While AI has the potential to address pressing environmental challenges, a recent survey (
AI Index Report 2021) highlighted the lack of diversity in the people who are building AI systems. The diversity of the future AI workforce is crucial to solving grand environmental challenges for society. NOAA’s AI strategy outlined promoting AI proficiency in the workforce as one of the primary goals. Meanwhile, NOAA is also committed to workforce diversity by recruiting and attracting diverse and highly-capable talent. This interactive panel discussion brings together champions from NOAA, academic institutions, and professional organizations to highlight the needs, current efforts, and future pathways to diversify AI talent for environmental sciences.
Panelists:
Dr. Shirley M. Malcom is Senior Advisor and Director of SEA Change at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Malcom, a behavioral ecologist by training, led AAAS programming in diversity, equity, inclusion, education, and literacy for over four decades. She was a member of the National Science Board from 1993-1998 and served on President Clinton’s PCAST from 1994 to 2001. Dr. Malcom is a Regent of Morgan State University and a member of the board of Caltech. In 2003 she received the Public Welfare Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, the highest award given by the Academy.
Dr. Alyson Wilson is the Associate Vice Chancellor for National Security and Special Research Initiatives at North Carolina State University. She is also a professor in the Department of Statistics and principal investigator for the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her research interests include statistical reliability, Bayesian methods, and the application of statistics to problems in defense and national security. Prior to joining NC State, she was a research staff member at the IDA Science and Technology Policy Institute (2011-2013); an associate professor in the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University (2008-2011); a technical staff member in the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (1999-2008); and a senior statistician and operations research analyst with Cowboy Programming Resources (1995-1999).
Dr. DaNa L. Carlis is an award-winning meteorologist and serves as the Deputy Director at NOAA’s Global Systems Laboratory (GSL). At GSL, he is responsible for leading the scientific and information technology efforts of the laboratory. Along with the GSL Director, he leads a laboratory of almost 200 scientists, engineers, and administrators. Prior to GSL, DaNa worked at the Weather Program Office (WPO) in Washington, DC where he was the founding program manager of the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC). DaNa enjoys the fact that he’s able to work between science, policy, and society to ensure better products and services to the American people.
Dr. Benjamin L. Richards is a Research Fishery Biologist at NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, where he leads the bottomfish fish survey team. His work focuses on development of fishery-independent surveys to continually improve the data used in fisheries stock assessment, and on the development of advanced technologies and operational machine learning solutions to optimize data processing and analysis. Dr. Richards currently serves on NOAA’s Artificial Intelligence Executive Committee and provides advice and service to the NOAA Center for Artificial Intelligence. He served as the chair of the NOAA Fisheries Automated Image Analysis Strategic Initiative, which received the 2019 US Department of Commerce Gold Medal for Scientific and Technical Achievement. In 2020, he was awarded the US Department of Commerce Silver Medal for enhancing stock assessment methodologies using camera-based surveys. In 2021, he received the NOAA Fisheries Silver Sherman award for safe and successful implementation of the bottomfish survey under COVID.
