On May 29 2013 professor Tim Allen was the invited guest speaker at the ICTA seminar series. His presentation is titled:
“All Models Are Wrong, Some Are Useful: Dealing with Complexity and Multiple Scales”. Download the slides here.
Tim Allen is Professor of Botany and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is a leader in the fields of Hierarchy Theory, Systems Theory, and Complexity, and (co)author of such influential books as:
- Hierarchy : Perspectives for Ecological Complexity (1982, with T.B. Starr),
- A Hierarchical Concept of Ecosystems (1986, with R.V. O’Neill, D. DeAngelis and J. B. Waide),
- Toward a Unified Ecology (1992 with T.W.Hoekstra), and
- Hierarchy Theory : a vision, vocabulary, and epistemology (1996, with Valerie Ahl).
- Supply-side Sustainability (2003, with J.A. Tainter and T.W. Hoekstra).
His recent work focuses on the implication of complexity for sustainability science, in particular hierarchy theory and problems of scale; epistemology for the analysis of socio-ecological systems; characterization of resource use and biosocial dynamics; and the process determining the choice of narratives in science.