I am writing to announce a new GCRI project on risks from emerging technologies. The project is sponsored by the United States Department of Homeland Security under its Science & Technology Directorate Centers of Excellence, through the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE), which is based at the University of Southern California.

The project’s Principal Investigator is GCRI Director of Research Tony Barrett. Contributions are also coming from our colleague Jun Zhuang, Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at SUNY-Buffalo, and myself.

Here is the project title and abstract:

Analyzing Current and Future Catastrophic Risks from Emerging-Threat Technologies

This project will develop a methodology for analyzing risks and risk-management tradeoffs of potential emerging threats by systematically identifying potential catastrophe-enabling developments and indicators of precursor events; estimating probabilities of facing precursors; assessing tradeoffs of available options; and continual monitoring for potential indicators of catastrophe precursors and updating probability estimates with new information and new judgments.

More detail on the project can be found on the CREATE website here.