A new project led by Professor Jingrui He aims to help scientists monitor disruptions to the Earth's ecosystem, such as climate change. She recently received support for her work through an Amazon Research Award, which includes $60,000 in cash and an additional $40,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits.
"In the past decades, it has been widely recognized that ecosystems have been facing multiple major threats, requiring immediate action to protect and restore the balance of multiple ecosystems on Earth," said He. "Among others, climate has been a key factor to such disruptions and climate change has shown to directly impact Earth's ecosystems in various ways."
For her project, "Foundation Model Enabled Earth’s Ecosystem Monitoring," she plans to leverage the neural representations from multiple climate and weather foundation models to significantly improve monitoring capabilities. According to He, not only will this research provide deeper insights regarding the adverse consequences of climate change and potentially inform future practices in ecosystem restoration, but it will also advance AI research via a suite of novel techniques. These techniques include generative missing value imputation, regularized recurrent neural networks with continuous recurrent units, spatial correlation guided foundation model fusion, and domain-specific dynamics models with neural representations.
He's general research theme is to design, build, and test a suite of automated and semi-automated methods to explore, understand, characterize, and predict real-world data by means of statistical machine learning. She received her PhD in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon University.