Bio: Vipin Kumar is a Regents Professor and holds William Norris Chair in the department of Computer Science and Engineering  at the University of Minnesota.  His research interests include data mining, high-performance computing, and their applications in Climate/Ecosystems and health care. He is currently leading an NSF Expedition project on understanding climate change using data driven approaches.  He has authored over 300 research articles, and co-edited or coauthored 10 books including the widely used text book “Introduction to Parallel Computing”, and “Introduction to Data Mining”.  Kumar co-founded SIAM International Conference on Data Mining and served as a founding co-editor-in-chief of Journal of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining (an official journal of the American Statistical Association).  Kumar is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE and AAAS.  He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee (2013) and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Computer Science Department, University of Maryland College Park (2009).  Kumar’s foundational research in data mining and high performance computing has been honored by the ACM SIGKDD 2012 Innovation Award, which is the highest award for technical excellence in the field of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), and the 2016 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award, one of IEEE Computer Society’s highest awards.

Big Data in Climate: Opportunities and Challenges for Machine Learning and Data Mining

This talk will present an overview of research being done in a large interdisciplinary project on the development of novel data mining and machine learning approaches for analyzing massive amount of climate and ecosystem data now available from satellite and ground-based sensors, and physics-based climate model simulations. These information-rich data sets offer huge potential for monitoring, understanding, and predicting the behavior of the Earth’s ecosystem and for advancing the science of global change. This talk will discuss challenges in analyzing such data sets and some of our research results in mapping the dynamics of surface water globally as well as detecting deforestation and fires in tropical forests using data from Earth observing satellites.

Research funded by the NSF Expeditions in Computing Program and  NASA

Pizza lunch will be provided