Artificial Intelligence in Earth Science

Ziheng Sun is a Principal Investigator at the Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems, and a research assistant professor the Department of Geography and Geoinformation Science at George Mason University. He is a practitioner of using the latest technologies such as artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, to seek for answers to the questions in geoscience. He invented RSSI, a novel index for artificial object recognition from high resolution aerial images, and proposed parameterless automatic classification solution for reducing the parameter-tuning burden on scientists. Prof Sun has published over 50 papers in renowned journals in geoscience and has worked on several federal-funded projects to build geospatial cyberinfrastructure systems for better disseminating, processing, visualizing, and understanding spatial big data. Nicoleta Cristea is a research scientist in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington (UW), a research scientist with the UW Freshwater Initiative, and a data science fellow at the UW eScience Institute. Her current research focus is on modeling snow surface temperature and evaluating spatially distributed hydrologic models. Nicoleta is currently leading an NSF-funded project on mapping snow covered areas from Cubesat imagery using deep learning techniques. Pablo Rivas is assistant professor of computer science at Baylor University where he teaches courses related to machine learning, deep learning, data mining, and theory. His research areas include deep machine learning and large-scale data mining in big data analytics, large-scale multidimensional multispectral signal analysis, statistical pattern recognition methods, image restoration, image analysis, intelligent software systems, and health-care imaging. Other research areas include applied mathematics, numerical optimization, swarm intelligence optimization, evolutionary algorithms, soft computing, fuzzy logic, neural networks, and neuro-fuzzy systems.