Blucher Institute hosts Workshop on Artificial Intelligence

More than 30 prominent scientists and researchers attended a workshop on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its application to Environmental and Geospatial Sciences on Friday and Saturday, Jan. 12-13 at the Conrad Blucher Institute for Surveying and Science.

Dr. Philip Tissot

“Artificial intelligence allows for a different approach to study environmental systems, particularly non-linear systems such as our atmosphere and climate change,” said Dr. Philip Tissot, an assistant professor in the College of Science and Technology and one of the workshop’s organizers. “The increasing availability of both cheap computational power and environmental data has fueled the development of these AI techniques for the past 15 to 20 years.

Applications include severe weather event predictions such as the occurrence of lightning and tornadoes. Initial workshop presentations introduced AI techniques used to model environmental systems such as genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks, clustering and data mining techniques, decision trees and random forests. The presentations described the application of these techniques to present problems such as the modeling of global temperatures including anthropogenic forcings using neural networks, the predictability of our atmosphere using AI modeling of the Lorenz attractor, the capability of Genetic Algorithm to find global optima for highly non-linear systems, the development of turbulence warning systems for aviation, feature identifications in satellite and radar images, and the classification of rainfall systems.

The workshop was organized by the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Artificial Intelligence Applications to Environmental Science, the Conrad Blucher Institute and the local offices of the National Weather Service. Workshop speakers were Dr. Sue Ellen Haupt from the Computational Mechanics Division of The Pennsylvania State University Applied Research Laboratory and chair of the AMS AI committee, Dr. V. Lakshmanan from NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla. Dr. S. Lakshmivarahan George Lynn Cross Research Professor at the University of Oklahoma School of Computer Science, Dr. Antonello Pasini, from Italy’s Institute of Atmospheric Pollution, and John Williams from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Speakers and attendees engaged in discussions on topics ranging from the nature of the techniques to current promising research areas.