As anthropogenic warming continues to put strain on our natural environments, it now is crucial that decision-makers have ready-access to actionable and timely information on the current states of environmental systems and future projections to help safeguard society and ecosystems around the world. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Twin technologies are rapidly becoming central to the development of novel digital technologies, leading to step-changes in our capabilities.
Digital Twinning is a next generation technology for environmental modelling, taking us beyond data assimilation by enabling us to get answers to “what-if” questions within seconds. Digital Twins are already in operation in industry and involve highly interoperable data pipelines, optimisation, and a mixture of knowledge-informed and data-driven probabilistic machine learning. Digital Twins are increasingly becoming a key component for research discovery, education, and aiding discussions at the board-level without having to wait weeks to months for results from traditional computer models.
Funding
I have secured over £15m in grant funding from public and private sectors as both Principal-Investigator (PI) and Co-Investigator (Co-I). These include:
- Surface Fluxes in Antarctica (SURFEIT), NERC 2022-2026 (Co-I)
- Using artificial intelligence to improve weather forecasts, 2022 Endeavour Smart Ideas, New Zealand, 2022-2024 (Co-I)
- DEFIANT: Drivers and Effects of Fluctuations in sea Ice in the ANTarctic, NERC (NE/W004747/1), 2021-2025 (Co-I)
- Scivision: A toolkit for scientific image analysis, Phase 3, 2022-2026 (PI)
- Towards an Antarctic Digital Twin for Instantaneous Decision-Making, NERC, 2021-22 (PI)
- Five projects funded by The Alan Turing Institute, under the Strategic Priorities Fund “AI for science and government (ASG)” (EP/T001569/1):
- Environmental monitoring: blending satellite and surface data, 2021-2023 (PI)
- Scivision: A toolkit for scientific image analysis, Phase 1 & 2, 2021-2022 (Co-I)
- Understanding Arctic sea ice loss, 2019-2021 (PI)
- Improving tracking of iceberg populations in the Southern Ocean, 2019-2021 (Co-I)
- Detecting changes in Himalayan glaciers and impacts on water security, 2020-2021 (PI)
- Supporting Pangeo: the community-driven platform for Big Data geoscience, Microsoft AI for Earth, 2020-2021 (Co-I)
- AI for Earth Observation (AI4EO) Accelerator, European Space Agency (ESA), 2020-2022 (Co-I)
- Peruvian Glacier Retreat and its Impact on Water Security (Peru GROWS), NERC (NE/S013296/1) - Newton-Paulet Fund, 2019-2022 (Co-I)
- Emergence of Climate Hazards, NERC (NE/S004726/1), 2019-2022 (Co-I)
- Future Water Security for communities reliant on the Upper Indus, Himalayas, NERC (NE/R000107/1), 2017-2020 (Co-I)
- The North Atlantic Climate System Integrated Study (ACSIS), NERC (NE/N018028/1), 2016-2021 (Co-I)
- Ice shelves in a warming world: Filchner Ice Shelf system, Antarctica (FISS), NERC (NE/L013770/1), 2015-2020 (Co-I)