Join us over the lunch hour to hear from UMN Professor Shashi Shekhar, Director of AI-CLIMATE, a National AI Research Institute, to learn about their work to leverage new AI tools to curb climate effects and lift rural economies. This seminar is free and open to all, refreshments will be provided for registrants - RSVP Here.
AI-CLIMATE (AI Institute for Climate-Land Interactions, Mitigation, Adaptation, Tradeoffs and Economy) aims to advance artificial intelligence (AI) by incorporating laws of nature and leveraging new nature-informed AI methods to curb climate effects while lifting rural economies. By creating a new scientific discipline and innovation ecosystem intersecting AI and climate-smart agriculture and forestry, it plans to discover and invent compelling AI-powered knowledge and solutions. A key goal is to lower the cost of and improve accounting for carbon in farms and forests to empower carbon markets and inform decision-making. The Institute will also expand and diversify rural and urban AI workforces.
AI-CLIMATE is a joint effort currently involving the University of Minnesota Twin Cities (lead), Colorado State University, Cornell University, Delaware State University, North Carolina State University, and Purdue University.
Shashi Shekhar is a leading scholar of spatial computing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Contributions include scalable algorithms for eco-routing, evacuation route planning and spatial pattern (e.g., colocation) mining, along with an Encyclopedia of GIS, a Spatial Databases textbook, and a spatial computing book for professionals. Shashi is a McKnight Distinguished University Professor, a Distinguished University Teaching Professor, and an ADC Chair at the University of Minnesota. He is serving as the Director of a National AI Research Institute, namely, AI-CLIMATE, an Associate Director of his college’s Data Science Initiative, a co-Editor-in-Chief of Geo-Informatica journal (Springer), and a general co-chair of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (2024). Earlier, he served as the President of the University Consortium for GIS (UCGIS), and a member of many National Academies’ committees and the Computing Research Association board. Recognitions include IEEE-CS Technical Achievement Award, UCGIS Education Award, IEEE Fellow and AAAS Fellow.