University of Trás-os Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD) hosted on January 24, 2020 the seminar “Computational Challenges for Climate Change Research” to discuss the impacts of artificial intelligence and human computation on climate change. The seminar joined the academic community and had as invited guests Professor Jeffrey Bigham from the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), USA and Professor Adriana Vivacqua from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil.
The opening session was chaired by Professor Artur Cristovão, UTAD Vice-Rector for Planning and Internationalization. The panel “Initiatives and Opportunities” introduced the CMU Portugal partnership and the education, research and innovation opportunities to foster the collaboration between CMU and Portuguese universities. Participants in the program under the CMU Portugal exploratory project “expert Crowdsourcing for Semantic Annotation of Atmospheric Phenomena – eCSAAP” and the Visiting Faculty and Researchers Program shared their mobility experience at CMU.
During the afternoon session took place the panels “Human Computation for Climate Change – eCSAAP Project results and exploitation” and “Climate Change Research: What’s Next?”.
The panels featured short communications from the researchers, presenting the current state of the art and the achieved advances with the research projects. The panel “Human Computation for Climate Change” included the presentation of the results of the exploratory project “expert Crowdsourcing for Semantic Annotation of Atmospheric Phenomena – eCSAAP”, carried out by a consortium led by INESC TEC with Instituto Dom Luiz and Carnegie Mellon University as partners and funded by the CMU Portugal program. The panel “Climate Change Research: What’s Next?” hosted the kickoff of the project “Citizens and experts cooperation flows for semantic annotation of extreme atmospheric phenomena using human computation” that will be carried out during 2020. The project is a partnership between UTAD and UFRJ, under the memorandum of understanding of FCT and FAPERJ.
