DSTO led Defence Operations Research Symposium (DORS 2013)
Plenary Speakers
Professor Graeme Dandy
The University of Adelaide, Australia
The multiple roles of modelling in water resources planning and management
Graeme Dandy is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Adelaide. He holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees in
Civil Engineering from the University
of Melbourne and a PhD from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(USA). He is a Fellow of the Australian
Academy of Technological Sciences and
Engineering and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers, Australia.
He has published widely in the areas of water resources planning
and management, optimisation of water supply and distribution
systems and the use of neural networks for forecasting water
resources variables.
Professor Jerzy Filar
Flinders University, Australia
The power and limitations of mathematical models and Plato’s Cave Parable
Jerzy Filar is a broadly trained
applied mathematician with research
interests spanning a wide spectrum
of both theoretical and applied topics
in Operations Research, Optimisation,
Game Theory, Applied Probability and
Environmental Modelling. Professor Filar
co-authored (with K. Vrieze) a research
level text book Competitive Markov
Decision Process, published
by Springer in 1996. He also authored
or co-authored approximately 100
refereed research papers. Professor Filar has an established record
of research contracts/agreements with government agencies
and research institutes such NSF, ARC, US EPA, World Resources
Institute, DSTO and the Sir Keith and Sir Ross Smith Foundation.
He is editor-in-chief of Environmental Modelling and Assessment
and serves on editorial boards of Operations Research, JMAA
and a number of other journals. Professor Filar is a Fellow of
the Australian Mathematical Society. He has supervised 18 PhD
students who are working at various universities, industries and
research institutions across the world.
Associate Professor Hedwig van Delden
Research Institute for Knowledge Systems, The Netherlands
Integrated modelling for policy support: lessons learnt and current challenges
Hedwig van Delden is the director
of the Research Institute for Knowledge
Systems (RIKS) in Maastricht, the
Netherlands and adjunct associate
professor at the University of Adelaide,
Australia. Her main fields of research are
land use modelling, model integration,
bridging the science-policy gap and
scenario development. Besides her
research, she manages and provides scientific leadership to
national and international projects of various sizes that focus on
the design, development and use of integrated models for policy
support. In this capacity she has led among others the European
research project LUMOCAP and the development of the DeSurvey
Integrated Assessment Model. Her work has been published in
several books and journals and widely presented at conferences.
She is currently acting as an expert evaluator for the European
Green Capital Award, organised by the European Commission.
Dr Jeff Kepert
Bureau of Meteorology, Australia
The science and technology of forecasting severe weather
Jeff Kepert works in the Centre
for Australian Weather and Climate
Research (CAWCR) at the Bureau
of Meteorology, which undertakes
research to improve scientific
understanding of, and the ability to
forecast, Australia’s climate and weather. Jeff has also worked for the Bureau as
a forecaster and as an instructor. Jeff’s
research interests include tropical cyclone dynamics, bushfire
meteorology, air–sea exchange, boundary layers and turbulence,
high-resolution wind prediction and data assimilation. He presently
leads the High Impact Weather Research team within CAWCR.
Jeff has degrees from the University of Western Australia (pure
mathematics and statistics) and Monash University (meteorology).
Dr Maja Schlüter
Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden
Embracing change – modeling for resilience thinking and ecosystem stewardship
Maja Schlüter is a researcher at Stockholm Resilience Centre
studying the co-evolution of social-ecological
systems (SES) resulting
from the interdependencies between
actors, institutions and ecosystems.
She is particularly interested in how
the nature of their interactions affects
the resilience and governance of SES.
She has worked on water issues in
Central Asia and fisheries in Mexico and
Germany using empirical and modeling
approaches. Maja has a background in
ecology and applied system science
and has conducted research on SES at the Helmholtz Centre for
Environmental Research, Leipzig; Princeton University; and the
Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Berlin. She
currently holds a starting grant of the European Research Council
for modeling social-ecological systems.
Professor Paul Whitehead
University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Adapting to climate change in freshwater ecosystems: multiple modelling approaches to assess processes, dynamics and strategies
Paul has over 35 years’ experience
of research on water resource, water
quality and pollution issues, and
has a special interest in modelling,
including the development of dynamic,
stochastic and planning models. Model
applications include simulation of
catchments, rivers, lakes and reservoirs;
environmental impact assessment
of effluent discharges, land use and
climate change, acid deposition and
non-point source pollution. Paul has
successfully managed 47 projects with
funding by NERC, EPSRC, ESRC, EU, EA and a range of Government
Departments such as DEFRA, DFID and DTI. Paul is a Professor in
the Environmental Change Institute in Oxford University and is the programme director for the NERC Macronutrient Cycles. The NERC
programme is a £9 million programme aimed at understanding
the interacting cycles of water, nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon
in river basins from the mountains or uplands to estuary and
coastal systems. Paul has served on several senior Government
and NERC committees such as the Thematic Programme
Planning committees for the River Ecology Programme (NERC
£8 million), Pollution Pathways Programme (NERC £8 million),
Land Use Research Programme (NERC £12 million), Joint NERC/
AFRC Agricultural Pollution Programme (£9 million), NERC LOIS
Programme (£36 million) and Environmental Diagnostics (NERC £6 million). He has published widely with over 90 papers
in the refereed literature as well as being guest speaker at a wide
range of conferences and meetings.
Dr Alex Zelinsky
Defence Science and Technology Organisation, Australia
The challenges of modelling and simulation for defence and national security
Dr Alex Zelinsky, D.Sc, B.Math (Hons), FIEEE, FTSE, FAICD, FIEA,
is Australia’s Chief Defence Scientist
and Chief Executive of the Defence
Science and Technology Organisation.
Previously he was Group Executive
for Information Sciences at CSIRO. His
advisory roles include membership of
the Information Technology Industry
Innovation Council, the NSW Digital
Economy Taskforce, the ARC Centre
for Vision Science and the Defence
Industry Innovation Board. Dr Zelinsky
worked in robotics in Japan and later
co-founded Seeing Machines, a high-technology Australian startup
company that develops computer vision systems. He has won
numerous engineering and science awards including the Clunies-Ross Science & Technology Award and the Eureka Prize. He is an
elected fellow of several professional bodies and Vice President of
the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society-Industrial Activities. Dr
Zelinsky has been a professor at the Australian National University
and the University of Wollongong where he completed his PhD.
Named a Technology Pioneer (2003–05) by the World Economic
Forum, Dr Zelinsky was Professional Engineer of the Year (Sydney
Division) in 2009 and has been included in Engineers Australia’s list
of the 100 most influential engineers since that year.
Dr Russell W. Glenn
The Australian National University, Australia
Mission impossible: achieving a comprehensive approach during operations and campaigns
Dr Russell W. Glenn graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1975 and thereafter served as a US Army officer in the US, Republic of Korea, Germany, United Kingdom, and Southwest Asia during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. His subsequent career as a security analyst includes work on urban operations and counterinsurgency, to include working with the US, Australian, Canadian, British, and Dutch militaries during development of doctrine in those fields. Dr Glenn earned his PhD in American history from the University of Kansas with secondary fields of military history and political science. Publications encompass some 50 books and reports along with over 20 articles. He is currently a member of the faculty in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, The Australian National University.