires the creation of foundational constructs that might link disciplines and, in the process, break down barriers to the scientific study of significant spiritual and ethical realities," said Elshtain.
The scholars are using a two-fold definition of science, which encompasses empirical studies in both the humanities and the natural sciences. Those perspectives include an examination of various definitions of virtue in philosophy, religion and cultures. Science also provides a guide to finding clarity among the studies of virtues, especially with respect to examining assumptions about human nature, according to the organizers.
"Virtues such as wisdom, generosity and gratitude are attributes of human behavior," said Nusbaum. "A submitted scientific proposal might look for genetic reasons why a person might be predisposed to greater generosity, for instance. Or a research team might examine non-human animal examples of generous actions and see how such actions can serve as a model for human virtue."
The project is seeking proposals for cutting-edge research around seven topics: virtue and modernity, models and exemplars of virtues, virtue and the natural sciences, virtue and society, the formation of philosophical conceptions of virtue, and research on specific virtues, such as courage, honesty and generosity.
New Science of Virtues, which is administered through the interdisciplinary Arete Initiative, is organizing a project council of distinguished scholars and scientists, who will review letters of intent and invite 40 finalists to submit proposals. Proposals will be peer-reviewed, and the best in the group will receive funding for further work.
Scholars joining the project will become part of a New Science of Virtues Research Network. Research results will be disseminated, and Elshtain expects to edit a volume based on the work. More information is available at http://www.scienceofvirtues.org/.
University Launches Arete Initiative, New Intellectual Incubator
The University has launched the Arete Initiative, an intellectual incubator program designed to assist faculty in developing innovative, large-scale interdisciplinary research projects.
The initiative emerged from a collaboration between John Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology; Matthew Christian, Administrative Director of the Center for Cognitive & Social Neuroscience; and Ken Olliff, Director for Strategic Foundation Initiatives. Cacioppo is the faculty director of the initiative, while Christian and Olliff are co-leaders.
"Over the past year, that work has blossomed into a pilot program, vetted and approved by the administration, and recently was established as a University initiative institutionalized within my office," said Donald Levy, the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in Chemistry and Vice President for Research and for National Laboratories.
"With very limited resources, the team has stimulated the creation of several highly innovative interdisciplinary projects with topics ranging from ‘"Predicting and Controlling MRSA Outbreaks" and "The Scientific Study of Wisdom" to "Modeling the Human Dimensions of Climate Change.'" Levy said.
Cacioppo said he and his colleagues proposed the initiative in order to help scientists and other researchers overcome the challenges they face when developing large projects that require interdisciplinary scholarship, and because the initiative reflects a tradition at the University that encourages work among various disciplines.
"Porous boundaries between departments and divisions have resulted in world-changing ideas and new schools of thought," he said, and this tradition of interdisciplinarity often leads scholars to work in teams.
"Team science, especially interdisciplinary science, is characterized by synergies among experts that can transform both science and scientists," Cacioppo added. "When interdisciplinary teams succeed, they have the potential to produce scientific innovations, advance understanding of what were thought to be intractable problems, influence multiple disciplines, and spawn new research."
Funding for Arete projects has come from a variety of public agencies and private foundations.
The organizers chose the name Arete, a classical Greek word that means excellence in the sense of the fulfillment of human potential.
Faculty interested in the possibility of establishing projects through Arete may call Arete Staff at 773-834-9870 or e-mail arete@uchicago.edu. For more information, visit arete.uchicago.edu.
