Research Initiatives for AI and the Climate Crisis
There is a Growing Engagement to Consider AI in the Context of Climate Change
It seems more initiatives are starting on climate change and artificial intelligence of late. Most of these initiatives have an applied scientific focus, rather than attempt to combine different types of field to address the urgent issues within the infrastructure that enables AI, however that may be a different story, and there seems to be initiatives on energy relating to AI. I want to focus on two initiatives, an AI track at Stanford and a new centre at the University of Cambridge.
AI for Climate Change Track at Stanford University
A Bootcamp for Cutting-Edge Research at the Intersection of AI and Climate Change
“The AI for Climate Change Bootcamp will convene teams of Stanford students this Winter quarter to build AI models for addressing key problems in climate change.”
The bootcamp will be led by the Stanford Machine Learning group, under Professor Andrew Ng alongside different communities at Stanford University.
- PhD students in Professor Andrew Ng’s lab
- Faculty of the Department of Earth System Science
- The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Scientists from Descartes Labs
The Bootcamp starts Jan 10th, 2020. There is a requirement to have completed several computer science courses prior to joining the course.
You can find the bootcamp here:
AI for the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER)
“The UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in the Application of Artificial Intelligence to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER) will, through several multi disciplinary cohorts, train researchers uniquely equipped to develop and apply leading edge computational approaches to address critical global environmental challenges by exploiting vast, diverse and often currently untapped environmental data sets.”
There is a split focus within two areas:
- Environmental data classification, integration & analysis
- Environmental modelling
It is a one-year Master of Research (MRes) course with a taught component and a major research element, followed by a three-year PhD research project.
This centre is also focused on the natural sciences, this are the type of candidates they are looking for:
- natural sciences (e.g. physics, chemistry, earth sciences, biology)
- engineering
- computer science
- mathematics
You can find more information here.
Short Note on Social Science vs. Natural Science
Since I study computer science as well I do understand that there is a very practical aspect to this type of education that requires an understanding of these conceptual frameworks. There has to be a degree of experience within these different fields to understand math, programming etc.
I do on the other hand wish that they opted in to create a space for a different type of participant who had another focus area. It seems if you are a social scientist wanting to combine these studies a heavier focus on the natural sciences is needed before it is possible to access these types of courses.
I have so far not seen any course focused on AI within social science, although there are plenty of Science and Technology studies wherein you could certainly have a research focus on artificial intelligence.
This is #500daysofAI and you are reading article 171. I write one new article about or related to artificial intelligence every day for 500 days.
