3rd NOAA Workshop on Leveraging AI in Environmental Sciences

Dr. Rose Hendrix is a Senior Research Software Engineer at the Allen Institute for Artificial intelligence on the Applied Science & Technology team. There, she is the primary AI practitioner for Skylight, a maritime domain awareness tool. Prior to joining AI2, she completed her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Washington. She completed her undergraduate education at the California Maritime Academy and sailed commercially with an unlimited 3AE steam/motor/GT license before beginning graduate work.

Dr. Ann Bostrom is the Weyerhaeuser endowed Professor of Environmental Policy at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington. She researches risk perception, risk communication, and decision-making under uncertainty, with a focus on mental models of hazardous processes. Projects include interview, survey, and experimental research on perceptions, communication, and decision-making about climate change, earthquake early warning, and extreme weather forecasts and warnings. Dr. Bostrom earned her PhD. in Policy Analysis from Carnegie Mellon University, her M.B.A from Western Washington University, and her B.A. in English from the University of Washington.

Dr. Julie Demuth is a Project Scientist III at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology (MMM) Lab with the Weather Risks and Decisions in Society (WRaDS) research group. Julie has a background in both atmospheric science (BS and MS) and communication (Ph.D.). She conducts research on hazardous weather risk communication, risk perceptions, and responses, and her research includes work with experts—including weather forecasters, emergency managers, and other government officials—and members of the public. Julie is co-leading the risk communication research effort with Ann Bostrom for the NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI for Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography, or what is referred to as AI2ES for short.

Jebb Q. Stewart is the lead of the Informatics and Visualization Branch with the NOAA Global System Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. With a unique background in both Meteorology and Computer Science, he has over 20 years of experience in software development for visualizing, processing, distributing, and interacting with geophysical data. Over the last couple of years, his work has expanded to machine learning applications for object identification and improving data processing capabilities along with leveraging commercial cloud capabilities to provide tools and services to efficiently explore the ever-growing volumes of data.

Lak Lakshmanan is the Director for Data Analytics and AI Solutions on Google Cloud. He founded Google's Advanced Solutions Lab and is the author of several books on machine learning. Before Google, Lak was a Director of Data Science at Climate Corporation where his team developed a rainfall estimation system for precision agriculture. Before selling out to private industry, Lak was a Research Scientist at an NOAA Cooperative Institute at the University of Oklahoma where he developed WDSSII/MRMS, a suite of severe weather algorithms, and wrote numerous, rarely read journal papers. He was recently elected a fellow of the American Meteorological Society.