Tison Award 2006 / Prix Tison 2006
The winner of the 2006 Tison Award is Dr Özgür Kisi (Turkey) for his paper "Suspended sediment estimation using neuro-fuzzy and neural network approaches" published in HSJ in 2005.
Dr. Arthur Askew, IAHS President, presenting the 2006 Tison Award to Dr Ö. Kisi during the VIIIth Kovacs Colloquium (UNESCO, Paris, 1st July 2006)
Citation by Z. Kundzewicz, IAHS Editor
I am pleased to inform you that the 2006 Tison Award Jury, composed of experts nominated by the IAHS, namely Hubert Savenije (ICWRS), Bruce Webb (ICWQ), Bent Hasholt (ICCE), Piotr Maloszewski (ICT) and John Pomeroy (ICSIH), chaired ex officio by Zbyszek Kundzewicz (IAHS Editor), arrived at a decision based on majority rule. The winner of the 2006 Tison Award is Dr Ozgur Kisi (Turkey) for his paper "Suspended sediment estimation using neuro-fuzzy and neural network approaches" published in Hydrological Sciences Journal in December 2005, pp. 1025-1040.
In the winning paper, the potential of neuro-fuzzy and neural network approaches to modelling the relationship between the streamflow and the suspended sediment is investigated, and illustrated based on the USGS data. The author proposed a new approach to sediment transport calculation, which for long time used to be based on rating curves. Dr Kisi showed that, for the data he used, the new approach performs better in representing the real system than the sediment rating curve and the multiple linear regression. His paper was highly evaluated by referees.
The ANN and neuro-fuzzy techniques are frequently used in many sub-domains of hydrology, but applications to sediment modeling are only few, hence the winning paper can be regarded as innovative. Even if neural and neuro-fuzzy networks are typically considered to be black box techniques that help in curve fitting rather than provide insight into processes and improve our understanding, they hold promise for solving important practical problems in hydrological sciences. Moreover, there have been some attempts, recently reported in HSJ, to bring the ANNs closer to physically-based models, by proposing a physical interpretation of the method.
Dr Kisi is a talented young scientist, working in the area of relatively new mathematical tools applied to hydrological sciences, sometimes called hydroinformatics. He has been a prolific author. In the procedure of selecting the 2006 Tison Award, Dr Ozgur Kisi had three different eligible papers which had passed the pre-screening procedure. He was also among candidates for the 2005 Tison Award.
By announcing the 2006 Tison Award being bestowed upon a young author from Turkey, it is worthy of mentioning that many contributions from Turkey have been submitted to HSJ in reent years, and a substantial part of them get accepted and published. A Turkish hydrologist, Professor Sen, is now Associate Editor of HSJ. Now, for the first time, a contribution published by a young Turkish author has received a prestigious Tison Award, administered by the International Association of Hydrological Sciences.