The First International Workshop on Climate Informatics

Speakers

Speakers

Arindam Banerjee, PhD

Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota

Arindam Banerjee is an associate professor and a McKnight Land Grant Professor at the Department of Computer and Engineering and a Resident Fellow at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005, where his dissertation was nominated for the best dissertation award. His research interests are in machine learning, data mining, information theory, convex analysis and optimization, and their applications in complex real-world problems. He has won several awards, including the NSF CAREER award in 2010, the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (2009–2011), the J. T. Oden Faculty Research Fellowship from the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES), University of Texas at Austin (2006), and the prestigious IBM PhD fellowship for the academic years 2003–2004 and 2004–2005. He has also won several awards for his publications, including the Best Paper Award at the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM) (2004), the Best Research Paper Award under University Cooperative Society Research Excellence Awards, University of Texas at Austin (2005), and the Best of SIAM Data Mining (SDM) Award at the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (2007).

Timothy DelSole, PhD

George Mason University and Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies

Timothy DelSole is Associate Professor of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Earth Sciences at George Mason University and a research scientist at the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies. His research focuses on distinguishing human and natural influences on climate and predicting seasonal changes in climate. He is noted particularly for his development of stochastic models of turbulence and application of multivariate statistics in climate and predictability research.

DelSole has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers since receiving his PhD in Applied Physics from Harvard University in 1993. He worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as a Global Change Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow for two years and as a National Research Council Associate for two years. DelSole received the Distinguished Teacher Award from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University and was a nominee for a Teaching Excellence Award at George Mason University. Since 2010 he has served as editor of Journal of Climate.

David Musicant, PhD

Computer Science, Carleton College

David Musicant is an associate professor of computer science at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. He received his PhD in Computer Sciences from University of Wisconsin–Madison and his undergraduate degrees from Michigan State University. His research interests are in machine learning and data mining, and he has been involved with the EDAM project in applying these ideas to atmospheric data analysis. He has also recently been involved with the GroupLens group at the University of Minnesota in studying social-computing systems, particularly Wikipedia.

Douglas Nychka, PhD

Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Douglas Nychka is a statistical scientist with an interest in the problems posed by geophysical data sets. His PhD (1983) is from the University of Wisconsin, and he subsequently spent 14 years as a faculty member at North Carolina State University. His research background in fitting curves and surfaces led to an interest in the analysis of spatial and environmental data. Pursuing this area of application, he assumed leadership of the Geophysical Statistics Project at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in 1997, an NSF-funded program to build collaborative research and training between statistics and the geosciences. In 2004 he became Director of the Institute of Mathematics Applied to Geosciences, an interdisciplinary component at NCAR with a focus on transferring innovative mathematical models and tools to the geosciences. His current interests are in quantifying the uncertainty of numerical experiments that simulate the Earth's present and possible future climate.

Gavin Schmidt, PhD

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University

See biography below.

Co-Chairs

Claire Monteleoni, PhD

George Washington University and Columbia University

Claire Monteleoni is an assistant professor of computer science at George Washington University. She is also an adjunct research scientist at the Center for Computational Learning Systems, Columbia University, where she was previously an associate research scientist since 2008. Prior to joining Columbia, she was a postdoc in computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego. She completed her PhD in 2006 and her master's degree in 2003, both in computer science, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She did her undergraduate work in earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. Her research focus is on machine learning theory and algorithms and climate informatics, specifically accelerating discovery in climate science with machine learning. Her work in climate informatics has received a Best Application Paper Award and has been presented at an Expert Meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a panel formed by the UN that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Gavin Schmidt, PhD

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University

Gavin Schmidt is a climatologist with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, where he models past, present, and future climate. He received a BA in Mathematics in 1989 from Oxford University and a PhD in Applied Mathematics in 1994 from University College London. He was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in Montreal, until 1996, when he was awarded a Climate and Global Change Fellowship from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and moved to the Goddard Institute. Schmidt was cited by Scientific American as one of the 50 leading researchers of 2004 and was a contributing author for the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He is a cofounder and contributing editor of RealClimate.org, which provides context and background on climate science issues that are missing in popular media coverage.

Organizers

Francis Alexander, PhD

Information Science and Technology Center at Los Alamos National Laboratory

Francis Alexander received a PhD in Physics from Rutgers University in 1991 and a BS degree in mathematics and physics from Ohio State University in 1987. He then joined CNLS at LANL as a postdoc, where he worked on problems in statistical physics and computational fluid dynamics. In 1993 Alexander moved to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he started work on hybrid numerical algorithms for multiscale problems. In 1995 he then joined the research faculty at Boston University in the Center for Computational Science. In 1998 Alexander returned to LANL as a staff member in what was then the CIC division. In 2002 he became the Deputy Group Leader for CCS-3 and in 2007 the Group Leader. Alexander is currently Acting Deputy Division Leader for CCS Division, as well as the Information Science and Technology Center Leader.

Alexandru Niculescu-Mizil, PhD

NEC Laboratories America

Alexandru Niculescu-Mizil has been a research staff member at NEC Labs America since 2010. Before joining NECLA, he was a Herman Goldstine postdoctoral fellow at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. He received his PhD from Cornell University in 2008 under the supervision of Rich Caruana, MS degree in computer science from Cornell University, and bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science, magna cum laude, from University of Bucharest. His research interests are in machine learning and data mining, particularly in inductive transfer, graphical model structure learning, probability estimation, empirical evaluations, ensemble methods, and online learning. He received an ICML Distinguished Student Paper Award in 2005 for his work on probability estimation and a COLT Best Student in 2008 paper award for his work on online learning. In 2009 he led the IBM Research team that won the KDD Cup.

Karsten Steinhaeuser, PhD

University of Minnesota

Karsten Steinhaeuser is a research associate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His primary responsibilities include two major research projects: an NSF Expeditions in Computing on "Understanding Climate Change: A Data Driven Approach" and the Planetary Skin Institute. His research interests are broadly in data mining and machine learning, in particular the construction and analysis of complex networks with applications in diverse domains including (but not limited to) climate, ecology, and social networks. He is actively involved in shaping an emerging research area called climate informatics, which lies at the intersection of computer science and climate sciences. He co-organizes the IEEE ICDM Workshop on Knowledge Discovery from Climate Data and the International Workshop on Climate Informatics, among others, and is engaged in numerous other professional service activities. Karsten earned his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame in 2011; he previously received an MS in Computer Science and Engineering (2007) and a BS, summa cum laude, in Computer Science (2005), both from the University of Notre Dame.

Michael Tippett, PhD

The International Research Institute for Climate and Society, Columbia University

Michael Tippett is a research scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University. He develops and implements methods for producing reliable, calibrated probabilistic seasonal forecasts of global temperature and precipitation. His interests include prediction, predictability, and analysis of climate variability. He received his PhD from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics from North Carolina State University.

Additional speaker biographies forthcoming.