AOSC Seminar by Dr. Jianwu Wang, 10/23/2025
AOSC Seminar
Jianwu Wang
UMBC, Data Science
Title
Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Earth: Exploring AI Techniques for Cloud Property Retrieval and Causal Understanding of Earth Processes
Abstract
Earth artificial intelligence (AI) has become a new research frontier by leveraging AI techniques to understand the complex Earth system and help various Earth applications. Challenges for Earth AI include large volumes of available data, spatial-temporal high-dimensionality, incompatible data from multiple sources, data-driven causal understanding of the Earth system. This talk will present two related Earth AI studies. The first one studies how to leverage multi-task deep learning techniques to accurately retrieve cloud masking, cloud phase, and cloud optical thickness (COT) for simulated OCI, ABI, and VIIRS datasets. The second one proposes a deep learning based potential outcome model for spatiotemporal causal inference, which was evaluated using real-world Arctic data to estimate the causal influence of atmospheric processes on the Pan-Arctic sea ice concentrations (SIC).
Bio
Dr. Jianwu Wang is a Professor in Data Science at the Department of Information Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He leads the Center for Scalable Data and Computational Science (ScaleS) and the Big Data Analytics Lab (BDAL) at UMBC and co-leads the NSF HDR Institute for Harnessing Data and Model Revolution in the Polar Regions (iHARP). He is also an affiliate faculty at the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET), UMBC. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2007. His research interests include Big Data Analytics, Causal AI, Earth Informatics and Distributed Computing. He has published 160+ papers (h-index: 28). He is/was associate editor or editorial board member of four international journals, conference organization committee member of eight conferences and co-chair of eight related workshops. He is also a program committee member for over 40 conferences/workshops, and reviewer of over 15 journals or books. Since joining UMBC in 2015, he has received multiple external grants as PI (over $3.7M in total), Co-PI (over $13.7M in total) or Senior Personnel (over $20.3M in total) funded by ARL, NSF, NASA, DOE, State of Maryland, and Industry. He received NSF CAREER award in 2020, Early-Career and Mid-Career Faculty Excellence award from UMBC in 2019 and 2025, respectively.
Contact
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AOSC Seminar
Pre-seminar refreshment: N/A
Seminar: 3:30-4:30pm, Room: ATL 2400(only when in-person)
Meet-the-Speaker: 4:30-5:00pm, Room: ATL 3400(only when in-person) [For AOSC Students only]
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