Stefano Ermon, "Measuring progress towards sustainable development goals with machine learning"
First CompSustNet virtual seminar held September 27, 2016, via Zoom
Recent technological developments are creating new spatio-temporal data streams that contain a wealth of information relevant to sustainable development goals. Modern AI techniques have the potential to yield accurate, inexpensive, and highly scalable models to inform research and policy. As a first example, I will present a machine learning method we developed to predict and map poverty in developing countries. Our method can reliably predict economic well-being using only high-resolution satellite imagery. Because images are passively collected in every corner of the world, our method can provide timely and accurate measurements in a very scalable end economic way, and could revolutionize efforts towards global poverty eradication. As a second example, I will present some ongoing work on monitoring agricultural and food security outcomes from space.
Stefano Ermon
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Fellow of the Woods Institute for the Environment
Stanford University