Department Lecture Series (DLS) – Sherrie Wang (MIT)

“Planetary-scale Insights via Remote Sensing and Machine Learning”

Abstract: As the world works toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals, data gaps hinder our ability to measure progress and evaluate interventions. Meanwhile, rapid advances in computer vision and satellite imagery offer the opportunity to extract knowledge about the Earth at planetary scale. This talk will cover two applications of remote sensing and machine learning to generate large-scale insights. In the first, we use transfer learning and weak supervision to delineate smallholder crop fields for the first time across India, showing how high-quality data products can be created in settings lacking ground truth labels. In the second, we use deep learning to assess which US waters the Clean Water Act regulates and how Supreme Court and White House rulings change this regulation, providing a template for machine learning in policy interpretation.

About this Series: The Department Lecture Series at EAPS at MIT is a series of weekly talks given by leading thinkers in the areas of geology, geophysics, geobiology, geochemistry, atmospheric science, oceanography, climatology, and planetary science. For more information and Zoom password please contact Madelyn Musick: mmusick@mit.edu