Theme: Countdown by TEDxClimateChangeAI

We at Climate Change AI believe in the power of ideas worth spreading. Ideas that start out as an inkling of hope, a call to a better future, but ones that eventually transform our lives through our collective belief and action.

Our planet and society face a formidable challenge in the decades ahead as natural disasters multiply, sea levels rise, and natural ecosystems falter due to climate change.

Addressing climate change will require systems solutions, with participation from across academia, industry, the public sector, and civic society.

It is with this belief that we are organizing a TEDx Countdown event on October 17, 2020 to further the conversation around climate change, and how machine learning fits into the narrative. Join us.

Virtual (Zoom)
N/A
N/A, Pennsylvania, N/A
United States

Alexandre Lacoste

Alexandre joined Element AI as the first Research Scientist in early 2017. His main interests revolve around transfer learning, bayesian inference, causality and meta-learning. In parallel, Alexandre explores solutions for mitigating climate change. Prior to Element AI, Alexandre worked 3 years at Google in the Research Group for building end-to-end question answering systems using deep learning. The system is currently launched in google search to answer some of the most complex questions. He obtained his PhD with Mario Marchand and Francois Laviolette in theoretical machine learning, where he developed bridges between PAC-Bayes theory and Bayesian inference. He obtained his Master with Douglas Eck in the former MILA where he applied machine learning to music. Finally, he studied Physics during his undergrad.

Anna Waldman-Brown

Anna is a PhD student in MIT’s Industrial Performance Center, researching manufacturing innovation and workforce automation with the MIT Work of the Future Taskforce. She has a Master's from the MIT Technology Policy Program, and has worked with Autodesk, the Fab Lab network, international policy-makers, and grassroots innovators across 60+ countries to foster creative problem-solving and sustainable development through emerging technologies. She was a Fulbright fellow at KNUST in Ghana, where she interviewed the roadside artisans and auto-mechanics who build and maintain the country’s minibus system.

Bill Weihl

Founder and Executive Director of ClimateVoice

Bill Weihl is the Founder and Executive Director of ClimateVoice, a non-profit initiative launched in February 2020 that is mobilizing the workforce to encourage companies to go “all in” on climate - especially in their use of their voice and influence to support public policy, everywhere they operate. Previously, Bill was Director of Sustainability at Facebook, leading work on sustainability across the company; Green Energy Czar at Google, where his team pioneered Google’s work to buy clean energy for its data centers, among other initiatives; a Professor of Computer Science at MIT; a researcher at Digital's Systems Research Center; and CTO of Akamai Technologies. Bill is on the board of directors of the Sierra Club Foundation and of Acterra, and also on the boards of WeSpire and Common Energy. He has received numerous awards, including Time Magazine's Hero of the Environment (2009), the Global Green Award for environmental leadership (2016), and the VERGE Vanguard Award (2018).

Catherine Nakalembe

Assistant Research Professor at the University of Maryland

Catherine Nakalembe is Assistant Research Professor at the University of Maryland. She grew up in Kampala, Uganda, where she earned a BSc. at Makerere University in Environmental Science. Dr. Nakalembe earned an MSc. in Geography and Environmental Engineering from Johns Hopkins University and her Ph.D. in Geographical Science at the University of Maryland. She was recently awarded the 2020 Africa Food Prize (AFP) for her contributions to the promotion of food security across the continent. Dr. Nakalembe's interests include agriculture, food security, remote sensing, and climate change. She has worked with the World Bank Environment Group and Climate Change Unit, The Nature Conservancy, The United Nations Development Program and the NASA LCLUC program. She works with government agencies in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda as a co-investigator on the NASA SERVIR Applied Sciences Team and NASA Harvest. She serves as the Program Assistant for the NASA Land Cover and Land Use Change Program.

Climate Change AI

Climate Change AI team

Climate Change AI (CCAI) is a group of volunteers from academia and industry who believe that tackling climate change requires concerted societal action, in which machine learning can play an impactful role. Since it was founded in June 2019, CCAI has led the creation of a global movement in climate change and machine learning, encompassing researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, companies, and NGOs. Speakers: * David Rolnick * Priya Donti * Lynn Kaack * Nikola Milojevic-Dupont * Anna Waldman-Brown * Alexandre Lacoste * Evan D. Sherwin * Kelly Kochanski * Kris Sankaran * Natasha Jaques * Sasha Luccioni

David Rolnick

David Rolnick is an Assistant Professor and Canada CIFAR AI Chair in the School of Computer Science at McGill University and at the Mila Quebec AI Institute. He is a co-founder and chair of Climate Change AI and serves as scientific co-director of Sustainability in the Digital Age. Dr. Rolnick has also worked at Google and DeepMind, and is a former NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow, NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from MIT.

Evan Sherwin

Evan Sherwin is a data-informed energy policy analyst assessing the role of hydrocarbon fuels in the transition to a net-zero energy system. Much of Evan’s research currently focuses on prediction, detection, and quantification of methane emissions from the oil and gas value chain, combining approaches from data science, machine learning, and systems engineering with an eye toward informing policy and industry decision-making. Evan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University's department of Energy Resources Engineering. Evan is also Programs Chair of Climate Change AI and the founder and chair of the Methane Emissions Technology Alliance international seminar series. Evan and holds a PhD in Engineering and Public Policy and an MS in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University.

George Kamiya

Digital/Energy Analyst at the International Energy Agency

George coordinates the IEA's work on digitalisation and tracking clean energy progress, and leads the agency’s analysis on ICT energy use and automated and shared mobility. He was a lead author of the 2017 Digitalization & Energy report and has contributed to the agency's work on climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Kelly Kochanski

Dr. Kelly Kochanski works as a Climate Analytics Data Scientist at McKinsey & Company, where she uses advanced analytics to help businesses make better decisions about weather and climate. Prior to joining McKinsey, she received her PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she was a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow.

Kris Sankaran

Kris Sankaran is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is interested in the role of machine learning in societal adaptation.

Lynn Kaack

Lynn Kaack is Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer in the Energy Politics Group at ETH Zürich, and a chair of the organization Climate Change AI. She is also a member of Austrian Council on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. Her research applies methods from statistics and machine learning to inform climate mitigation policy across the energy sector. She obtained a PhD in Engineering and Public Policy and a Master's in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University.

Natasha Jaques

Natasha Jaques holds a joint position as a Research Scientist at Google Brain and post-doc at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on social reinforcement learning---developing multi-agent RL algorithms that can improve single-agent learning, generalization, coordination, and human-AI collaboration. Natasha received her PhD from MIT, where she worked on Affective Computing and deep/reinforcement/machine learning. Her work has received the best demo award at NeurIPS 2016, best paper at the NeurIPS workshops on ML for Healthcare and Cooperative AI, and an honourable mention for best paper at ICML 2019. She has interned at DeepMind, Google Brain, and is an OpenAI Scholars mentor. Her work has been featured in Quartz, the MIT Technology Review, Boston Magazine, and on CBC radio. Natasha earned her Masters degree from the University of British Columbia, and undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Psychology from the University of Regina.

Nikola Milojevic-Dupont

Nikola is a fourth-year PhD candidate. His work focuses on sustainable urban planning, with a particular focus on applying machine learning techniques to support data-driven public policies in urban areas. He is affiliated with both the Mercator Research Institute for Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), in the working group Land Use, Infrastructure, Transport, as well as the Technical University Berlin, in the chair of Sustainability Economics of Human Settlements. He is also a founding, core team member of Climate Change AI (CCAI), an organization of volunteers aiming to facilitate impactful work at the intersection between machine learning and climate change.

Priya Donti

Priya Donti is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and a U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow. She is also a co-founder and chair of Climate Change AI, an initiative to catalyze impactful work in climate change and machine learning. Her work lies at the intersection of machine learning, electric power systems, and climate change mitigation. Specifically, her research explores ways to incorporate domain knowledge (such as power system physics) into machine learning models.

Sasha Luccioni

Sasha Luccioni is a researcher working on Artificial Intelligence for Humanity initiatives at Mila Institute, where she leads projects at the nexus of AI and social issues such as climate change, education and healthcare. Sasha got her PhD in Cognitive Computing in 2018 and spent two years working in applied research, applying Deep Learning in industries, such as customer service and banking. Since joining Mila in early 2019, she has organized and led many AI for social good initiatives, conferences and workshops. She is co-chair of the Climate Change AI Content Committee, and involved with other initiatives like Women in Machine Learning and KidsCodeJeunesse.