NeurIPS 2021 Workshop: Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning

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About

Many in the ML community wish to take action on climate change, but are unsure of the pathways through which they can have the most impact. This workshop highlights work that demonstrates that, while no silver bullet, ML can be an invaluable tool in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and in helping society adapt to the effects of climate change. Climate change is a complex problem, for which action takes many forms - from theoretical advances to deployment of new technology. Many of these actions represent high-impact opportunities for real-world change, and are simultaneously interesting academic research problems.

This workshop was held as part of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), one of the premier conferences on machine learning, which draws a wide audience of researchers and practitioners in academia, industry, and related fields.

About NeurIPS

The main workshop took place digitally on December 14. The schedule is available below, with links to papers, videos, and slides.

Schedule Full Recording

Time (UTC)	Event
	Opening remarks
	Daron Acemoglu: Is AI the Solution to Climate Change? (Invited talk) Details: (click to expand) Speaker: Daron Acemoglu, MIT Title: Is AI the Solution to Climate Change Abstract: Many pin their hopes on the tech sector and advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other digital technologies in combating climate change. In this talk, I argue against this optimistic view. I first provide evidence on how AI has been used in US businesses, pointing out that it has had few of the promised benefits and has instead continued the process of inequality-increasing and wage-reducing automation. I then review the evidence on advances in renewable energy, arguing that it has responded strongly to subsidies and prices of fossil fuels, but these advances have slowed down lately. There appears to be no alternative to increasing carbon taxes significantly and investing in renewable and green technologies. There is no evidence that big tech companies have played a leading role, and most existing evidence suggests that big energy companies have typically undermined efforts to switch to renewables. Bio: Daron Acemoglu is an Institute Professor at MIT and an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, the British Academy of Sciences, the Turkish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a member of the Group of Thirty. He is the author of five books, including New York Times bestseller Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (joint with James A. Robinson), Introduction to Modern Economic Growth, and The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (with James A. Robinson). His academic work covers a wide range of areas, including political economy, economic development, economic growth, technological change, inequality, labor economics and economics of networks. Daron Acemoglu has received the inaugural T. W. Shultz Prize from the University of Chicago in 2004, and the inaugural Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contribution to labor economics in 2004, Distinguished Science Award from the Turkish Sciences Association in 2006, the John von Neumann Award, Rajk College, Budapest in 2007, the Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize in 2018, the Global Economy Prize in 2019, and the CME Mathematical and Statistical Research Institute prize in 2021. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award. He holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Utrecht, the Bosporus University, University of Athens, Bilkent University, the University of Bath, Ecole Normale Superieure, Saclay Paris, and the London Business School.
	Spotlight Presentations
	(52) "Resolving Super Fine-Resolution SIF via Coarsely-Supervised U-Net Regression"
	(64) "Detecting Abandoned Oil And Gas Wells Using Machine Learning And Semantic Segmentation"
	(55) "Semi-Supervised Classification and Segmentation on High Resolution Aerial Images"
	(29) "A GNN-RNN Approach for Harnessing Geospatial and Temporal Information: Application to Crop Yield Prediction"
	Poster Session 1 Details: (click to expand) Posters presented in this slot are listed below. Papers track: (1) Flood Segmentation on Sentinel-1 SAR Imagery with Semi-Supervised Learning (7) Towards debiasing climate simulations using unsuperviserd image-to-image translation networks (8) Using Non-Linear Causal Models to Study Aerosol-Cloud Interactions in the Southeast Pacific (10) Hurricane Forecasting: A Novel Multimodal Machine Learning Framework (11) Improved Drought Forecasting Using Surrogate Quantile And Shape (SQUASH) Loss (12) Global ocean wind speed estimation with CyGNSSnet (13) Predicting Critical Biogeochemistry of the Southern Ocean for Climate Monitoring (14) On the Generalization of Agricultural Drought Classification from Climate Data (16) Rotation Equivariant Deforestation Segmentation and Driver Classification (17) WiSoSuper: Benchmarking Super-Resolution Methods on Wind and Solar Data (18) Meta-Learned Bayesian Optimization for Calibrating Building Simulation Models with Multi-Source Data (19) MS-nowcasting: Operational Precipitation Nowcasting with Convolutional LSTMs at Microsoft Weather (20) SunCast: Solar Irradiance Nowcasting from Geosynchronous Satellite Data (21) Synthetic Imagery Aided Geographic Domain Adaptation for Rare Energy Infrastructure Detection in Remotely Sensed Imagery (22) Being the Fire: A CNN-Based Reinforcement Learning Method to Learn How Fires Behave Beyond the Limits of Physics-Based Empirical Models (23) Subseasonal Solar Power Forecasting via Deep Sequence Learning (24) A Transfer Learning-Based Surrogate Model for Geological Carbon Storage with Multi-Fidelity Training Data (27) Multitask Learning for Estimating Power Plant Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Satellite Imagery (28) ClimART: A Benchmark Dataset for Emulating Atmospheric Radiative Transfer in Weather and Climate Models (30) Learned Benchmarks for Subseasonal Forecasting (31) Emissions-aware electricity network expansion planning via implicit differentiation (32) Amortized inference of Gaussian process hyperparameters for improved concrete strength trajectory prediction (33) A data integration pipeline towards reliable monitoring of phytoplankton and early detection of harmful algal blooms (35) Predicting Atlantic Multidecadal Variability (36) Identifying the atmospheric drivers of drought and heat using a smoothed deep learning approach (41) HyperionSolarNet: Solar Panel Detection from Aerial Images (42) Prediction of Household-level Heat-Consumption using PSO enhanced SVR Model (43) EcoLight: Reward Shaping in Deep Reinforcement Learning for Ergonomic Traffic Signal Control (44) Data Driven Study of Estuary Hypoxia (47) High-resolution rainfall-runoff modeling using graph neural network (48) Machine Learning for Snow Stratigraphy Classification (50) Learning to Dissipate Traffic Jams with Piecewise Constant Control (51) Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning Controller for Multi-Generator Industrial Wave Energy Converter (55) Semi-Supervised Classification and Segmentation on High Resolution Aerial Images (58) Capturing Electricity Market Dynamics in the Optimal Trading of Strategic Agents using Neural Network Constrained Optimization (59) Leveraging Machine Learning to Predict the Autoconversion Rates from Satellite Data (61) Scalable coastal inundation mapping using machine learning Proposals track: (66) Hybrid physics-based and data-driven modeling with calibrated uncertainty for lithium-ion battery degradation diagnosis and prognosis (67) On the use of Deep Generative Models for "Perfect" Prognosis Climate Downscaling (69) A NLP-based Analysis of Alignment of Organizations' Climate-Related Risk Disclosures with Material Risks and Metrics (71) Multi-agent reinforcement learning for renewable integration in the electric power grid (72) Machine Learning Speeding Up the Development of Portfolio of New Crop Varieties to Adapt to and Mitigate Climate Change (74) Optimization of Agricultural Management for Soil Carbon Sequestration based on Deep Reinforcement Learning and Large-Scale Simulations (76) Predicting Cascading Failures in Power Systems using Graph Convolutional Networks Tutorials track: (78) A day in a sustainable life (79) Open Catalyst Project: An Introduction to ML applied to Molecular Simulations
	Panel 1: Decision-making Details: (click to expand) Panelists: Eliane Ubalijoro, Future Earth Lieve Helsen, KU Leuven Lynn Kaack, Hertie School João M. Costa Sousa, IST ULisboa
	Spotlight Presentations
	(57) "Two-phase training mitigates class imbalance for camera trap image classification with CNNs"
	(35) "Predicting Atlantic Multidecadal Variability"
	(30) "Learned Benchmarks for Subseasonal Forecasting"
	Anima Anandkumar: Principled Al Algorithms for predicting and mitigating climate change (Invited talk) Details: (click to expand) Speaker: Anima Anandkumar, Caltech, Nvidia Title: Role of AI in predicting and mitigating climate change Abstract: Predicting extreme weather events in a warming world at fine scales is a grand challenge faced by climate scientists. Policy makers and society at large depend on reliable predictions to plan for the disastrous impact of climate change and develop effective adaptation strategies. Deep learning (DL) offers novel methods that are potentially more accurate and orders of magnitude faster than traditional weather and climate models for predicting extreme events. The Fourier Neural Operator (FNO), a novel deep learning method has shown promising results for predicting complex systems, such as spatio-temporal chaos, turbulence, and weather phenomena. I will give an overview of the method as well as our recent results. Bio: Anima Anandkumar is a Bren Professor at Caltech and Director of ML Research at NVIDIA. She was previously a Principal Scientist at Amazon Web Services. She has received several honors such as Alfred. P. Sloan Fellowship, NSF Career Award, Young investigator awards from DoD, and Faculty Fellowships from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Adobe. She is part of the World Economic Forum's Expert Network. She is passionate about designing principled AI algorithms and applying them in interdisciplinary applications. Her research focus is on unsupervised AI, optimization, and tensor methods.
	Spotlight Presentations
	(28) "ClimART: A Benchmark Dataset for Emulating Atmospheric Radiative Transfer in Weather and Climate Models"
	(77) "DeepQuake: Artificial Intelligence for Earthquake Forecasting Using Fine-Grained Climate Data"
	(10) "Hurricane Forecasting: A Novel Multimodal Machine Learning Framework"
	(31) "Emissions-aware electricity network expansion planning via implicit differentiation"
	Tianzhen Hong: Machine Learning for Smart Buildings: Applications and Perspectives (Invited talk) Details: (click to expand) Speaker: Tianzhen Hong, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Title: Machine Learning for Smart Buildings: Applications and Perspectives Abstract: Fueled by big data, powerful computing, and advanced algorithms, machine learning has been explored and applied to smart buildings and has demonstrated its potential to enhance building performance. This talk presents an overview of how machine learning has been applied across different stages of building life cycle with a focus on building design, operation, and control. A few applications using machine learning will be presented. Challenges and opportunities of applying machine learning to buildings research will be discussed also. Bio: Dr. Tianzhen Hong is a Senior Scientist and Deputy Head of the Building Technologies Department of LBNL. He leads the Urban Systems Group and a team with research on data, methods, computing, occupant behavior, and policy for design and operation of low energy buildings and sustainable urban systems. He is an IBPSA Fellow and ASHRAE Fellow. He received B.Eng. and Ph.D. in HVACR, and B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from Tsinghua University, China.
	Poster Session 2 Details: (click to expand) Posters presented in this slot are listed below. Papers track: (2) Short-term Solar Irradiance Prediction from Sky Images (4) Addressing Deep Learning Model Uncertainty in Long-Range Climate Forecasting with Late Fusion (5) Predicting Discharge in Catchment Outlet Using Deep Learning: Case Study of the Ansongo-Niamey Basin (6) Accurate and Timely Forecasts of Geologic Carbon Storage using Machine Learning Methods (9) Memory to Map: Improving Radar Flood Maps With Temporal Context and Semantic Segmentation (17) WiSoSuper: Benchmarking Super-Resolution Methods on Wind and Solar Data (19) MS-nowcasting: Operational Precipitation Nowcasting with Convolutional LSTMs at Microsoft Weather (29) A GNN-RNN Approach for Harnessing Geospatial and Temporal Information: Application to Crop Yield Prediction (31) Emissions-aware electricity network expansion planning via implicit differentiation (37) Learning to identify cracks on wind turbine blade surfaces using drone-based inspection images (39) An Automated System for Detecting Visual Damages of Wind Turbine Blades (45) Decentralized Safe Reinforcement Learning for Voltage Control (46) NoFADE: Analyzing Diminishing Returns on CO2 Investment (49) DEM Super-Resolution with EfficientNetV2 (51) Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning Controller for Multi-Generator Industrial Wave Energy Converter (53) PreDisM: Pre-Disaster Modelling With CNN Ensembles for At-Risk Communities (56) Reducing the Barriers of Acquiring Ground-truth from Biodiversity Rich Audio Datasets Using Intelligent Sampling Techniques (57) Two-phase training mitigates class imbalance for camera trap image classification with CNNs Proposals track: (62) Machine Learning in Automating Carbon Sequestration Site Assessment (63) A Risk Model for Predicting Powerline-induced Wildfires in Distribution System (64) Detecting Abandoned Oil And Gas Wells Using Machine Learning And Semantic Segmentation (65) Machine learning-enabled model-data integration for predicting subsurface water storage (70) Unsupervised Machine Learning framework for sensor placement optimization: analyzing methane leaks (71) Multi-agent reinforcement learning for renewable integration in the electric power grid (73) Toward Foundation Models for Earth Monitoring: Proposal for a Climate Change Benchmark Tutorials track: (79) Open Catalyst Project: An Introduction to ML applied to Molecular Simulations
	Panel 2: Data Details: (click to expand) Panelists: Bethany Lusch, ANL Tricia Martinez, Techstars Industries Kakani Katija, MBARI Brookie Guzder-Williams, WRI
	Tutorials Track intro
	(78) "A day in a sustainable life"
	(79) "Open Catalyst Project: An Introduction to ML applied to Molecular Simulations"
	Amy McGovern: Developing Trustworthy AI for Weather and Climate (Invited talk) Details: (click to expand) Speaker: Amy McGovern, University of Oklahoma Title: Developing Trustworthy AI for Weather and Climate Abstract: In this talk we give an overview of the work of the NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography. For this talk, we will focus on our applications to weather and climate predictions, including convective hazards and extreme heat. We also briefly review the need for the development of principles for ethical and responsible AI for weather and climate. Bio: Lloyd G. and Joyce Austin Presidential Professor, School of Computer Science and School of Meteorology, University of Oklahoma Director, NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography
	Closing remarks
	Poster Session 3 Details: (click to expand) Posters presented in this slot are listed below. Papers track: (3) Towards Representation Learning for Atmospheric Dynamics (5) Predicting Discharge in Catchment Outlet Using Deep Learning: Case Study of the Ansongo-Niamey Basin (15) Mapping Post-Climate Change Biogeographical Regions with Deep Latent Variable Models (19) MS-nowcasting: Operational Precipitation Nowcasting with Convolutional LSTMs at Microsoft Weather (25) National Cropland Classification with Agriculture Census Information and EO Datasets (26) FIgLib & SmokeyNet: Dataset and Deep Learning Model for Real-Time Wildland Fire Smoke Detection (31) Emissions-aware electricity network expansion planning via implicit differentiation (38) Evaluating Pretraining Methods for Deep Learning on Geophysical Imaging Datasets (40) Predicting Power System Dynamics and Transients: A Frequency Domain Approach (51) Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning Controller for Multi-Generator Industrial Wave Energy Converter (52) Resolving Super Fine-Resolution SIF via Coarsely-Supervised U-Net Regression Proposals track: (68) A Deep Learning application towards transparent communication for Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PES) (75) Leveraging machine learning for identify hydrological extreme events under global climate change
	Networking at Gather.Town

Accepted Works

Works were submitted to one of three tracks: Papers, Proposals, or Tutorials.

Click the links below for information about each submission, including slides, videos, and papers.

Papers

Title	Authors
(1) Flood Segmentation on Sentinel-1 SAR Imagery with Semi-Supervised Learning	Siddha Ganju (Nvidia Corporation); Sayak Paul (Carted)
(2) Short-term Solar Irradiance Prediction from Sky Images	Hoang Chuong Nguyen (Australia National University); Miaomiao Liu (The Australian National University)
(3) Towards Representation Learning for Atmospheric Dynamics	Sebastian Hoffmann (University of Magdeburg); Christian Lessig (Otto-von-Guericke-Universitat Magdeburg)
(4) Addressing Deep Learning Model Uncertainty in Long-Range Climate Forecasting with Late Fusion	Ken C. L. Wong (IBM Research – Almaden Research Center); Hongzhi Wang (IBM Almaden Research Center); Etienne E Vos (IBM); Bianca Zadrozny (IBM Research); Campbell D Watson (IBM Reserch); Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood (IBM Research)
(5) Predicting Discharge in Catchment Outlet Using Deep Learning: Case Study of the Ansongo-Niamey Basin	Peniel J. Y. Adounkpe (WASCAL); Eric Alamou (Université d'Abomey-Calavi); Belko Diallo (WASCAL); Abdou Ali (AGRHYMET Regional Centre)
(6) Accurate and Timely Forecasts of Geologic Carbon Storage using Machine Learning Methods	Dan Lu (Oak Ridge National Laboratory); Scott Painter (Oak Ridge National Laboratory); Nicholas Azzolina (University of North Dakota); Matthew Burton-Kelly (University of North Dakota)
(7) Towards debiasing climate simulations using unsuperviserd image-to-image translation networks	James Fulton (University of Edinburgh); Ben Clarke (Oxford University)
(8) Using Non-Linear Causal Models to Study Aerosol-Cloud Interactions in the Southeast Pacific	Andrew Jesson (University of Oxford); Peter Manshausen (University of Oxford); Alyson Douglas (University of Oxford); Duncan Watson-Parris (University of Oxford); Yarin Gal (University of Oxford); Philip Stier (University of Oxford)
(9) Memory to Map: Improving Radar Flood Maps With Temporal Context and Semantic Segmentation	Veda Sunkara (Cloud to Street); Nicholas Leach (Cloud to Street); Siddha Ganju (Nvidia)
(10) Hurricane Forecasting: A Novel Multimodal Machine Learning Framework	Léonard Boussioux (MIT, CentraleSupélec); Cynthia Zeng (MIT); Dimitris Bertsimas (MIT); Théo J Guenais (Harvard University)
(11) Improved Drought Forecasting Using Surrogate Quantile And Shape (SQUASH) Loss	Devyani Lambhate Lambhate (Indian Institute of Science); Smit Marvaniya (IBM Research India); Jitendra Singh (IBM Research - India); David Gold (IBM)
(12) Global ocean wind speed estimation with CyGNSSnet	Caroline Arnold (German Climate Computing Center); Milad Asgarimehr (German Research Centre for Geosciences)
(13) Predicting Critical Biogeochemistry of the Southern Ocean for Climate Monitoring	Ellen Park (MIT); Jae Deok Kim (MIT-WHOI); Nadege Aoki (MIT); Yumeng Cao (MIT); Yamin Arefeen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Matthew Beveridge (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); David P Nicholson (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution); Iddo Drori (MIT)
(14) On the Generalization of Agricultural Drought Classification from Climate Data	Julia Gottfriedsen (1Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), LMU); Max Berrendorf (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München); Pierre Gentine (Columbia University); Markus Reichstein (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena; Michael Stifel Center Jena for Data-Driven and Simulation Science, Jena); Katja Weigel (niversity of Bremen, Institute of Environmental Physics (IUP), Bremen, Germany); Birgit Hassler (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR), Institut für Physik der Atmosphäre, Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany); Veronika Eyring (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR), Institut für Physik der Atmosphäre, Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany; University of Bremen, Institute of Environmental Physics (IUP), Bremen, Germany)
(15) Mapping Post-Climate Change Biogeographical Regions with Deep Latent Variable Models	Christopher Krapu (Oak Ridge National Lab - Oak Ridge, TN)
(16) Rotation Equivariant Deforestation Segmentation and Driver Classification	Joshua Mitton (University of Glasgow); Roderick Murray-Smith (University of Glasgow)
(17) WiSoSuper: Benchmarking Super-Resolution Methods on Wind and Solar Data	Rupa Kurinchi-Vendhan (Caltech); Björn Lütjens (MIT); Ritwik Gupta (University of California, Berkeley); Lucien D Werner (California Institute of Technology); Dava Newman (MIT); Steven Low (California Institute of Technology)
(18) Meta-Learned Bayesian Optimization for Calibrating Building Simulation Models with Multi-Source Data	Sicheng Zhan (NUS); Gordon Wichern (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)); Christopher Laughman (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories); Ankush Chakrabarty (Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs)
(19) MS-nowcasting: Operational Precipitation Nowcasting with Convolutional LSTMs at Microsoft Weather	Sylwester Klocek (Microsoft Corporation); Haiyu Dong (Microsoft); Matthew Dixon (Microsoft Corporation); Panashe Kanengoni (Microsoft Corporation); Najeeb Kazmi (Microsoft); Pete Luferenko (Microsoft Corporation); Zhongjian Lv (Microsoft Corporation); Shikhar Sharma (); Jonathan Weyn (Microsoft); Siqi Xiang (Microsoft Corporation)
(20) SunCast: Solar Irradiance Nowcasting from Geosynchronous Satellite Data	Dhileeban Kumaresan (UC Berkeley); Richard Wang (UC Berkeley); Ernesto A Martinez (UC Berkeley); Richard Cziva (UC Berkeley); Alberto Todeschini (UC Berkeley); Colorado J Reed (University of California, Berkeley); Puya Vahabi (UC Berkeley)
(21) Synthetic Imagery Aided Geographic Domain Adaptation for Rare Energy Infrastructure Detection in Remotely Sensed Imagery	Wei Hu (Duke University); Tyler Feldman (Duke University); Eddy Lin (Duke University); Jose Luis Moscoso (Duke); Yanchen J Ou (Duke University); Natalie Tarn (Duke University); Baoyan Ye (Duke University); Wendy Zhang (Duke University); Jordan Malof (Duke University); Kyle Bradbury (Duke University)
(22) Being the Fire: A CNN-Based Reinforcement Learning Method to Learn How Fires Behave Beyond the Limits of Physics-Based Empirical Models	William L Ross (Stanford)
(23) Subseasonal Solar Power Forecasting via Deep Sequence Learning	Saumya Sinha (University of Colorado, Boulder); Bri-Mathias S Hodge (University of Colorado Boulder); Claire Monteleoni (University of Colorado Boulder)
(24) A Transfer Learning-Based Surrogate Model for Geological Carbon Storage with Multi-Fidelity Training Data	Su Jiang (Stanford University)
(25) National Cropland Classification with Agriculture Census Information and EO Datasets	Junshi Xia (RIKEN); Naoto Yokoya (The University of Tokyo); Bruno Adriano (RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP))
(26) FIgLib & SmokeyNet: Dataset and Deep Learning Model for Real-Time Wildland Fire Smoke Detection	Anshuman Dewangan (University of California, San Diego); Mai Nguyen (University of California, San Diego); Garrison Cottrell (UC San Diego)
(27) Multitask Learning for Estimating Power Plant Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Satellite Imagery	Joëlle Hanna (University of St. Gallen); Michael Mommert (University of St. Gallen); Linus M. Scheibenreif (University of St. Gallen); Damian Borth (University of St. Gallen)
(28) ClimART: A Benchmark Dataset for Emulating Atmospheric Radiative Transfer in Weather and Climate Models	Salva Rühling Cachay (Technical University of Darmstadt); Venkatesh Ramesh (MILA); Jason N. S. Cole (Environment and Climate Change Canada); Howard Barker (Environment and Climate Change Canada); David Rolnick (McGill University, Mila)
(29) A GNN-RNN Approach for Harnessing Geospatial and Temporal Information: Application to Crop Yield Prediction Best Paper: ML Innovation	Joshua Fan (Cornell University); Junwen Bai (Cornell University); Zhiyun Li (Cornell University); Ariel Ortiz-Bobea (Cornell); Carla P Gomes (Cornell University)
(30) Learned Benchmarks for Subseasonal Forecasting	Soukayna Mouatadid (University of Toronto); Paulo Orenstein (IMPA); Genevieve E Flaspohler (MIT); Miruna Oprescu (Microsoft Research); Judah Cohen (AER); Franklyn Wang (Harvard University); Sean Knight (MIT); Maria Geogdzhayeva (MIT); Sam Levang (Salient Predictions Inc.); Ernest Fraenkel (MIT); Lester Mackey (Microsoft Research)
(31) Emissions-aware electricity network expansion planning via implicit differentiation	Anthony Degleris (Stanford University); Lucas Fuentes (Stanford); Abbas El Gamal (Stanford University); Ram Rajagopal (Stanford University)
(32) Amortized inference of Gaussian process hyperparameters for improved concrete strength trajectory prediction	Kristen Severson (Microsoft Research); Olivia Pfeiffer (MIT); Jie Chen (IBM Research); Kai Gong (MIT); Jeremy Gregory (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Richard Goodwin (IBM Research); Elsa Olivetti (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
(33) A data integration pipeline towards reliable monitoring of phytoplankton and early detection of harmful algal blooms	Bruna Guterres (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande - FURG); Sara khalid (University of Oxford); Marcelo Pias (Federal University of Rio Grande); Silvia Botelho (Federal University of Rio Grande)
(34) Identifying Distributional Differences in Convective Evolution Prior to Rapid Intensification in Tropical Cyclones	Irwin H McNeely (Carnegie Mellon University); Galen Vincent (Carnegie Mellon University); Rafael Izbicki (UFSCar); Kimberly Wood (Mississippi State University); Ann B. Lee (Carnegie Mellon University)
(35) Predicting Atlantic Multidecadal Variability Best Paper: Pathway to Impact	Glenn Liu (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Peidong Wang (MIT); Matthew Beveridge (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Young-Oh Kwon (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution); Iddo Drori (MIT)
(36) Identifying the atmospheric drivers of drought and heat using a smoothed deep learning approach	Magdalena Mittermeier (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München); Maximilian Weigert (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München); David Ruegamer (LMU Munich)
(37) Learning to identify cracks on wind turbine blade surfaces using drone-based inspection images	Akshay B Iyer (SkySpecs, Inc.); Linh V Nguyen (SkySpecs Inc); Shweta Khushu (SkySpecs Inc.)
(38) Evaluating Pretraining Methods for Deep Learning on Geophysical Imaging Datasets	James Chen (Kirby School)
(39) An Automated System for Detecting Visual Damages of Wind Turbine Blades	Linh V Nguyen (SkySpecs Inc); Akshay B Iyer (SkySpecs, Inc.); Shweta Khushu (SkySpecs Inc.)
(40) Predicting Power System Dynamics and Transients: A Frequency Domain Approach	Wenqi Cui (University of Washington); Weiwei Yang (Microsoft Research); Baosen Zhang (University of Washington)
(41) HyperionSolarNet: Solar Panel Detection from Aerial Images	Poonam Parhar (UCBerkeley); Ryan Sawasaki (UCBerkeley); Alberto Todeschini (UC Berkeley); Colorado Reed (UC Berkeley); Hossein Vahabi (University California Berkeley); Nathan Nusaputra (UC Berkeley); Felipe Vergara (UC Berkeley)
(42) Prediction of Household-level Heat-Consumption using PSO enhanced SVR Model	Satyaki Chatterjee (Pattern Recognition Lab, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg); Siming Bayer (Pattern Recognition Lab, Friedrich-Alexander University); Andreas K Maier (Pattern Recognition Lab, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg)
(43) EcoLight: Reward Shaping in Deep Reinforcement Learning for Ergonomic Traffic Signal Control	Pedram Agand (Simon Fraser University); Alexey Iskrov (Breeze Labs Inc.); Mo Chen (Simon Fraser University)
(44) Data Driven Study of Estuary Hypoxia	Md Monwer Hussain (University of New-Brunswick); Guillaume Durand (National Research Council Canada); Michael Coffin (Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada); Julio J Valdés (National Research Council Canada); Luke Poirier (Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada)
(45) Decentralized Safe Reinforcement Learning for Voltage Control	Wenqi Cui (University of Washington); Jiayi Li (University of Washington); Baosen Zhang (University of Washington)
(46) NoFADE: Analyzing Diminishing Returns on CO2 Investment	Andre Fu (University of Toronto); Justin B Tran (University of Toronto); Andy Xie (University of Toronto); Jonathan T Spraggett (University of Toronto); Elisa Ding (University of Toronto); Chang-Won Lee (University of Toronto); Kanav Singla (University of Toronto); Mahdi S. Hosseini (University of New Brunswick); Konstantinos N Plataniotis (UofT)
(47) High-resolution rainfall-runoff modeling using graph neural network	Zhongrun Xiang (University of Iowa); Ibrahim Demir (The University of Iowa)
(48) Machine Learning for Snow Stratigraphy Classification	Julia Kaltenborn (McGill University); Viviane Clay (Osnabrück University); Amy R. Macfarlane (WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF); Martin Schneebeli (WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF)
(49) DEM Super-Resolution with EfficientNetV2	Bekir Z Demiray (University of Iowa); Muhammed A Sit (The University of Iowa); Ibrahim Demir (The University of Iowa)
(50) Learning to Dissipate Traffic Jams with Piecewise Constant Control	Mayuri Sridhar (MIT); Cathy Wu ()
(51) Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning Controller for Multi-Generator Industrial Wave Energy Converter	Soumyendu Sarkar (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Vineet Gundecha (Hewlett Packard Enterpise); Alexander Shmakov (UC Irvine); Sahand Ghorbanpour (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Ashwin Ramesh Babu (Hewlett Packard Enterprise Labs); Paolo Faraboschi (HPE); mathieu Cocho (Carnegie Clean Energy); Alexandre Pichard (Carnegie Clean Energy); Jonathan Fievez (Carnegie Clean Energy)
(52) Resolving Super Fine-Resolution SIF via Coarsely-Supervised U-Net Regression	Joshua Fan (Cornell University); Di Chen (Cornell University); Jiaming Wen (Cornell University); Ying Sun (Cornell University); Carla P Gomes (Cornell University)
(53) PreDisM: Pre-Disaster Modelling With CNN Ensembles for At-Risk Communities	Vishal Anand (Columbia University); Yuki Miura (Columbia University)
(54) A hybrid convolutional neural network/active contour approach to segmenting dead trees in aerial imagery	Jacquelyn Shelton (Hong Kong Polytechnic University); Przemyslaw Polewski (TomTom Location Technology Germany GmbH); Wei Yao (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University); Marco Heurich (Bavarian Forest National Park)
(55) Semi-Supervised Classification and Segmentation on High Resolution Aerial Images	Sahil S Khose (Manipal Institute of Technology); Abhiraj Tiwari (Manipal Institute of Technology); Ankita Ghosh (Manipal Institute of Technology)
(56) Reducing the Barriers of Acquiring Ground-truth from Biodiversity Rich Audio Datasets Using Intelligent Sampling Techniques	Jacob G Ayers (UC San Diego); Sean Perry (UC San Diego); Vaibhav Tiwari (UC San Diego); Mugen Blue (Cal Poly San Luis Obispo); Nishant Balaji (UC San Diego); Curt Schurgers (UC San Diego); Ryan Kastner (University of California San Diego); Mathias Tobler (San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance); Ian Ingram (San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance)
(57) Two-phase training mitigates class imbalance for camera trap image classification with CNNs	Farjad Malik (KU Leuven); Simon Wouters (KU Leuven); Ruben Cartuyvels (KULeuven); Erfan Ghadery (KU Leuven); Sien Moens (KU Leuven)
(58) Capturing Electricity Market Dynamics in the Optimal Trading of Strategic Agents using Neural Network Constrained Optimization	Mihály Dolányi (KU Leuven); Kenneth Bruninx (KU Leuven); Jean-François Toubeau (Faculté Polytechnique (FPMs), Université de Mons (UMONS)); Erik Delaue (KU Leuven)
(59) Leveraging Machine Learning to Predict the Autoconversion Rates from Satellite Data	Maria C Novitasari (University College London); Johannes Quaas (University of Leipzig); Miguel Rodrigues (University College London)
(60) Towards Automatic Transformer-based Cloud Classification and Segmentation	Roshan Roy (Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani); Ahan M R (BITS Pilani); Vaibhav Soni (MANIT Bhopal); Ashish Chittora (BITS Pilani)
(61) Scalable coastal inundation mapping using machine learning	Ophelie Meuriot (IBM Research Europe); Anne Jones (IBM Research)

Proposals

Title	Authors
(62) Machine Learning in Automating Carbon Sequestration Site Assessment	Jay Chen (Shell); Ligang Lu (Shell); Mohamed Sidahmed (Shell); Taixu Bai (Shell); Ilyana Folmar (Shell); Puneet Seth (Shell); Manoj Sarfare (Shell); Duane Mikulencak (Shell); Ihab Akil (Shell)
(63) A Risk Model for Predicting Powerline-induced Wildfires in Distribution System	Mengqi Yao (University of California Berkeley)
(64) Detecting Abandoned Oil And Gas Wells Using Machine Learning And Semantic Segmentation	Michelle Lin (McGill University); David Rolnick (McGill University, Mila)
(65) Machine learning-enabled model-data integration for predicting subsurface water storage	Dan Lu (Oak Ridge National Laboratory); Eric Pierce (Oak Ridge National Laboratory); Shih-Chieh Kao (Oak Ridge National Laboratory); David Womble (Oak Ridge National Laboratory); LI LI (Pennsylvania State University); Daniella Rempe (The University of Texas at Austin)
(66) Hybrid physics-based and data-driven modeling with calibrated uncertainty for lithium-ion battery degradation diagnosis and prognosis	Jing Lin (Institute for Infocomm Research); Yu Zhang (I2R); Edwin Khoo (Institute for Infocomm Research)
(67) On the use of Deep Generative Models for "Perfect" Prognosis Climate Downscaling	Jose González-Abad (Institute of Physics of Cantabria); Jorge Baño-Medina (Institute of Physics of Cantabria); Ignacio Heredia (Institute of Physics of Cantabria)
(68) A Deep Learning application towards transparent communication for Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PES)	Lan HOANG (IBM Research); Thuy Thu Phan (Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR))
(69) A NLP-based Analysis of Alignment of Organizations' Climate-Related Risk Disclosures with Material Risks and Metrics	Elham Kheradmand (University of Montreal); Didier Serre (Clearsum); Manuel Morales (University of Montreal); Cedric B Robert (Clearsum)
(70) Unsupervised Machine Learning framework for sensor placement optimization: analyzing methane leaks	Shirui Wang (University of Houston); Sara Malvar (Microsoft); Leonardo Nunes (Microsoft); Kim Whitehall (Microsoft); YAGNA DEEPIKA ORUGANTI (MICROSOFT); Yazeed Alaudah (Microsoft); Anirudh Badam (Microsoft)
(71) Multi-agent reinforcement learning for renewable integration in the electric power grid	Vincent Mai (Mila, Université de Montréal); Tianyu Zhang (Mila, Université de Montréal); Antoine Lesage-Landry (Polytechnique Montréal & GERAD)
(72) Machine Learning Speeding Up the Development of Portfolio of New Crop Varieties to Adapt to and Mitigate Climate Change	Abdallah Bari (OperAI Canada - Operational AI); Hassan Ouabbou (INRA); Abderrazek Jilal (INRA); Frederick Stoddard (University of Helsinki); Mikko Sillanpää (University of Oulu); Hamid Khazaei (World Vegetable Center)
(73) Toward Foundation Models for Earth Monitoring: Proposal for a Climate Change Benchmark	Alexandre Lacoste (ServiceNow); Evan D Sherwin (Stanford University, Energy and Resources Engineering); Hannah R Kerner (University of Maryland); Hamed Alemohammad (Radiant Earth Foundation); Björn Lütjens (MIT); Jeremy A Irvin (Stanford); David Dao (ETH Zurich); Alex Chang (Service Now); Mehmet Gunturkun (Element Ai); Alexandre Drouin (ServiceNow); Pau Rodriguez (Element AI); David Vazquez (ServiceNow)
(74) Optimization of Agricultural Management for Soil Carbon Sequestration based on Deep Reinforcement Learning and Large-Scale Simulations	Jing Wu (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Pan Zhao (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Ran Tao (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Naira Hovakimyan (UIUC); Guillermo Marcillo (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign); Nicolas Martin (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign); Carla Ferreira (Royal Institute of Technology); Zahra Kalantari (Royal Institute of Technology); Jennifer Hobbs (IntelinAir Inc.)
(75) Leveraging machine learning for identify hydrological extreme events under global climate change	Ying-Jung C Deweese (Georgia Insititute of Technology)
(76) Predicting Cascading Failures in Power Systems using Graph Convolutional Networks	Tabia Ahmad (University of Strathclyde); Yongli Zhu (Texas A&M Universersity); Panagiotis Papadopoulos (University of Strathclyde)
(77) DeepQuake: Artificial Intelligence for Earthquake Forecasting Using Fine-Grained Climate Data Best Paper: Proposals	Yash Narayan (The Nueva School)

Tutorials

Title	Authors
(78) A day in a sustainable life	Hussain Kazmi (KU Leuven); Attila Balint (KU Leuven); Jolien Despeghel (KU Leuven)
(79) Open Catalyst Project: An Introduction to ML applied to Molecular Simulations	Muhammed Shuaibi (Carnegie Mellon University); Anuroop Sriram (Facebook); Abhishek Das (Facebook AI Research); Janice Lan (Facebook AI Research); Adeesh Kolluru (Carnegie Mellon University); Brandon Wood (NERSC); Zachary Ulissi (Carnegie Mellon University); Larry Zitnick (Facebook AI Research)

Sponsors

Organizers

Maria João Sousa (IST, ULisboa)
Hari Prasanna Das (UC Berkeley)
Simone Fobi (Columbia University)
Ján Drgoňa (PNNL)
Tegan Maharaj (Mila, UToronto)
Yoshua Bengio (Mila, UdeM)

Tutorials Track Organizers

Ankur Mahesh (UC Berkeley)
Isabelle Tingzon (Thinking Machines Data Science)

Mentors

Alberto Costa Nogueira Junior (IBM Research)
Anuroop Sriram (Facebook AI Research)
Aranildo Lima (Aquatics Informatics)
Campbell Watson (IBM Research)
Deval Pandya (Vector Institute )
Fatma Tarlaci (OpenTeams)
Indrasis Chakraborty (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Kara Lamb (Columbia University)
Malte Hessenius (Climate & Company)
Mohamed Sidahmed (Shell)
Peter Dolan (Waymo)
Quentin Paletta (University of Cambridge)
Rajendiran Gopinath (CSIR-Central Scientific Instruments Organisation, India)
Reshmi Ghosh (Carnegie Mellon University)
Sara Khalid (University of Oxford)
Siddha Ganju (Nvidia)
Varvara Vetrova (University of Canterbury)
Vishal Anand (Columbia University, Microsoft)
Ying-Jung Chen Deweese (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Yongli Zhu (Texas A&M University)
Zoltan Nagy (The University of Texas at Austin)

Program Committee

Alberto Chapchap (GS Cap)
Alexandra Puchko (Western Washington University)
Andrew Ross (New York University)
Aneesh Rangnekar (Rochester Institute of Technology)
Ankur Mahesh (UC Berkeley)
Ankush Chakrabarty (Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs)
Armi Tiihonen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Bertrand Le Saux (European Space Agency (ESA))
Bianca Zadrozny (IBM Research)
Bill Cai (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Bingqing Chen (Carnegie Mellon University)
Brian Hutchinson (Western Washington University)
Campbell Watson (IBM Reserch)
Chase Dowling (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
Clement Duhart (MIT Media Lab)
Dali Wang (ORNL)
Dan Lu (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Daniel Salles Civitarese (IBM Research, Brazil)
Daniela Szwarcman (IBM Research)
Dara Farrell (Graduate of University of Washington)
Dario Augusto Borges Oliveira (Technische Universität München)
David Dao (ETH)
David Rolnick (McGill University, Mila)
Deepjyoti Deka (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Diego Kiedansk (Telecom ParisTech)
Difan Zhang (PNNL)
Duncan Watson-Parris (University of Oxford)
Fabrizio Falasca (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Felix Laumann (Imperial College London)
Fred Otieno (IBM)
Frederik Gerzer (fortiss)
Gege Wen (Stanford University)
Geneviève Patterson (Climate Change AI)
Hannah Kerner (University of Maryland)
Hao Sheng (Stanford University)
Hari Prasanna Das (UC Berkeley)
Hovig Bayandorian
Isabelle Tingzon (Thinking Machines Data Science)
Jan Drgona (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
Jeremy Irvin (Stanford)
Jiaxin Zhang (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Jonathan Fürst (NEC Laboratories Europe)
Joris Guerin (ENSAM)
Joyjit Chatterjee (University of Hull)
Julian de Hoog (The University of Melbourne)
Julius von Kügelgen (MPI for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen & University of Cambridge)
Kai Jeggle (ETH Zurich)
Kalai Ramea (PARC)
Katarzyna B. Tokarska (ETH Zurich)
Kate Duffy (Northeastern University)
Kidane Degefa (Haramaya University)
Komminist Weldemariam (IBM Research)
Konstantin Klemmer (University of Warwick)
Kureha Yamaguchi (University of Cambridge)
Lauren Kuntz (Gaiascope)
Levente Klein (IBM Research)
Lexie Yang (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Linda Petrini (Google Brain)
Lucas Kruitwagen (University of Oxford)
Lucas Spangher (U.C. Berkeley)
Maike Sonnewald (Princeton University)
Marcus Voss (TU Berlin)
Maria João Sousa (IDMEC, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa)
Markus Leippold (University of Zurich)
Matias Quintana (National University of Singapore)
Meareg Hailemariam (Addis Ababa University)
Michael Howland (Stanford University)
Michael Steininger (University of Würzburg)
Miguel Molina-Solana (Universidad de Granada)
Milan Jain (PNNL)
Niccolo Dalmasso (J.P. Morgan Chase)
Nikola Milojevic-Dupont (Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC))
Olivia Mendivil Ramos (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
Paulo Orenstein (Stanford)
Paweł Gora (TensorCell)
Peetak Mitra (Palo Alto Research Center)
Priya Donti (Carnegie Mellon University)
Ramakrishna Tipireddy (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
Redouane Lguensat (LOCEAN-IPSL)
Robin Dunn (Novartis)
Romana Markovic (KIT - Building Science Group)
Samrat Chatterjee (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
Sara El Mekkaoui (EMI Engineering School)
Sasha Luccioni (Mila)
Sayak Mukherjee (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
Shruti Kulkarni (Indian Institute of Science (IISc))
Simone Fobi (Columbia University)
Tianle Yuan (NASA)
Tristan Ballard (Sust Global, Stanford University)
Valentina Zantedeschi (INRIA, UCL)
Victoria Preston (MIT)
Vili Hätönen (Emblica)
Yimeng Min (Cornell University)
Yue Hu (Vanderbilt University)

Call for Submissions

We invite submissions of short papers using machine learning to address problems in climate mitigation, adaptation, or modeling, including but not limited to the following topics:

• Agriculture
• Behavioral and social science
• Buildings and cities
• Carbon capture and sequestration
• Climate finance and economics
• Climate justice
• Climate modeling
• Climate policy
• Disaster prediction, management, and relief
• Earth science and monitoring
• Ecosystems and natural systems
• Forestry and other land use
• Heavy industry and manufacturing
• Power and energy systems
• Societal adaptation
• Transportation

All machine learning techniques are welcome, from kernel methods to deep learning. Each submission should make clear why the application has (or could have) a pathway to positive impacts regarding climate change. We highly encourage submissions which make their data publicly available. Accepted submissions will be invited to give poster presentations, of which some will be selected for spotlight talks.

The workshop does not publish proceedings, and submissions are non-archival. Submission to this workshop does not preclude future publication. Previously published work may be submitted under certain circumstances (see the FAQ).

All papers and proposals submissions must be through the submission website. Submissions will be reviewed double-blind; do your best to anonymize your submission, and do not include identifying information for authors in the PDF. Authors are required to use the workshop style template (based on the NeurIPS style files), available for LaTeX and docx format.

All tutorials submissions must be through this application form.

Please see the Tips for Submissions and FAQ, and contact climatechangeai.neurips2021@gmail.com with questions.

Submission Tracks

There are three tracks for submissions: (i) Papers, (ii) Proposals, (iii) Tutorials. Submissions are limited to 4 pages for the Papers track, and 3 pages for the Proposals track, in PDF format (see examples from ICML 2021, NeurIPS 2020, ICLR 2020, NeurIPS 2019, and ICML 2019). References do not count towards this total. Supplementary appendices are allowed but will be read at the discretion of the reviewers. All submissions must explain why the proposed work has (or could have) positive impacts regarding climate change.

PAPERS Track

Work that is in progress, published, and/or deployed.

Submissions for the Papers track should describe projects relevant to climate change that involve machine learning. These may include (but are not limited to) academic research; deployed results from startups, industry, public institutions, etc.; and climate-relevant datasets.

Submissions should provide experimental or theoretical validation of the method presented, as well as specifying what gap the method fills. Authors should clearly illustrate a pathway to climate impact, i.e., identify the way in which this work fits into broader efforts to address climate change. Algorithms need not be novel from a machine learning perspective if they are applied in a novel setting. Details of methodology need not be revealed if they are proprietary, though transparency is highly encouraged.

Submissions creating novel datasets are welcomed. Datasets should be designed to permit machine learning research (e.g. formatted with clear benchmarks for evaluation). In this case, baseline experimental results on the dataset are preferred, but not required.

PROPOSALS Track

Early-stage work and detailed descriptions of ideas for future work.

Submissions for the Proposals track should describe detailed ideas for how machine learning can be used to solve climate-relevant problems. While less constrained than the Papers track, Proposals will be subject to a very high standard of review. Ideas should be justified as extensively as possible, including motivation for why the problem being solved is important in tackling climate change, discussion of why current methods are inadequate, explanation of the proposed method, and discussion of the pathway to climate impact. Preliminary results are optional.

TUTORIALS Track

Interactive notebooks for insightful step-by-step walkthroughs.

Submissions for the Tutorials track should introduce or demonstrate the use of ML methods and tools such as libraries, packages, services, datasets, or frameworks to address a problem related to climate change. Tutorial proposals (250 words, due Aug 23) should take the form of an abstract and should include a clear and concise description of users’ expected learning outcomes from the tutorial. Accepted submissions (to be notified by Aug 30) will be given 6 weeks for the initial tutorial development (“midterm” deadline Oct 11), after which tutorial creators will collaborate with the CCAI Tutorials Team, who will review the tutorials periodically and provide iterative feedback, while the creators continue to develop and improve their work over the course of another 6 weeks. Final tutorial submissions (due Nov 22) should be in the form of executable notebooks (e.g. Jupyter, Colab) in a hosted code environment.

Tips for Submissions

• For examples of typical formatting and content, see submissions from our previous workshops at ICML 2021, NeurIPS 2020, ICLR 2020, NeurIPS 2019, and ICML 2019).
• Be explicit: Describe how your proposed approach addresses climate change, demonstrating an understanding of the application area.
• Frame your work: The specific problem and/or data proposed should be contextualized in terms of prior work.
• Address the impact: Describe the practical implications of your method in addressing the problem you identify, as well as any relevant societal impacts or potential side-effects. We recommend reading our further guidelines on this aspect here.
• Explain the ML: Readers may not be familiar with the exact techniques you are using or may desire further detail.
• Justify the ML: Describe why the ML method involved is needed, and why it is a good match for the problem.
• Avoid jargon: Jargon is sometimes unavoidable but should be minimized. Ideal submissions will be accessible both to an ML audience and to experts in other relevant fields, without the need for field-specific knowledge. Feel free to direct readers to accessible overviews or review articles for background, where it is impossible to include context directly.

Addressing Impact

Tackling climate change requires translating ideas into action. The guidelines below will help you clearly present the importance of your work to a broad audience, hopefully including relevant decision-makers in industry, government, nonprofits, and other areas.

• Illustrate the link: Many types of work, from highly theoretical to deeply applied, can have clear pathways to climate impact. Some links may be direct, such as improving solar forecasting to increase utilization within existing electric grids. Others may take several steps to explain, such as improving computer vision techniques for classifying clouds, which could help climate scientists seeking to understand fundamental climate dynamics.
• Consider your target audience: Try to convey with relative specificity why and to whom solving the problem at hand will be useful. If studying extreme weather prediction, consider how you would communicate your key findings to a government disaster response agency. If analyzing a supply chain optimization pilot program, what are the main takeaways for industries who might adopt this technology? To ensure your work will be impactful, where possible we recommend co-developing projects with relevant stakeholders or reaching out to them early in the process for feedback. We encourage you to use this opportunity to do so!
• Outline key metrics: Quantitative or qualitative assessments of how well your results (or for proposals, anticipated results) compare to existing methods are encouraged. Try to give a sense of the importance of your problem and your findings. We encourage you to convey why the particular metrics you choose are relevant from a climate change perspective. For instance, if you are evaluating your machine learning model on the basis of accuracy, how does improved accuracy on a machine learning model translate to climate impact, and why is accuracy the best metric to use in this context?
• Be clear and concise: The discussion of impact does not need to be lengthy, just clear.
• Convey the big picture: Ultimately, the goal of Climate Change AI is to “empower work that meaningfully addresses the climate crisis.” Try to make sure that from the beginning, you contextualize your method and its impacts in terms of this objective.

Mentorship Program

We are hosting a mentorship program to facilitate exchange between potential workshop submitters and experts working in topic areas relevant to the workshop. The goal of this program is to foster cross-disciplinary collaborations and ultimately increase the quality and potential impact of submitted work.

Expectations:

Mentors are expected to guide mentees during the CCAI mentorship program as they prepare submissions for this workshop.

Examples of mentor-mentee interactions may include:

• In-depth discussion of relevant related work in the area of the Paper or Proposal, to ensure submissions are well-framed and contextualized in terms of prior work.
• Iterating on the core idea of a Proposal to ensure that the climate change application is well-posed and the ML techniques used are well-suited.
• Giving feedback on the writing or presentation of a Paper or Proposal to bring it to the right level of maturity for submission.

Mentees are expected to initiate contact with their assigned mentor and put in the work and effort necessary to prepare a Paper or Proposal submission by Sep 18.

We suggest that after the mentor-mentee matching is made, a first (physical or digital) meeting should take place within the first week (Aug 19-25) to discuss the Paper or Proposal and set expectations for the mentorship period. Subsequent interactions can take place either through meetings or via email discussions, following the expectations set during the initial meeting, culminating in a final version of a Paper or Proposal submitted via the CMT portal by Sep 18.

Mentors and mentees must abide by the following Code of Conduct: https://www.climatechange.ai/code_of_conduct.

Application

Applications are due by Aug 16.

• Application to be a mentee: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/CCAIMNeurIPS2021
• Application to be a mentor: https://forms.gle/49Lmr8Uk2iWWBNF99

Frequently Asked Questions

Mentorship Program FAQ

Q: Are mentors allowed to be authors on the paper for which they provided mentorship?
A: Yes, mentors can be co-authors but not reviewers.

Q: What happens if the mentor/mentee does not fulfill their duties, or if major issues come up?
A: Please email us at climatechangeai.neurips2021@gmail.com and we will do our best to help resolve the situation. Potential breaches of the Code of Conduct will be responded to promptly as detailed therein.

Q: What happens if I apply to be a mentee but do not get paired with a mentor?
A: While we will do our best, we cannot guarantee pairings for everyone. Even if you do not get paired with a mentor, we encourage you to submit a Paper or Proposal to the workshop, and our reviewers will provide you with guidance and feedback on how to improve it.

Q: What happens if my submission does not get accepted to the workshop?
A: While the mentorship program is meant to give early-career researchers and students the opportunity to improve the quality of their work, sometimes submissions will need further polishing and elaboration before being ready for presentation at a CCAI workshop. If this is the case, we invite you to take into account the comments made by the reviewers and to resubmit again to a subsequent CCAI workshop.

Q: I cannot guarantee that I can commit at least 4 hours to the program over the time period. Should I still apply as a mentor?
A: No. While the 4 hour time commitment is a suggestion, we do believe that it is necessary to ensure that all mentees receive the help and guidance they need.

Q: I do not have a background in machine learning; can I still apply to be a mentor/mentee?
A: Yes! We welcome applications from domains that are complementary to machine learning to solve the problems that we are targeting.

Q: What happens if my mentor/mentee wants to continue meeting after the workshop?
A: We welcome and encourage continued interactions after the official mentorship period. That said, neither the mentor nor the mentee should feel obligated to maintain contact.

Submission FAQ

Q: How can I keep up to date on this kind of stuff?
A: Sign up for our mailing list!

Q: I’m not in machine learning. Can I still submit?
A: Yes, absolutely! We welcome submissions from many fields. Do bear in mind, however, that the majority of attendees of the workshop will have a machine learning background; therefore, other fields should be introduced sufficiently to provide context for the work.

Q: What if my submission is accepted but I can’t attend the workshop?
A: You may ask someone else to present your work in your stead.

Q: It’s hard for me to fit my submission on 3 or 4 pages. What should I do?
A: Feel free to include appendices with additional material (these should be part of the same PDF file as the main submission). Do not, however, put essential material in an appendix, as it will be read at the discretion of the reviewers.

Q: Can I send submissions directly by email?
A: No, please use the CMT website to make submissions.

Q: The submission website is asking for my name. Is this a problem for anonymization?
A: You should fill out your name and other info when asked on the submission website; CMT will keep your submission anonymous to reviewers.

Q: Do submissions for the Proposals track need to have experimental validation?
A: No, although some initial experiments or citation of published results would strengthen your submission.

Q: The submission website never sent me a confirmation email. Is this a problem?
A: No, the CMT system does not send automatic confirmation emails after a submission, though the submission should show up on the CMT page once submitted. If in any doubt regarding the submission process, please contact the organizers. Also please avoid making multiple submissions of the same article to CMT.

Q: Can I submit previously published work to this workshop?
A: Yes, though under limited circumstances. In particular, work that has previously been published at non-machine learning venues may be eligible for submission; however, work that has been published in conferences on machine learning or related fields is likely not eligible. If your work was previously accepted to a Climate Change AI workshop, this work should have changed or matured substantively to be eligible for resubmission. Please contact climatechangeai.neurips2021@gmail.com with any questions.

Q: Can I submit work to this workshop if I am also submitting to another NeurIPS 2021 workshop?
A: Yes. We cannot, however, guarantee that you will not be expected to present the material at a time that conflicts with the other workshop.