October 22, 2021
Abstract
The urgency of climate change has brought the importance of accelerating climate science and research to the forefront. Improved understanding of climate change risk and impacts will form the basis for developing strategies, including carbon footprint reduction, preparedness, planning, response, and resiliency. While climate research informing these strategies have made progress in last decades, further acceleration of discovery could be achieved by leveraging technological advances in hybrid cloud platforms and AI to exploit the massive generation of climate-related observation and simulation data. This talk will highlight how recent advances in AI, big data analytics, geospatial indexing and cloud platforms can be applied towards accelerating climate research and science as well as addressing industry-specific use cases to help enterprises mitigating and adapting to the impact of climate change.
Dr. Hendrik Hamann is a Distinguished Research Staff Member and the IBM Chief Scientist for the Future of Climate. 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.