iHARP’s Emam Hossain, UMBC PhD candidate, presented his paper "Incorporating Causality with Deep Learning in Predicting Short-term and Seasonal Sea Ice" at the American Meteorological Society’s 23rd Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Science, 104th AMS Annual Meeting, 2024.  Emam’s research highlights the importance of Arctic sea ice (ASI) in controlling global warming and the concerning trend of its decline. It underscores the need for accurate forecasting to address various socio-economic issues. While current correlation-based machine learning (ML) models have limited capabilities, causal models offer promise by considering cause-and-effect relationships between atmospheric variables. The study aims to predict ASI using causal features identified by Granger Causality (GC) and PCMCI+ algorithms. Results show that models trained on causal features outperform those trained on correlated features. The study seeks to develop a deep learning model incorporating causality for both short-term and long-term sea ice prediction, with potential for further improvement by considering exact time lags identified by the causal algorithm.

We congratulate Emam for presenting and representing at AMS to share his research and knowledge on data science, polar science, and data analysis!

To learn more about iHARP, please visit us at iharp.umbc.edu

iHARP is proud to announce Chhaya Kulkarni, UMBC PhD Candidate, will be a part of the GESTAR Fellowship! Through this fellowship, she will gain experience working with NASA's Global Modeling and Analysis Office (GMAO) under the mentorship of Dr. Nikki Prive. NASA's GMAO is responsible for developing and distributing a variety of products that either incorporate NASA's satellite observations, aid in the development of new missions, or assist with satellite missions and field activities. 

Through the simulated data from the observational systems, Chhaya will apply and evaluate her model with the help of her skills in data analysis, visualization, and storytelling. By utilizing the skills she has gained from this fellowship, Chhaya plans to improve her research skills, learn about new cutting-edge technologies so that she may produce high-quality papers, and use this research to further integrate data science and polar science in future research.

iHARP students, senior researchers and faculty members: Atefeh Jebeli, Chhaya Kulkarni, Naomi Tack, and Drs. Don Engel, Bayu Adhi Tama had the opportunity to have their papers accepted into IGARSS this year for their 43rd Annual Symposium! This group attended the week-long symposium in Pasadena, California where they presented their research papers and findings this July of this year.

As part of their experience at IGARSS, our researchers were able to meet with researchers from all over the world, including NASA, NOAA, and other academic institutions; attending tutorials, speeches, and presentations. iHARP researchers plan to expand their work to continue to integrate data science and polar science for physics-informed, data-driven discoveries.     

Our iHARP Graduate Assistants and postdoctoral researcher: Dr. Bayu Adhi Tama, Emam Hossain, Akila Sampath, and Atefeh Jebeli, along with a student from University of Colorado Boulder, Nidhin Harilal had a great opportunity to visit the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)! 

This group from iHARP attended the week-long “Machine Learning Institute” from June 26-30th where they received training on topics such as Introduction to Computing Clusters and Python environments, Supervised and Unsupervised Learning, Deep Learning Techniques, and briefly touched upon distributed deep learning using PyTorch. 

As a part of the workshop experience, our researchers  toured TACC infrastructure firsthand, observing the LoneStar6, Stampede2, and Frontera servers. iHARP researchers plan to utilize the TACC resources in various projects in a scalable environment integrating data science and polar science for physics-informed, data-driven discoveries.

iHARP is recruiting the executive director to provide critical leadership in the center's operations working alongside the iHARP team, a person who is dedicated to the center’s growth as well as building a sustainable center for years to come. The ideal candidate will be active in building community relationships and related programming, involved in strategic planning for the center's growth, and work with researchers to identify new grant and funding opportunities. 

For more information about the position and how to apply,  please visit: https://listings.umbc.edu/cw/en-us/job/494168/executive-director-for-iharp