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We have invited five ML and domain experts from climate and conservation to the stage to inspire the ML audience with new problems, open challenges, and success stories.
We have invited five ML and domain experts from climate and conservation to the stage to inspire the ML audience with new problems, open challenges, and success stories.
Prof. Dr. Philippe Ciais is the Associate Director of LSCE, France. He co‑chaired the Global Carbon Project in 2009, was Convening Lead Author for the IPCC Working Group 1 and coordinated the chapter on Carbon and other biogeochemical cycles of the 5th Assessment Report. He will present recent work that blends ecosystem models, satellite and eddy‑covariance data to explore terrestrial greenhouse‑gas fluxes, including pioneering studies of managed ecosystems and coupled carbon‑climate simulations.
Dr. Sagar Vaze is a Research Scientist at Mistral AI, working on multi-modal language models. Previously, he completed a PhD in the VGG lab at Oxford University, working on representation learning in computer vision with a focus on Open-set recognition (outlier detection) and category discovery, supervised by Andrew Zisserman and Andrea Vedaldi. During his PhD, he spent time at Meta AI (FAIR) working with Ishan Misra and Ross Girshick. Bridging academic and industry perspectives, he will discuss how "off-the-shelf" models can support computer vision challenges, like fine-grained recognition, that is relevant to conservationists.
Prof. Dr. Verena C. Griess is a Full Professor at ETH Zürich, Switzerland. Her research focuses on advancing decision-making in forestry by addressing the essential question: What should we do, where, and when?—to ensure a sustainable and resilient future for forests and society. Her team develops next-generation decision support systems that leverages a range of sensors to transform how forests are mapped, monitored, managed, and visualized. Beyond data collection, Prof. Griess investigates how various management strategies and climate change scenarios affect forest landscapes, integrating complex dynamics such as wildfires, pests, and extreme weather events. Her domain expertise will provide an interesting perspective on how AI can advance forest resource management.
Dr. Ahlstrand is a botanist based in Copenhagen with a passion for field botany, floristics, historical ecology, and herbarium \& botanical garden curation. She studies how change throughout the Anthropocene has impacted the timing of flowering, fruiting and other plant traits over time and space, in order to predict future conditions under continued global change. She has collected botanical data derived from natural history collections, living collections, and archival records, combined with modern field data and resurveys. She will talk about the challenges and the role of machine learning in ecology by combining citizen science, population genomics, analytical chemistry.
Dr. Purves is a Research Scientist and Nature Lead at Google DeepMind. He co-leads Google DeepMind's Sustainability Program, with a special interest in Nature and Biodiversity. Prior to this current role, for many years he led the research strategy of Google DeepMind's Worlds team, which focused on developing rich, 3D interactive environments, for a wide variety of AI research. He has spent 18 years in ecological research and environmental data science at the University of Cambridge, University of York, Princeton, and at Microsoft Research Cambridge, leading and collaborating with different groups of scientists, universities and NGOs. In addition, he has a strong interest in explaining and demystifying the current AI revolution for diverse groups of stakeholders in all sectors.
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