Truyen Tran
A/Professor
Photo credit: Tienphong.vn, 09/07/2019
“Climate change is a driver of
global wildfire trends” (WWF)
CLIMATE CHANGE:
CHALLENGES &
-DRIVEN SOLUTIONS
AI
Sir David MacKay
(1967-2016)
Physicist * AI scientist *
Sustainable energy expert *
Cancer fighter
11/12/2019
3
Introduction to AI/ML AI as an approach
The challenges
Agenda
Joining the global effort
Source: Royal Society
Human greenhouse gas footprints
Source: Sceptical Science
Credit: climate calcommons
Source: David MacKay, 2007
Source: David MacKay, 2007
Source: David MacKay, 2007
What are the effect?
• large-scale singular events (such as further sea level rise as major ice
sheets melt over Greenland and Antarctica)
• threatening the survival of certain ecosystems
• exacerbating extreme weather events (e.g. heat waves, drought, extreme
rainfall, and coastal flooding)
• altering sea ice concentrations, river flow and coastal erosion
• pushing plant and animal species towards the poles and to higher
elevations
• slowing productivity gains for some crops such as wheat and maize
• severe impacts on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations
Source: The Committee on Climate Change, UK
Hà Tĩnh, 09/07/2019 – Tiền Phong
Reduction
• Energy
• Industry
• Buildings & cities
• Farms & forests
• Transportation
Adaptation
• Disaster prevention
• Societal impact
• Ecological impact
Alteration
• Sequestration
• Geoengineering
Adapted from Ng & Zhou 2019
What can we/AI do?
Advancing climate sciences
• Data-driven climate models
• Process-based climate models
• Hybrid-models
Photo credit: bedford
Education
• Raise awareness | Enable individual actions
11/12/2019
14
Introduction to AI/ML AI as an approach
The challenges Joining the global effort
Agenda
What is AI?
11/12/2019
15
Among the most challenging scientific questions of our
time are the corresponding analytic and synthetic
problems:
• How does the brain function?
• Can we design a machine which will simulate a brain?
-- Automata Studies, 1956.
What makes AI?
Perceiving
Learning
Reasoning
Planning
11/12/2019
16
Acting
Robotics
Communicating
Consciousness
Automated discovery
Modern AI is mostly data-driven, as
opposed to classic AI, which is mostly
expert-driven.
Source: PwC
Machine learning
(system that improves its performance with more experience)
Supervised learning
(mostly machine)
A  B
Unsupervised learning
(mostly human)
Will be quickly solved for “easy”
problems (Andrew Ng)
11/12/2019
18
Anywhere in between: semi-supervised learning,
reinforcement learning, lifelong learning, meta-learning, few-
shot learning, knowledge-based ML
ML starts with feature engineering learning
• In typical machine learning projects, 80-90%
effort is on feature engineering
• E.g., flood prediction: history, current weather,
deforestation rate, change in landscape,
construction density, etc.
• A range of powerful classifiers: Random forests,
GBM, SVM, deep neural nets, etc.
• Try yourself on Kaggle.com!
11/12/2019
19
Current AI (deep learning): Mimic the brain
11/12/2019
20
andreykurenkov.com
DL basic 1: Repeat the trick, horizontally and vertically
Integrate-and-fire neuron
andreykurenkov.com
Feature detector
Block representation
11/12/2019
21
DL basic 2: Keep looking ahead
Classification
Image captioning
Sentence classification
Neural machine translation
Sequence labelling
Source: karpathy
11/12/2019
22
DL basic 3: Repeat and vote
Source: adeshpande3
11/12/2019
23
DL basic 4: Dual - guess and judge
11/12/2019
24Adapted from Goodfellow’s, NIPS 2014
Can you tell which one is real?
11/12/2019
25
Karras, T., Aila, T., Laine, S., & Lehtinen, J. (2017). Progressive growing of gans for improved quality,
stability, and variation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.10196.
[shutterstock: 567338095, Sarah Holmlund]. Credit: e3zine
What can AI/ML do, as a General Purpose Tech?
● Predict, aka slot filling
● Optimize, aka finding better places
● Uncover hidden factors & clusters
● Detect complex relationships
● Mimic the world
● Suggest actions with long-term rewards
● Reason about the world
● Be aware of its own limitations
11/12/2019
27
Introduction to AI/ML
The challenges Joining the global effort
Agenda
AI as an approach
One upon a time … in movies
Source: opgalImage: © EPA PHOTO/EFE/Columbia TriStar/Robert Zucker
Hate Love
Source: blackfeetclimatechange
AI
Machine
learning
Control
Reasoning
Knowledge
Reduction
Right now, on planet Earth
What can AI/ML do to tackle climate change?
● Make systems more efficient
● Enable remote sensing and automatic monitoring
● Provide fast approximations to time intensive simulations
● Support interpretable or causal models (e.g. for understanding weather
patterns, informing policy makers, and planning for disasters).
AI/ML is only one part of the solution!
● It is a tool that enables other tools across fields
● Its performance improves with more data!
Rolnick, David, et al. "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning." arXiv
preprint arXiv:1906.05433 (2019).
Experimentation
Control systems
Predictive maintenance
Hybrid physical models
Forecasting
Human interaction
Remote sensing
System optimization
ML-enabled methodologies
Electricity system
Transportation
Building & cities
Industry
Farms & forests
CO2 removal
Climate prediction
Societal impacts
Solar geoengineering
Individual action
Collective decisions
Education
Finance
Actionable areas
Rolnick, David, et al. "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning." arXiv
preprint arXiv:1906.05433 (2019).
Computer vision
NLP
Causal inference
Interpretable ML
RL & control
Time-series analysis
Transfer learning
Uncertainty quant.
Unsupervised learning
Machine learning areas
Electricity system
Transportation
Building & cities
Industry
Farms & forests
CO2 removal
Climate prediction
Societal impacts
Solar geoengineering
Individual action
Collective decisions
Education
Finance
Actionable areas
Energy
Source: financial-news-now
Transportation
Problems
● Increased CO2 footprint
● Lost of time
● Health issues (physical and mental)
● Lost of productivity
● Increase transportation cost
AI/ML-driven solutions
● Predict traffic congestion, suggest
alternative route
● Optimize fuel consumption
● Detect route/traffic management
maintenance
Vietnam News
“Forecasting travel times helps improve
road safety and efficiency. Accurate
predictions help commuters make
informed decisions about when to travel
and on what routes. This helps to lower
intensity on problem arterials by
encouraging motorists to use
underutilised parts of the grid, and
where possible, by having them select
alternative times and modes of travel. ”
Smart homes and cities
Rolnick, David, et al. "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning." arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05433 (2019).
Farms and forests
● Sensor network, automated sensing and optimization
Rolnick, David, et al. "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning." arXiv preprint
arXiv:1906.05433 (2019).
20tree.ai surveys and maps forests.
From: Financial News Now
Collecting information underwater
Source: NBC News
Source: mila
Climate prediction
● Predict effects of climate
change
● Extremely fast approximation
alternative to complex
simulation
Societal impacts
Rolnick, David, et al. "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning." arXiv preprint
arXiv:1906.05433 (2019).
Conservation effort
Norouzzadeh, Mohammad Sadegh, et al.
"Automatically identifying, counting, and
describing wild animals in camera-trap images with
deep learning." Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 115.25 (2018): E5716-E5725.
AI for social
measurements
analysis on climate
Source: financial-news-now
Education and collective
decisions
Source: David MacKay, 2007
Individual actions
Towards green AI
Strubell, Emma, Ananya Ganesh, and Andrew McCallum. "Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP." arXiv
preprint arXiv:1906.02243 (2019).
South Vietnam, 2050
Credit: New York Times
Kulp, Scott A., and Benjamin H. Strauss. "New elevation data triple
estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal
flooding." Nature communications 10.1 (2019): 1-12.
Prediction model: Neural network
• 23 input features
• trained on US LIDAR-derived
elevation data
• Extrapolated over time and
space.
However, it has been criticized for
using inaccurate data for Vietnam.
Source: Pacific Standard & Iconfinder
(1835-1882)
Source: Wiki
Jevon paradox in action
AI as an approach
11/12/2019
48
Introduction to AI/ML
The challenges
Agenda
Joining the global effort
UN sustainable development goals - 2030
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
AI & CLIMATE CHANGE
BY GOOGLE TREND
Technology alone is never enough
“Technologies [to help fight
climate change] have largely not
been adopted at scale by society.
While we hope that ML will be
useful in reducing the costs
associated with climate action,
humanity also must decide to
act.”
Rolnick, David, et al. "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning." arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05433 (2019).
First thing first: Speak collaborators’ languages
Information system Maths
Health informatics
Symbolic AI
Database
Probabilistic AI
Old machine learning Statistical machine learning
Hard core data mining
Current data mining
Clinical statistics
Theoretical statistics
Bioinformatics Statistical epidemiology
Biomedical engineering
Biostatistics
Deep learning
Molecular biology
Biochemistry
Quantum chemistry
Chemoinformatics Genetic statistics
Domain
CS/ML
Population genetics
(The case of biomedicine)
Credit: Microsoft
Source: opgal
To sum up
AI is a General-Purpose Technology (GPT)
● Just like electricity
Why AI for climate change?
● Automation, scalability, knowledge and data
integration
● Assisting in decision making
● Rational in an irrational world of politics.
● AI should be a green exemplar
Can AI fail?
● Yes. We are still learning.
● It is subject to misuse.
● It can be wrongly aligned with human values.
Sir David MacKay
(1967-2016)
Sustainable energy scientist
Cancer fighter
4.1 mil tones of CO2 has been emitted
since I started talking
This talk may have been written by AI
with non-zero probability
It have been delivered by human
with probability 1
.
11/12/2019
59
Thank you Truyen Tran
@truyenoz
truyentran.github.io
truyen.tran@deakin.edu.au
letdataspeak.blogspot.com
goo.gl/3jJ1O0

AI for tackling climate change

  • 1.
    Truyen Tran A/Professor Photo credit:Tienphong.vn, 09/07/2019 “Climate change is a driver of global wildfire trends” (WWF) CLIMATE CHANGE: CHALLENGES & -DRIVEN SOLUTIONS AI
  • 2.
    Sir David MacKay (1967-2016) Physicist* AI scientist * Sustainable energy expert * Cancer fighter
  • 3.
    11/12/2019 3 Introduction to AI/MLAI as an approach The challenges Agenda Joining the global effort
  • 4.
  • 5.
    Human greenhouse gasfootprints Source: Sceptical Science
  • 6.
  • 7.
  • 8.
  • 9.
  • 10.
    What are theeffect? • large-scale singular events (such as further sea level rise as major ice sheets melt over Greenland and Antarctica) • threatening the survival of certain ecosystems • exacerbating extreme weather events (e.g. heat waves, drought, extreme rainfall, and coastal flooding) • altering sea ice concentrations, river flow and coastal erosion • pushing plant and animal species towards the poles and to higher elevations • slowing productivity gains for some crops such as wheat and maize • severe impacts on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations Source: The Committee on Climate Change, UK
  • 12.
    Hà Tĩnh, 09/07/2019– Tiền Phong
  • 13.
    Reduction • Energy • Industry •Buildings & cities • Farms & forests • Transportation Adaptation • Disaster prevention • Societal impact • Ecological impact Alteration • Sequestration • Geoengineering Adapted from Ng & Zhou 2019 What can we/AI do? Advancing climate sciences • Data-driven climate models • Process-based climate models • Hybrid-models Photo credit: bedford Education • Raise awareness | Enable individual actions
  • 14.
    11/12/2019 14 Introduction to AI/MLAI as an approach The challenges Joining the global effort Agenda
  • 15.
    What is AI? 11/12/2019 15 Amongthe most challenging scientific questions of our time are the corresponding analytic and synthetic problems: • How does the brain function? • Can we design a machine which will simulate a brain? -- Automata Studies, 1956.
  • 16.
    What makes AI? Perceiving Learning Reasoning Planning 11/12/2019 16 Acting Robotics Communicating Consciousness Automateddiscovery Modern AI is mostly data-driven, as opposed to classic AI, which is mostly expert-driven.
  • 17.
  • 18.
    Machine learning (system thatimproves its performance with more experience) Supervised learning (mostly machine) A  B Unsupervised learning (mostly human) Will be quickly solved for “easy” problems (Andrew Ng) 11/12/2019 18 Anywhere in between: semi-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, lifelong learning, meta-learning, few- shot learning, knowledge-based ML
  • 19.
    ML starts withfeature engineering learning • In typical machine learning projects, 80-90% effort is on feature engineering • E.g., flood prediction: history, current weather, deforestation rate, change in landscape, construction density, etc. • A range of powerful classifiers: Random forests, GBM, SVM, deep neural nets, etc. • Try yourself on Kaggle.com! 11/12/2019 19
  • 20.
    Current AI (deeplearning): Mimic the brain 11/12/2019 20 andreykurenkov.com
  • 21.
    DL basic 1:Repeat the trick, horizontally and vertically Integrate-and-fire neuron andreykurenkov.com Feature detector Block representation 11/12/2019 21
  • 22.
    DL basic 2:Keep looking ahead Classification Image captioning Sentence classification Neural machine translation Sequence labelling Source: karpathy 11/12/2019 22
  • 23.
    DL basic 3:Repeat and vote Source: adeshpande3 11/12/2019 23
  • 24.
    DL basic 4:Dual - guess and judge 11/12/2019 24Adapted from Goodfellow’s, NIPS 2014
  • 25.
    Can you tellwhich one is real? 11/12/2019 25 Karras, T., Aila, T., Laine, S., & Lehtinen, J. (2017). Progressive growing of gans for improved quality, stability, and variation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.10196.
  • 26.
    [shutterstock: 567338095, SarahHolmlund]. Credit: e3zine What can AI/ML do, as a General Purpose Tech? ● Predict, aka slot filling ● Optimize, aka finding better places ● Uncover hidden factors & clusters ● Detect complex relationships ● Mimic the world ● Suggest actions with long-term rewards ● Reason about the world ● Be aware of its own limitations
  • 27.
    11/12/2019 27 Introduction to AI/ML Thechallenges Joining the global effort Agenda AI as an approach
  • 28.
    One upon atime … in movies Source: opgalImage: © EPA PHOTO/EFE/Columbia TriStar/Robert Zucker Hate Love
  • 29.
  • 30.
    What can AI/MLdo to tackle climate change? ● Make systems more efficient ● Enable remote sensing and automatic monitoring ● Provide fast approximations to time intensive simulations ● Support interpretable or causal models (e.g. for understanding weather patterns, informing policy makers, and planning for disasters). AI/ML is only one part of the solution! ● It is a tool that enables other tools across fields ● Its performance improves with more data!
  • 31.
    Rolnick, David, etal. "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning." arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05433 (2019). Experimentation Control systems Predictive maintenance Hybrid physical models Forecasting Human interaction Remote sensing System optimization ML-enabled methodologies Electricity system Transportation Building & cities Industry Farms & forests CO2 removal Climate prediction Societal impacts Solar geoengineering Individual action Collective decisions Education Finance Actionable areas
  • 32.
    Rolnick, David, etal. "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning." arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05433 (2019). Computer vision NLP Causal inference Interpretable ML RL & control Time-series analysis Transfer learning Uncertainty quant. Unsupervised learning Machine learning areas Electricity system Transportation Building & cities Industry Farms & forests CO2 removal Climate prediction Societal impacts Solar geoengineering Individual action Collective decisions Education Finance Actionable areas
  • 33.
  • 34.
    Transportation Problems ● Increased CO2footprint ● Lost of time ● Health issues (physical and mental) ● Lost of productivity ● Increase transportation cost AI/ML-driven solutions ● Predict traffic congestion, suggest alternative route ● Optimize fuel consumption ● Detect route/traffic management maintenance Vietnam News
  • 35.
    “Forecasting travel timeshelps improve road safety and efficiency. Accurate predictions help commuters make informed decisions about when to travel and on what routes. This helps to lower intensity on problem arterials by encouraging motorists to use underutilised parts of the grid, and where possible, by having them select alternative times and modes of travel. ”
  • 36.
    Smart homes andcities Rolnick, David, et al. "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning." arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05433 (2019).
  • 37.
    Farms and forests ●Sensor network, automated sensing and optimization Rolnick, David, et al. "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning." arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05433 (2019).
  • 38.
    20tree.ai surveys andmaps forests. From: Financial News Now
  • 39.
  • 40.
    Source: mila Climate prediction ●Predict effects of climate change ● Extremely fast approximation alternative to complex simulation
  • 41.
    Societal impacts Rolnick, David,et al. "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning." arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05433 (2019).
  • 42.
    Conservation effort Norouzzadeh, MohammadSadegh, et al. "Automatically identifying, counting, and describing wild animals in camera-trap images with deep learning." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115.25 (2018): E5716-E5725.
  • 43.
  • 44.
    Source: financial-news-now Education andcollective decisions Source: David MacKay, 2007 Individual actions
  • 45.
    Towards green AI Strubell,Emma, Ananya Ganesh, and Andrew McCallum. "Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP." arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.02243 (2019).
  • 46.
    South Vietnam, 2050 Credit:New York Times Kulp, Scott A., and Benjamin H. Strauss. "New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding." Nature communications 10.1 (2019): 1-12. Prediction model: Neural network • 23 input features • trained on US LIDAR-derived elevation data • Extrapolated over time and space. However, it has been criticized for using inaccurate data for Vietnam.
  • 47.
    Source: Pacific Standard& Iconfinder (1835-1882) Source: Wiki Jevon paradox in action
  • 48.
    AI as anapproach 11/12/2019 48 Introduction to AI/ML The challenges Agenda Joining the global effort
  • 49.
  • 50.
  • 51.
    Technology alone isnever enough “Technologies [to help fight climate change] have largely not been adopted at scale by society. While we hope that ML will be useful in reducing the costs associated with climate action, humanity also must decide to act.” Rolnick, David, et al. "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning." arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05433 (2019).
  • 52.
    First thing first:Speak collaborators’ languages Information system Maths Health informatics Symbolic AI Database Probabilistic AI Old machine learning Statistical machine learning Hard core data mining Current data mining Clinical statistics Theoretical statistics Bioinformatics Statistical epidemiology Biomedical engineering Biostatistics Deep learning Molecular biology Biochemistry Quantum chemistry Chemoinformatics Genetic statistics Domain CS/ML Population genetics (The case of biomedicine)
  • 54.
  • 55.
    Source: opgal To sumup AI is a General-Purpose Technology (GPT) ● Just like electricity Why AI for climate change? ● Automation, scalability, knowledge and data integration ● Assisting in decision making ● Rational in an irrational world of politics. ● AI should be a green exemplar Can AI fail? ● Yes. We are still learning. ● It is subject to misuse. ● It can be wrongly aligned with human values.
  • 56.
    Sir David MacKay (1967-2016) Sustainableenergy scientist Cancer fighter
  • 57.
    4.1 mil tonesof CO2 has been emitted since I started talking
  • 58.
    This talk mayhave been written by AI with non-zero probability It have been delivered by human with probability 1 .
  • 59.
    11/12/2019 59 Thank you TruyenTran @truyenoz truyentran.github.io truyen.tran@deakin.edu.au letdataspeak.blogspot.com goo.gl/3jJ1O0