GES-themed Zoomposium: 13 May 2022
Published: 4 May 2022
Dr Cristina PERSANO: ‘Deep geothermal energy: how can geoscience help?’ Dr Ziqi LI: ‘Explainable AI for geospatial data’ Dr Alejandra VOVIDES: 'Roots of cooperation'
Watch GES-themed Zoomposium (Passcode #sp7mBy!)
Speakers:
Dr Cristina Persano, School of Geographical & Earth Sciences
‘Deep geothermal energy: how can geoscience help?’
Text TBC.
Dr Ziqi Li, School of Geographical & Earth Sciences
‘Explainable AI for geospatial data’
As a quantitative geographer, I am interested in developing spatially explicit statistical tools to help understand urban, social and environmental spatial phenomena and processes. In the recent decade, ML/AI have been increasingly used to study geospatial problems in both physical and social domains. Despite numerous successful stories, ML/AI methods are largely black box. However, geographic research often requires interpretability, as geographers seek to understand the underlying processes of observed geographical patterns rather than perform purely predictive tasks. The recent emergence of XAI methods offers potential but has a number of caveats and issues when applied to geospatial data and AI models.
I hope to engage researchers who are interested in statistics, interpretable machine learning and geospatial data science. Funders such as the EPSRC, ESRC, and the Alan Turing Institute could be pursued for collaborative initiatives.
Dr Alejandra Vovides, School of Geographical & Earth Sciences
‘Roots of cooperation’
A major challenge to achieve adaptation to climate change lies in our ability to understand how environmental resources and regulators modulate individual trait plasticity, interactions, and ecosystem functions. My research bridges multiple disciplines in biology, forestry, coastal, environmental- and computer sciences to understand the drivers of plant architecture, and their consequent effects on their interactions, landscape formation, and ecosystem function. I seek to explore the interplay between biotic and abiotic elements that drive ecosystem complexity to inform management approaches that prevent ecosystem loss, to develop Nature-based Solutions for sustainable coastal ecosystem management and restoration, and to identify easy-to-monitor indicators of ecological restoration to accompany community-based monitoring tools to ensure restoration success.
First published: 4 May 2022