Guest Editors' Introduction to the Special Issue on Advances in Risk Modelling

It is a great pleasure and honour to have been selected to be the new editor-in-chief for the Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering. I would like to thank my predecessor, Prof. K. Nandakumar, as well as all the members of the CIC publications team and John Wiley & Sons for their warm welcome and for kindly helping me during this transition period. I would also like to acknowledge the efforts of the previous editors of the CJChE, Professors L. W. Shemilt, N. Epstein, C. W. Robinson and P. J. Carreau. It is a privilege and a great responsibility to follow on their footsteps; I truly hope to maintain the international reputation the CJChE has acquired under their direction. A journal such as the CJChE, which aims at publishing manuscripts covering a wide spectrum of chemical engineering themes, has great opportunities but also faces significant challenges today. Besides the core areas of transport phenomena, reaction engineering, and thermodynamics, our profession extents into areas so diverse from each other as advanced new materials, bioengineering and biomedical applications, nanotechnology, alternative energy sources, and environmental engineering, just to mention a few. How to keep the focus on the traditional areas that define chemical engineering as a distinct discipline and still attract manuscripts from the various interdisciplinary subjects chemical engineers are engaged on is the major difficulty a journal such as the CJChE faces, but it is also what makes it such a dynamic and engaging publication. Undoubtedly, this diversity of themes, interconnected through a few core areas, is what makes chemical engineering so rich and stimulating and also what has captivated most of us since our undergraduate days; to be able to capture this variety of themes between the covers of a single scientific journal will be one of the main goals of the CJChE editorial board. One of the new initiatives planned to reach this objective is to establish special feature article series on current research topics in chemical engineering. These series will typically include six to ten articles written by leading experts in the field and will be published over a period of one to two years, one to two articles per issue. The series will be organised by the editor-in-chief, one of the associate editors, or by a guest editor in their area of interest. Thematic areas covered in the series will include both core as well as non-traditional chemical engineering topics. It is a great pleasure for me to announce that our first three articles series are already being planned in the areas of Chemical Reaction Engineering (Guest Editor: Professor John Grace, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of British Columbia), Nanotechnology (Guest Editors: Professors Michael Tam and Frank Gu, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Waterloo), and Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology (Guest Editor: Professor Elizabeth Jones, Department of Chemical Engineering, McGill University). We intend to broaden the international profile of the CJChE by inviting researchers from institutions abroad to join our editorial board as associated editors and by encouraging them to work actively with the editor-in-chief to attract top quality papers from worldwide researchers. We also intend to give a wider coverage to our annual Canadian Conference of Chemical Engineering by dedicating one special issue of the CJChE to outstanding research and review papers presented in this event. Special issues to celebrate the achievements of Canadian researchers, researchers who had an important impact in science and engineering in Canada, and topics of international relevance in chemical engineering, are also part of the future plans for the CJChE. Perhaps more importantly, I would like to invite our readers to participate actively in the development of their journal by welcoming any suggestions or comments they may have during my term as editor-in-chief. I look forward to an active and extensive exchange of ideas with all my colleagues in Canada and abroad during the next five years.

Tsunami waves represent extreme often catastrophic events, which significantly and adversely impact coastal areas. In spite of the lower frequency of occurrence comparing to storms and storm-induced surges, tsunami-induced coastal flooding often leads to massive casualties and tremendous economic losses. Hence, although tsunamis are a rare event, they often come in the form of a high-impact natural disaster. This Special Issue on Tsunami Risk and Impacts on Coastlines comprises ten papers by an international group of authors. The first paper is titled ‘‘The earthquakes and related tsunamis of October 6, 1944 and March 7, 1867, NE Aegean Sea’’ and is written by Altinok et al. The second paper is authored by Alpar et al. and deals with new approaches in the assessment of tsunami deposits in Dalman, SW Turkey. The third paper, by Lopez et al., has the title ‘‘Evidence for mid to late Holocene paleotsunami deposits, Kakawis Lake, Vancouver Island, British Columbia.’’ The fourth paper which is on the far field impact and coastal sedimentation associated with the 2006 Java tsunami in West Australia is by Prendergast and Brown. A corrected 3-D SPH method for modeling breaking tsunami waves by Xie et al. is the theme for the fifth paper. The sixth paper by Rajakumari and Subramanian deals with the topic of behaviour of tsunami waves along the coasts of Kancheepuram and Villupuram Districts in Tamil Nadu, India. The post-depositional changes to the onshore 2004 tsunami deposits on the Andaman Sea coast of Thailand are dealt with by Szczucinski in paper seven. Paper eight bears the title ‘‘Tsunami vulnerability assessment in urban areas using a numerical model and GIS’’ and is prepared by Usha et al. The evaluation of Canada tsunami risk and numerical modeling for potential tsunamis along western Canada coast is the focus of the ninth paper by Xie et al. The final paper is written by Murthy et al. and is about mapping of coastal inundation along Nagapattinam based on field observations. The guest editors would like to express their gratitude to Springer for inviting them to guest-edit this Special Issue, and they hope that this will contribute to the knowledge and understanding of the tsunami risk and the coastal impacts that they generate.

The December 2011 issue of the Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics is on the topic “Computer models and spatial statistics for environmental science.” This is a topic of great interest as the study of complex environmental phenomena increasingly relies on deterministic computer models. These models, for example regional climate models or rainfall-runoff simulators, are mathematical models that describe the evolution in time of a physical process. Usually, they consist of complex differential or partial differential equations that are not solvable in closed form. Hence, these are typically solved using numerical techniques, yielding deterministic predictions of a process. In this special issue, researchers tackle several important statistical problems that arise in the analysis of computer model output, for example calibrating model output with observed data, comparing and combing output from several computer models and physical observations, and building statistical emulators for computer models to predict the outcome of the models for new sets of input conditions. An important contribution of statisticians in the analysis of deterministic models is to quantify uncertainty in inferences and predictions in rigorous fashion. Uncertainty quantification is of great interest, especially as information from complex computer models and messy observational data is used for decision making. There are several types of uncertainty, including (1) parametric uncertainty in the model’s inputs or tuning parameters and (2) structural uncertainty in the mathematical equations that define the model. In “First-Order Emulator Inference for Parameters in Nonlinear Mechanistic Models”, Mevin B. Hooten, William B. Leeds, Jerome Fiechter, and Christopher K. Wikle provide a computationally-efficient method for quantifying parametric uncertainty. They approximate the complicated computer model with a more tractable statistical model, and use

This special issue of the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics on “Regime Switching and Threshold Models” is motivated by the mounting empirical evidence of important nonlinearities in regress...

The Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environment Statistics (JABES) special issue on the Climate and Earth System highlights recent statistical develops that aim to refine our understanding of this complex system. New methods are required to process the massive environmental data that often fuels climate analysis and to properly account for uncertainty in the results. This special issue proudly features eight papers that span a wide range of computational and methodological problems related to the climate and earth system. In this brief introduction, we identify common themes among the papers and point to areas of future research.

Guest Editorial: Introduction to Special Issue Commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the 1986 Inception of the Butterworths Series on Individual and Population Aging and the 30th Anniversary of the Founding of the Canadian Journal on Aging - Volume 30 Issue 3

Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Constrained Decision-Making in Robotics Marco Pavone · Stefano Carpin the date of receipt and acceptance should be inserted later As the complexity of tasks envisioned for robotic systems increases, their decision making module needs to be capable of concurrently evaluating and trading off multiple, possibly contradicting and stochastic ob- jectives. For example, a rescue robot might be required to plan trajectories so as to maximize the probability of success to reach a critical location and, at the same time, minimize the duration of the traversal. Other more general examples include trading off information gath- ering versus energy expenditures, computation time ver- sus optimality of a decision, or learning versus safety. A natural framework to address this class of problems is constrained decision-making, whereby a decision maker seeks to optimize a given cost function (often stochas- tic) while keeping other costs (usually involving risk assessments) below given bounds. In the last decade, the operations research community has made significant strides on the topics of constrained decision-making (notoriously more challenging than the unconstrained counterpart) and risk assessment in dynamic scenarios. The result is a comprehensive theory and a set of algo- rithmic tools for this class of decision-making problems. Yet, despite their relevance, these results have seen lim- ited application within the robotics domain. Accordingly, in July 2014 we organized the work- shop “Constrained decision-making in robotics: models, algorithms, and applications” during the Robotics Sci- ence and Systems (RSS) conference in Berkeley, CA. Marco Pavone Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Stanford University E-mail: pavone@stanford.edu Stefano Carpin School of Engineering University of California, Merced E-mail: scarpin@ucmerced.edu The workshop had three objectives: (1) to convene to- gether researchers working in the areas of decision-making, risk theory, and robotics, (2) to inform robotic researchers about the state of the art in constrained decision-making and modern risk theory, and (3) to formulate a research agenda on the topics of risk modeling and constrained decision-making for robotic applications. After the workshop, participants were invited to sub- mit an extended version of their work. The call for con- tributions was also extended to the broader research community and widely circulated. Eventually, six pa- pers were selected for publication and are included in this special issue. Collectively, these papers covers sev- eral robotic application domains for constrained decision- making, ranging from sensors networks to autonomous vehicles and space robotics. The first three papers deal with a deterministic prob- lem setup. Specifically, the paper “Cognitive Robots Learning Failure Contexts through Real-World Exper- imentation” by Sertac Kapinar and Sanem Sariel stud- ies how to endow robots with the ability to learn about their limitations of performance when it comes to task execution, and to capitalize on such knowledge to for- mulate risk-averse decisions subject to performance con- straints. The authors tackle the problem by using an In- ductive Logic Programming (ILP) framework, whereby hypotheses are formulated that relate execution con- texts to action outcomes. Hypotheses are continuously updated based on online observations and are used to model risks, constraints, and limitations on task exe- cution. On top of this knowledge base, a planner for- mulates decision sequences fulfilling the constraints de- rived from the learned hypotheses. The theoretical frame- work is experimentally demonstrated and validated both on a mobile robot and on a 7-DOF robotic arm perform-

Remarks on Non-Parametric Estimates for Density Functions and Regression Curves

This special volume celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Journal of Statistical Software (JSS) and is a Festschrift for its founding editor Jan de Leeuw. Jan recently retired from his long-held position as founding chair of the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. The contributions to this special volume look back at some of his research interests and accomplishments during the half-century that he has been active in psychometrics and statistics. In this introduction, the guest editors also reminisce on their own first encounters with Jan, ten years ago. Since that time JSS has solidified its place as a leading journal of computational statistics, a fact that has a lot to do with Jan's stewardship. We include a brief history of JSS.

Canadian Journal of StatisticsVolume 48, Issue 1 p. 4-7 Editorial Special issue on Stochastic Models, Statistics and Finance: Guest Editor's Introduction Cody Hyndman, Cody Hyndman Concordia UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Cody Hyndman, Cody Hyndman Concordia UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 11 February 2020 https://doi.org/10.1002/cjs.11539Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume48, Issue1Special Issue: Special issue on Stochastic Models, Statistics and FinanceMarch 2020Pages 4-7 RelatedInformation

This special issue presents a series of papers by scholars who participated in a workshop entitled ‘Men's Groups: Challenging Feminism’, which was held at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada, 26-27 May 2014. The workshop was organised by Susan B Boyd, Professor of Law and Chair in Feminist Legal Studies at the UBC Faculty of Law, and was sponsored by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC, the Peter A Allard School of Law, the Centre for Feminist Legal Studies at UBC, and the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law. The aim of the workshop was to bring together feminist scholars from multiple disciplines and multiple national contexts to explore a source of resistance to feminism that has been largely overlooked in scholarly research: the growing number of nationally situated and globally linked organisations acting in the name of men's rights and interests which contend that men are discriminated against in law, education and government funding, and that feminism is to blame for this. This special edition presents eight papers inspired by the workshop, authored by scholars from Canada, New Zealand, Poland, Sweden and the United States. A second special issue comprised of eight other papers inspired by the workshop was published in the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law as volume 28(1) in 2016.To find out more about this special edition, download the PDF file from this page.

Developments in macro-econometrics have been evolving since the aftermath of the Second World War.[...]

From the Guest Editors: Change the World: Teach Evidence-Based Practice!

The Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environment Statistics (JABES) special issue on Recent Advances in Design and Analysis of Experiments and Observational Studies in Agriculture covers a select set of topics currently of primary importance in the field. Efficient use of resources in agricultural research, as well as valid statistical inference, requires good designs, and this special issue boasts seven papers providing both review and cutting-edge methodology for the purpose. A broad range of methods for analysis of data arising in different branches agricultural research is covered in another five exciting papers. This special issue highlights the importance of and opportunities for applied statistics in agriculture.

Anthropogenic impacts on multi-scale ecosystems