Look into my AIs!

Digital Twins are becoming popular in the Earth sciences as a way to help decision-making for a range of environmental problems. A Digital Twin is a virtual copy of a physical system that can monitor its state, make predictions and help implement changes. For example, a Digital Twin of a city might be able to monitor air pollution using data from sensors around the city, make predictions about how the air quality is going to change in the next few hours, and modify the traffic system to avoid pollution hotspots, as well as issue alerts to pedestrians and advise on the healthiest walking routes. This small example illustrates the potential of Digital Twins to help us tackle many environmental problems. When we think about the large amounts of satellite data and Earth System models that are now available, we quickly realise the possibilities are endless! In this talk, we will explain how Digital Twins can be used with satellite data and AI models to help us mitigate and adapt to climate change.

In the next five years, robots that think and learn like us are going to change the way we live in some pretty exciting ways. Imagine having a robot buddy that can help out with everything from making dinner to keeping our streets clean. This talk is all about how these smart robots are stepping out of sci-fi movies and into our homes and jobs. We'll chat about how they're already starting to help doctors perform surgeries with laser precision, take over the boring tasks in factories, and even do chores around the house so we have more time for fun. But it's not all smooth sailing; we'll also touch on some tricky questions, like what happens to jobs when robots can do them too, and how we make sure our robotic helpers respect our privacy. Get ready to peek into a future where robots are part of the family, making our lives easier and more interesting.

Artificial Intelligence has been around for decades now, but it only garnered international interest recently due to the release of ChatGPT, art generating tools etc. that found use in our daily lives. My research is on developing the most advanced kind of AI - one that learns to recognise patterns in the data given to it. Since we have a lot of spare data just lying around (see that excel spreadsheet on your desktop?) why not make use of it? Data is not just figures, it is also relationships - this is where colourful and intuitive graphs enter the picture. Are you interested yet?