USDA Office of Risk Assessment and Cost-Benefit Analysis host risk forum on nanofoods

(Nanowerk News) The USDA Office of Risk Assessment and Cost-Benefit Analysis host the ORACBA Risk Forum on December 3, 2010, 1:00 – 2:30 pm with the title "Application of a multicriteria decision making model based on probabilistic inversion to assess nanotechnology-enabled food products".
Known and projected applications of nanotechnology for the food sector, so far, fall into 4 categories (Chaudhry et al.,2008). Concomitant with growing industry interest in these technologies & products are concerns about safety and relevant regulatory issues.
Currently these are difficult to address due to the lack of knowledge of possible interactions of nanomaterials at the molecular and/or physiological level and their effects on human health either directly or indirectly. This level of uncertainty requires input of expert judgment, and it is expected that experts' opinions will vary.
The issue in question then becomes: how to capture experts' current knowledge and uncertainties & to understand how experts use their knowledge when thinking about possible risk of nanotechnology-enabled food products.
Our approach employs a multi criteria decision making model based on probabilistic inversion (PI) (Teck et al.,2010);it enables us to model experts' judgments regarding safety of such products in terms of scores on 10 criteria. This paper describes the PI method, the expert exercise and the results of both methods of validation.
Following the Risk Forum, the authors will be available until 4:00 pm for further in-depth discussion of the modeling technique and expert elicitation exercise. This Risk Forum is a unique opportunity to hear an extended version of a paper to be presented in a twenty minute oral session at the Society for Risk Analysis meeting in Salt Lake City.
Who: Villie Flari, Food and Environment Research Agency, United Kingdom; Rabin Nelso, University of Delft, the Netherlands
Source: USDA