I am an assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the AI/ML lead for the Environmental Data Science Innovation and Impact Lab (ESIIL) and a scientific director for the Togo Data Lab.
I direct the Geospatial and Environmental Machine Learning (GEM) lab at CU Boulder, where we blend methodological and applied techniques to study and design machine learning algorithms and systems with an emphasis on applications in environmental monitoring. We develop algorithms and infrastructure for reliable environmental monitoring using machine learning, notably Earth embeddings: flexible and efficient representations of geospatial data, tailored to and empowered by AI and machine learning. In addition to developing new models for Geospatial ML and applying these to problems of social importance, our research addresses foundational questions in the multifaceted nature of representation in data and how that affects our ability to train effective machine learning systems. My work has been recognized with an SDG Digital Gamechangers award (2023) from the United Nations Development Programme and the International Telecommunication Union, and best paper awards at ICML (2018), the Workshop on AI for Social Good at Neurips (2019), and the Workshop on Machine Learning for Remote Sensing at ICLR (2025).
For an overview of my research, you can watch my keynote talk from the NeurIPS workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning from 2024.
