A project seeking to create a digital replica of the earth in order to better understand relationships between the environment and society, has won the 2021 Mardia Prize.
The Mardia Prize encourages cutting-edge interdisciplinary workshops that bring together statisticians with other science communities. Founded by RSS fellow Kanti Mardia, the prize makes £3,000-4,000 available per year to support workshops in emerging interdisciplinary areas and is awarded as part of the Society's honours each year.
The winning proposal for 2021 came from Dr Vinny Davies (pictured), a member of the Statistics & Data Analytics group in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Glasgow, for a workshop on Analytics for Digital Earth.
The workshops will focus on developing a network of statisticians and non-statisticians to tackle some global challenges as part of a digital earth and link to the AI3 initiative launched by the group in 2020. They will aim to identify sub-systems in the digital earth concept where the greatest data and analytics needs exist, and then come up with action plans that allow academia and industry to combine to solve these gaps in an effective manner.
Dr Davies works on a variety of projects combining statistics and machine learning, with a general focus on the design and inference of digital simulators ranging from metabolomics to biodiversity. As a group, the Statistics & Data Analytics group has a strong focus on real-world impact within an environmental context, with a strong expertise in modelling data - whether from satellites, sensors or citizen science - to monitor environmental change affecting the earth.