Emily Shuckburgh

Monitoring the environment

The environment is under ever increasing pressure from climate change and other stresses. Monitoring these changes and understanding the drivers and processes associated with them is critically important. Advances in sensor technology are making it possible to capture data that previously was unobtainable, and advances in AI-based tools are enabling us to analyse that data in new ways to extract unprecedentedly detailed information for decision-making. In this talk I will highlight some of the environmental challenges that it would be useful to apply sensor technologies to and some of the opportunities for analysis of that data that application of AI-based methods facilitates.

Dr Emily Shuckburgh is Director of the University of Cambridge Carbon Neutral Futures Initiative and Reader in Environmental Data Science at the Department of Computer Science and Technology. She is a mathematician and climate scientist and a Fellow of Darwin College, a Fellow of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Science and Policyand a Fellow of the British Antarctic Survey. She leads the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training on the Application of AI to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER). Until April 2019 she led a UK national research programme on the Southern Ocean and its role in climate (ORCHESTRA), and was deputy head of the Polar Oceans Team and head of the Data Science Group at British Antarctic Survey. In the past she has worked at École Normale Supérieure in Paris and at MIT. She is a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and co-chair of their Climate Science Communications Group. She has also acted as an advisor to the UK Government on behalf of the Natural Environment Research Council. In 2016 she was awarded an OBE for services to science and the public communication of science. She is co-author with HRH The Prince of Wales and Tony Juniper of the Ladybird Book on Climate Change.