HAI Weekly Seminar with Stefano Ermon
AI for Sustainable Development
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AI for Sustainable Development
This session is specifically designed for full-time graduate students within one year of obtaining their PhD, as well as current postdoctoral scholars, fellows, and researchers.

This session is specifically designed for full-time graduate students within one year of obtaining their PhD, as well as current postdoctoral scholars, fellows, and researchers.
Save the Date. Artificial intelligence is transforming how researchers collect, analyze, and learn from data. As AI systems become increasingly integrated into scientific discovery, business decision-making, and policy analysis, they are reshaping both the questions researchers can ask and the methods they use to answer them.

Save the Date. Artificial intelligence is transforming how researchers collect, analyze, and learn from data. As AI systems become increasingly integrated into scientific discovery, business decision-making, and policy analysis, they are reshaping both the questions researchers can ask and the methods they use to answer them.
The rapid acceleration of AI comes with a profound wave of anxiety. Across every sector of society, people are facing unsettling questions about their worth and their place in a shifting world.

The rapid acceleration of AI comes with a profound wave of anxiety. Across every sector of society, people are facing unsettling questions about their worth and their place in a shifting world.
Recent technological developments are creating new 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. A key challenge, however, is the lack of large quantities of labeled data that often characterize successful machine learning applications. In this talk, Stefano will present new approaches for learning useful spatio-temporal models in contexts where labeled training data is scarce or not available at all. He will show applications to predict and map poverty in developing countries, monitor agricultural productivity and food security outcomes, and map infrastructure access in Africa. His methods can reliably predict economic well-being using only high-resolution satellite imagery. Because images are passively collected in every corner of the world, his methods can provide timely and accurate measurements in a very scalable end economic way, and could revolutionize efforts towards global poverty eradication.
