Ankita Raturi

GFI Fellow - Class of 2015

Graduate Student, Informatics, Software Engineering
UC Irvine

Project

Modeling the Environmental Impact of Agricultural Systems

Description

Life cycle assessment is a modeling technique used to estimate the environmental impacts of agricultural systems. I investigate how methods are customized, how data are structured and how software supports modeling. Three essential difficulties are identified: it is difficult to capture the complexity of agricultural systems, to capture change data and to capture contextual information. By drawing on software modeling theory, I explore the design of complementary modeling languages and tools.

Goals

Immediate goals:

• Identify strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities in the modeling of the environmental impacts of agricultural systems.
• Identify possible avenues to address these difficulties, as well as discuss implications for the design of complementary modeling languages and tools.

Future Plans

Now that the work is grounded in both literature and theory in agricultural life cycle assessments and software model, I will be designing and developing a modeling language and software tool, the Open Resource Tracker. This is the core of my dissertation research.

Mentors

Bill Tomlinson, Debra Richardson and Andre van der Hoek