Events Calendar

CAIS Seminar: Stefano Ermon (Stanford) - Measuring Progress towards Sustainable Development Goals with Machine Learning

Speaker: Stefano Ermon, Stanford University

Talk Title: Measuring Progress towards Sustainable Development Goals with Machine Learning

Series: Center for AI in Society (CAIS) Seminar Series

Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

Recent technological developments are creating new spatio-temporal data streams that contain a wealth of information relevant to sustainable development goals. Modern AI techniques have the potential to yield accurate, inexpensive, and highly scalable models to inform research and policy. As a first example, I will present a machine learning method we developed to predict and map poverty in developing countries. Our method can reliably predict economic well-being using only high-resolution satellite imagery. Because images are passively collected in every corner of the world, our method can provide timely and accurate measurements in a very scalable end economic way, and could revolutionize efforts towards global poverty eradication. As a second example, I will present some ongoing work on monitoring agricultural and food security outcomes from space.

Biography: Stefano Ermon is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he is affiliated with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Woods Institute for the Environment. He completed his PhD in computer science at Cornell in 2015. His research interests include techniques for scalable and accurate inference in graphical models, statistical modeling of data, large-scale combinatorial optimization, and robust decision making under uncertainty, and is motivated by a range of applications, in particular ones in the emerging field of computational sustainability. Stefano has won several awards, including two Best Student Paper Awards, one Runner-Up Prize, and a McMullen Fellowship.

Host: Milind Tambe

Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 101

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair