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AI Weather Forecasts for Climate Adaptation with Dr. Peetak Mitra
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In this episode we speak with Dr Peetak Mitra, veteran of countless climate change projects, on the founding team of Excarta, core member of ClimateChange.AI, and gracious human being. He illuminates the role AI/ML can play in adapting to a warming planet, describes the ML techniques his company employs in their breakthrough tools, and gives advice for engineers looking to move into the climate space - in short, ‘just do it’. We also discuss growth in the climate sector, and he shares that despite a widespread economic slowdown, investment in climate technology continues to increase. We were delighted to have him on the show.
About Dr Peetak Mitra
Peetak is a San Francisco-based technologist passionate about leveraging AI to combat climate change. He's on the Founding team of Excarta, a venture-backed startup building a breakthrough AI-powered weather intelligence platform for businesses. Prior to Excarta, he was a Member of Research Staff at the Xerox PARC (now SRI-PARC), where he co-led projects for AI climate forecasting funded in part by DARPA, and NASA. He has been part of Climate Change AI, organizing impactful workshops at major ML conferences including ICLR, AAAI, and NeurIPS with Turing Laureate Prof. Yoshua Bengio. He has been a featured speaker on Climate and AI at MIT, SF Climate Week, OpenAI, NSF among others. He holds a PhD in Scientific Machine Learning from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Bachelor's degree from BIT Mesra.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/peetak/
Papers
The paper Peetak mentioned:
Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3485128
A milestone paper summarizing the application of ML to climate problems.
Abstract: “Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity, and we, as machine learning (ML) experts, may wonder how we can help. Here we describe how ML can be a powerful tool in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and helping society adapt to a changing climate. From smart grids to disaster management, we identify high impact problems where existing gaps can be filled by ML, in collaboration with other fields. Our recommendations encompass exciting research questions as well as promising business opportunities. We call on the ML community to join the global effort against climate change.”
Companies and Organizations
Climate Change AI (CCAI) is an organization composed of volunteers from academia and industry who believe that tackling climate change requires concerted societal action, in which machine learning can play an impactful role. Since it was founded in June 2019 (and established as a US domestic non-profit on June 14, 2021), CCAI has led the creation of a global movement in climate change and machine learning, encompassing researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, companies, and NGOs.
9zero Climate Co-working Space.
Launched during San Francisco Climate Week 2024, 9Zero is the hub for all things climate. Starting with coworking and events, we’re uniting the entire ecosystem. Startups, investors, corporations, service providers, policymakers, academics: if you’re working toward a healthier, more resilient world, you belong at 9Zero. Expanding to Seattle and LA this year. Sign up at www.9Zero.com
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