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IIASA corner IIASA postdoc Sibel Eker uses systems modeling to influence policymaking. Eker joined IIASA in July 2017 as a postdoc in the Advanced Systems Analysis (ASA), Ecosystems Services and Management, and Water programs. Originally from Turkey, Eker studied in the Netherlands, worked in London, and has a background in industrial and systems engineering. “Policy impact and innovation are my primary focus areas,” says Eker. “I hope to design and communicate my work to directly address the policy problems of the time, and to use my interdisciplinary background to create synergies and innovation in modeling.” The ASA Program aims to develop new, interdisciplinary methods to address problems in the policy analysis of complex, socioenvironmental systems. This suits Eker perfectly, as her primary interests center on developing modeling and simulation tools to help deal with these highly complex issues. Systems models in particular not only acknowledge the uncertainty and complexity of these problems, but help researchers explore a wide variety of different outcomes. By predicting and analyzing these different scenarios, researchers will be able to produce data that enables policymakers to adopt proactive strategies for solving some of the world’s most daunting problems. “I hope that my work here will make models more useful, either by shedding some light on the validity concerns and perspectives at the science-policy interface, or by bringing an explicit human behavior component to the models of global environmental change,” says Eker. Helping to solve the world’s most complex problems Software engineer Anto Subash builds new applications to collect and visualize data. Subash joined IIASA in January 2017 as an application developer in the Earth Observation Systems Group, which forms part of the Ecosystems Services and Management Program. He was born in Nagercoil, India, and grew up in Chennai, on the country’s southeastern coast. Subash, whose background is in computer science and software engineering, is a full-stack software developer, meaning that he creates both web and mobile applications. His work largely focuses on creating a framework for improving the process of crowdsourcing data, as well as making it more user-friendly. Subash is currently working on web mapping and application development for new data collection methods. He is involved in two major projects: BirdLife and FloodCitiSense. BirdLife is an application that allows users to report threats to bird populations in a given area. He originally built the application for users in Spain, but is expanding it to users in Indonesia, Greece, and Georgia. Similarly, FloodCitiSense enables users to report flood events in some of Europe’s low-lying areas, including Birmingham, Brussels, and Rotterdam. “The applications I help create are used to collect, display, and visualize data,” explains Subash. “By making them easier to use for the people submitting data, we hope to encourage more people to use them. On the visualization side, we hope to enable scientists to understand and communicate this data in more impactful ways.” Written by: Jeremy Summers Employing crowdsourcing for better data collection People profiles Sibel Eker: eker@iiasa.ac.at Anto Subash: anto@iiasa.ac.at www.iiasa.ac.at30 Options Summer 2019