AI for Climate, Safety and Environment

Join leading researchers to explore how AI can drive impactful solutions for climate resilience, environmental monitoring, public and industrial safety. Sessions span cutting‑edge models, real‑world case studies, and collaborative challenges—equipping participants to critically think about data‑driven systems and state-of-the-art algorithms for a sustainable future.

Program Overview:

Keynotes:

Professor Ingmar Weber, Saarland University

Title: From Social Media to Satellites: Data Innovation to Study Society

Abstract: In this talk, Professor Weber will show how unconventional data - from digital traces on social media to high-resolution satellite imagery - can be used to study societal dynamics, including migration, gender inequality, poverty, and public health. Going beyond computing of society, i.e. quantifying social phenomena via non-traditional data, he’ll also give examples of computing for society, i.e. using data insights to support humanitarian response and international development. One throughline of the talk are reflections on methodological challenges around bias and non-representativeness, and different approaches to address them. He’ll conclude with a discussion on risks of counting people, in particular when the benefit to those people might not be clear.

Bio: Ingmar Weber is the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, Germany’s most valuable research award, and holds the Chair for Societal Computing at Saarland University. His interdisciplinary research focuses on the measurement of different social phenomena, from migration to gender gaps. Analyses performed by his team and collaborators have been used in displacements contexts ranging from Venezuela to Ukraine. He is an ACM Distinguished Member and is among the top 2% of most cited scientists worldwide.

Professor Xuemei Bai, Australian National University

Title: Cities and Climate Change and How AI Can Help

Bio: Distinguished Professor Bai joined ANU in 2011, as a professor of Urban Environment and Human Ecology at the Fenner School of Environment and Society. Prio to ANU, she was a Senior Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO, visiting professor at Yale University, and senior researcher at environmental research institutes in Japan. She is a Visiting Professor at The University of Tokyo. Professor Bai's research focuses on several frontiers of urban sustainability science and policy, including drivers and consequence of urbanization, structure, function, processes, and evolution of urban socio-ecological systems, urban metabolism, urban sustainability experiments and transition, cities and climate change, and urban environmental policy and governance, and cross scale translations between planetary level boundaries and targets into cities. 

Speakers:

Professor Lexing Xie, Australian National University

Professor Jing Jiang, Australian National University

Professor Wenjie Zhang, University of New South Wales

Associate Professor Patrik Haslum, Australian National University

Associate Professor Liang Zheng, Australian National University

Dr Jieshan Chen, Data61, CSIRO

Dr Jianwei Wang, University of New South Wales

Dr Yue Liu, Australian National University

Dr Yonghui Liu, Australian National University

Karen Zhou, University of Chicago

Chenyi Du, Australian National University

Xiuyuan Yuan, Australian National University

Organisers:

This event is a collaboration between the Computational Media Lab at ANU School of Computing, ANU Integrated AI Network, and the Data61 Tech4HSE Research Program.

The Integrated AI Network brings together researchers from different disciplines across ANU whose work focuses on the role of AI in addressing social and scientific problems, as well as utilising AI in creative spaces and cultural practices: https://ai.anu.edu.au/

General Chairs:

Professor Lexing Xie, Australian National University

Professor Jing Jiang, Australian National University

Associate Professor Patrik Haslum, Australian National University

Program Chairs:

Dr Yue Liu, Australian National University

Dr Haojie Zhuang, Australian National University

* Vegetarian and gluten-free food will be available for lunch.

* Birch Building - Photo credit: Mark Skye