ABSTRACT: The climate and earth sciences have recently undergone a rapid transformation from a data-poor to a data-rich environment. In particular, massive amount of data about Earth and its environment is now continuously being generated by a large number of Earth observing satellites as well as physics-based earth system models running on large-scale computational platforms.  These massive and information-rich datasets offer huge potential for understanding how the Earth’s climate and ecosystem have been changing and how they are being impacted by human actions.  This talk will discuss various challenges involved in analyzing these massive data sets as well as opportunities they present for both advancing machine learning as well as the science of climate change in the context of monitoring the state of the tropical forests and surface water on a global scale. BIO: Vipin Kumar is a Regents Professor and holds William Norris Chair in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota.  His research interests include data mining, high-performance computing, and their applications in Climate/Ecosystems and health care.  He is currently leading an NSF Expedition project on understanding climate change using data science approaches.  He has authored over 300 research articles, and co-edited or coauthored 10 books including the widely used text book “Introduction to Parallel Computing”, and “Introduction to Data Mining”.  Kumar has served as chair/co-chair for many international conferences and workshops in the area of data mining and parallel computing, including 2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (2002), and International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (2001).  Kumar is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, AAAS, and SIAM.  Kumar’s research has been honored by the ACM SIGKDD 2012 Innovation Award, which is the highest award for technical excellence in the field of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), and the 2016 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award, one of IEEE Computer Society’s highest awards in high performance computing.

Hosted by Professor Carlo Zaniolo

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