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(sent on behalf of Jiayi Liu, Secretary of the Edinburgh local group of the Royal Statistical Society) Edinburgh Local RSS event Venue: ICMS Address: 15 South College Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AA Date and time: Thursday 22nd Sep Tea & coffee available from 17:30pm; talk between 18:00-19:00. Speaker: Prof. Didier Sornette, ETH Zürich, Chair of Enterpreneurial Risks Title: "Dragon-kings: extreme risk events, prediction and control" Abstract: In many complex systems, large events are believed to follow power-law, scale-free probability distributions so that the extreme, catastrophic events are unpredictable. In the last decade, I have spearheaded the concept of “dragon-kings’’, these outliers of large sizes and unique origins [1,2]. Our research has shown that most extreme events in fact do not belong to a scale-free distribution. Called dragon-kings, these events are outliers that possess distinct formation mechanisms. Such specific underlying mechanisms open the possibility that dragon-kings can be forecasted, allowing for suppression and control [3]. For certain dynamical systems, it is possible to illustrate the statistical evidence and predictability of dragon-kings. The approach can be generalised to obtain a conceptual framework to quantify, model and predict crises in out-of-equilibrium open heterogeneous dynamical systems (ie almost all systems of interest) based on a synthesis of the theory of the renormalization group in statistical physics and bifurcation theory in mathematics combined with systematic empirical data analyses. We have recently reviewed the state of the art and some recent progress on the best statistics to detect the dragon-kings in sparse data (the outlier detection problem) [4]. The obtained insights have important implications to address the challenges facing mankind, including finance induced instabilities in worldwide economies, debt instability, cyber-risks [5], industrial and nuclear risks [6], epidemics of obesity and chronic diseases, aging and financial retirement liabilities, the energy challenges, the water problem, the soil erosion run- away, the on-going sixth largest biological extinction, extreme industrial disasters, coupled with geopolitical risks, the problem of the stability of societies that need to steer responsible management of our complex industrial systems. We propose a novel quadrant formulation of risk management along the dimensions of stressor severity and level of predictability [7], in which the dragon-king regime plays a prominent role. Registration https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSchLvTdjw97XWMv2fEHkkDTY9NPwDvaqB58IilUuVySAWYt3A/viewform This is a free event open to everyone. Your registration would be useful for the organisers to know how many people are likely to attend, so please complete the registration below. Thanks! Many thanks, Jiayi Liu Secretary of the Edinburgh local group of the Royal Statistical Society http://www.bioss.ac.uk/rsse/ -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. You may leave the list at any time by sending the command SIGNOFF allstat to [log in to unmask], leaving the subject line blank.