Joint Electrial & Computer Engineering and Civil & Environmental Engineering Seminar
Dr. Hendrik Hamann
Computing and AI for Climate
Wednesday, August 24, 2022, 10:00-11:00 AM
B02 Coordinated Science Laboratory
Abstract:
The urgency of responding to climate change and its impact has rallied the scientific community like few challenges before. Although climate science has made tremendous progress in the last decades, it is becoming increasingly clear that computational systems, tools, and platforms needed to rapidly accelerate climate science have not kept up. They have not only been outpaced by the urgency of the matter but especially as it relates to harnessing the massive generation/availability of climate-related observation and simulation data using Machine-Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI): an approach that promises great advances in understanding climate.
In this presentation progress towards accelerating climate science using computation and AI is presented. (i) A scalable geospatial data and analytics platform is presented which not only reduces “data gravity” challenges but also enables efficient federation of distributed climate information. This platform is coupled to a modeling framework, which accelerates climate modeling and its workflows. (ii) Then, we will present a set of specific AI models, for example for statistical downscaling such as AI enabled weather generators, helping to accelerate understanding local climate impact. (iii) Finally, we present a set of examples how these technologies have been applied to derive new insights for climate and its impacts such as natural carbon sequestration, future flood, or wildfire risk modeling.
Biography:
Dr. Hendrik Hamann is a Distinguished Research Staff Member and the Global leader for Climate and Sustainability Research in IBM Research. He is also the Chief Scientist for Climate and Sustainability in IBM. He received his PhD from the University of Göttingen in Germany. In 1999 he joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Hendrik’s interests include sensor-based physical modeling, machine-learning, artificial intelligence, big data technologies, geospatial analytics, and climate informatics. He has more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers and holds over 170 patents. Hendrik has served on governmental committees such as the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation and as an industrial advisor to universities. He won several awards including the 2016 Prize for Industrial Applications of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), a senior member of The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a member of the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the New York Academy of Sciences. He is also a standing member of the National Mapping Committee of the National Research Council and a Visiting Professor at Yamagata University.
