George Sugihara

George Sugihara (born in Tokyo, Japan) is currently a professor of biological oceanography in the Physical Oceanography Research Division at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he is the inaugural holder of the McQuown Chair in Natural Science. Sugihara is a theoretical biologist who works across a variety of fields ranging from ecology and landscape ecology, to epidemiology, to genetics, to geoscience and atmospheric science, to quantitative finance and economics.

His work involves inductive theoretical approaches to understanding nature from observational data. The general approach is different from most theory and involves minimalist inductive theory – Inductive data-driven explorations of nature using minimal assumptions. The aim is to avoid inevitable assumptions of deductive first-principle models and produce an understanding that passes the validation test of out-of-sample prediction. His initial work on fisheries as complex, chaotic systems led to work on financial networks and prediction of chaotic systems.

Other notable research relates some of his early work on topology and assembly in ecological systems to recent work on social systems and work on generic early warning signs of critical transitions that apply across many apparently different classes of systems. Provided by Wikipedia