June, 2023
SDS Lab alumna Kate Duffy (PhD ‘2021) wins the 2022 Clemens Herschel Award from the Boston Society of Civil Engineers Section for a climate-ecology Article that she authored with the SDS Lab PI Auroop Ganguly and long-time collaborator Tarik Gouhier. The article along with an accompanying Research Briefing, published in the November issue of the journal Nature Climate Change, and has been highlighted by Northeastern News, PNNL Spotlight, and NASA Feature, as well as by the international media such as in India and the United Kingdom.
May 17, 2023
The SDS Lab visits the United Nations headquarters in New York City for an invitation-only event organized by the UNDRR (United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction) which was attended by US academia, government, and the private sector, as well as international partners from around the globe. As reported by a Northeastern news article (and a COE article), besides a short opening statement by SDS Lab PI Auroop Ganguly, the event included a statement on hybrid physics-AI and Big Data – small data challenges for disaster risk reduction and climate resilience by Ganguly (excerpt here) and a case study presentation by SDS Lab PhD candidate Puja Das. A third white paper on SDS Lab’s translation research (e.g., US patents and startups) was submitted but not presented. In addition to Das and Ganguly, the SDS Lab participants included incoming and current PhD students Aayushi Mishra and Dian Indrawati (co-author of the case study paper with Das), PhD candidates Jack Watson and Ashis Pal, Postdoc Rishi Sahastrabuddhe, EAI Postdoc Arnob Ray and GRI Postdoc Rachindra Mawalagedara (author of the translational research paper with Watson). The nine-member SDS Lab contingent represented five countries: Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the United States of America.
May 2023
Recent SDS Lab PhD alumnus Bharat Sharma publishes a paper in the journal Biogeosciences titled “Carbon cycle extremes accelerate weakening of the land carbon sink in the late 21st century”. Besides SDS Lab PI Auroop Ganguly, the co-authors include long-term SDS Lab collaborators from the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL): Jitendra Kumar and Forrest Hoffman.
May 2023
SDS Lab PhD alums Kate Duffy (PhD ‘2021) and Thomas Vandal (PhD ‘2018) lead Zeus AI, the startup they co-founded for AI-based weather prediction with satellite data for the renewable energy sector, to Phase II grant funding from NASA SBIR, as reported by a Northeastern news article. SDS Lab alumnus Evan Kodra (PhD ‘2014), a successful entrepreneur in urban climate and muni bonds, as well as SDS Lab PI Auroop Ganguly, are Zeus AI advisors.
May 1,2023
A delegation from the Indonesian ministry BAPPENAS, or the Ministry for National Development Planning of Indonesia, visited the SDS Lab led by College of Engineering (COE) Distinguished Professor Auroop Ganguly, on May 1, 2023, to discuss potential long term collaborations and grant funding, as reported by the Northeastern University (NU) College of Engineering (COE).
April 2023
The Monsoon Mission of India , Phase III (MM-III), led by the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) of India and co-led by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, among others, funds a project titled ‘ Improving short-to-medium range extreme precipitation forecasts with climate networks and hybrid physics-ML convection parameterization’ . The project is led by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, and includes IIT campuses in Gandhinagar (the corresponding Co-PI is SDS Lab alumnus Udit Bhatia ) and Madras, as well as the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune. The Co-PI from Northeastern University is SDS Lab PI Auroop Ganguly , with direct and possible indirect involvements by SDS Lab Postdocs Rishi Shastrabuddhe and Arnob Ray .
March 2023
The SDS Lab wins a US DOE SBIR Phase I grant titled ‘Urban Visualization and Data Analysis Toolkit (UVDAT) ‘ with lead partner Kitware. Northeastern persons are Auroop Ganguly and Rishi Sahastrabuddhe, SDS Lab PI and Postdoc respectively, with occasional support from SDS PhD candidates Jack Watson and Ashis Pal.
January 2023
Recent SDS Lab PhD alumna Kate Duffy and her adviser SDS Lab PI Auroop Ganguly (as corresponding author) published a paper titled Explainable deep learning for insights in El Niño and river flows in Nature Communications jointly with recent PhD alumnus Yumin Liu and his adviser Jennifer Dy from ECE. The paper, highlighted as a news article by Northeastern and as a PNNL Spotlight, partially contributed to an article in Lifewire.
November 2022
SDS Lab PI Auroop Ganguly delivers an invited plenary at TIES 2022 and an invited talk at SC22, even as the Lab prepares to welcome three new postdoctoral research associates in climate, infrastructures, and data sciences, with PhDs from the University of Nebraska Lincoln, Brown University, and the Indian Statistical Institute.
October-November 2022
A climate-ecology Article and an accompanying Research Briefing by (recently graduated) SDS Lab PhD student Kate Duffy gets published in the November issue of the journal Nature Climate Change, and has been highlighted by Northeastern News, PNNL Spotlight, and NASA Feature.
November 4, 2022
SDS Lab PhD student Jack Watson gets the Society for Risks Analysis (SRA) Student Merit Award from the Resilience Analysis Specialty Group second year in a row for work on resilience of multiscale rail networks under compound extremes, as part of a PNNL-Northeastern collaboration.
August-October 2022
SDS Lab PI Auroop Ganguly’s media quotes: the New York Times on building back better after hurricanes and on hurricanes and hospitals, Newsweek on global weirding and climate extremes, the 2022 California heat waves, drought impacts on Lake Mead, and fish suffocation in North Carolina’s Lake Wilson, the National Geographic on the role of dams, the BBC World Service on Hurricane Ian (12:30 - 13:15), the Independent (UK) on the 2022 Pakistan floods, Boston 25 News on heatwaves and the power grid, and Berkeley KPFA on hurricanes in Florida (35:45 - 44:40).
10. July 2022
The startup risQ, a spinout from our SDS Lab, and alumnus Dr. Evan Kodra (CEO of risQ and a co-founder along with Lab PI Auroop Ganguly and NU alumnus Colin Sullivan), gets featured in the Wall Street Journal. A Northeastern news article about risQ was published on January 21.
2. June 2022
The Journal of Geophysical Research - Biogeosciences (JGR-Biogeosciences) has accepted for publication our collaborative paper with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The paper titled ‘Quantifying Carbon Cycle Extremes and Attributing Their Causes Under Climate and Land Use & Land Cover Change from 1850 to 2300’ is led by SDS Lab PhD student Bharat Sharma, and besides Auroop Ganguly, includes the following (ORNL scientists) as co-authors: Jitendra Kumar, Forrest Hoffman, and Nathan Collier.
1. June 2022
The temperature extremes section of the just released Greater Boston Research Advisory Group report (GBRAG report) on climate assessment of the Boston area was led by former SDS Lab PhD alumnus Evan Kodra with contributions from (then current, now graduated) SDS Lab PhD students Kate Duffy and Mary (‘Lizzy’) Warner. This follows the original BRAG report where the temperature extremes section was led by Auroop Ganguly with contributions from Evan Kodra and then Northeastern professor Matthias Ruth.
26. May 2022
SDS Lab PhD alums and current NASA scientists, <a href= ‘https://www.linkedin.com/in/tjvandal/ ‘ target= ‘_blank ‘>Thomas J. Vandal</a> (CEO and co-founder) and <a href= ‘https://www.linkedin.com/in/katemduffy/ ‘ target= ‘_blank ‘>Kate M. Duffy</a> (CPO and co-founder), have been <a href= ‘https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-supports-small-business-research-to-power-future-exploration ‘ target= ‘_blank ‘>awarded</a> a NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) <a href= ‘https://sbir.nasa.gov/SBIR/abstracts/22/sbir/phase1/SBIR-22-1-S17.04-1586.html ‘ target= ‘_blank ‘>grant</a> to launch their AI-inspired weather and hydrologic data analytics and forecasting startup <a href= ‘https://myzeus.ai/ ‘ target= ‘_blank ‘>Zeus AI</a> (formerly called GeoLens).
15. May 2022
NASA selects the SDS Lab led ‘Category 1’ proposal titled ‘Remote-sensing data driven Artificial Intelligence for precipitation-Nowcasting (RAIN)’ for funding in water resources. The team led by Auroop Ganguly at Northeastern includes the Tennessee Valley Authority, NASA Earth Exchange, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and RTI International.
13. May 2022
Auroop Ganguly is co-organizing the Fragile Earth 2022 workshop in conjunction with the ACM KDD 2022 conference. The focus of the workshop this year is on ‘AI for climate mitigation, adaptation, and environmental justice’. The paper submission deadline is May 26.
5. May 2022
A part of Kate Duffy’s dissertation research, which focused on Deep Emulation in Satellite Remote Sensing and was joint with NASA (including former SDS Lab PhD alumnus TJ Vandal), is now published in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems.
4. Apr 2022
The SDS Lab’s publications have been cited in each of the three recent climate reports forming the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC). The reports on the physical science basis (Report, NYT news); impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability (Report, NYT news); and mitigation (Report, NYT news) were published in late 2021 to early 2022 timeframe. Please note that the SDS Lab neither participates in the IPCC writing or review processes nor lobbies for citing publications.
30. Mar 2022
SDS Lab PhD student Nishant Yadav accepts an offer to join Microsoft Azure AI as a senior research scientist. In his new role, Nishant hopes to get an opportunity to work with Microsoft AI for Earth, originally founded and led by Dr. Lucas Joppa. A prior comment article in the journal Nature by Dr. Joppa provided a shout-out to an award-winning SDS Lab Climate-AI paper by a former SDS Lab PhD student (and current NASA scientist) TJ Vandal.
06. Feb 2022
SDS Lab PI Auroop Ganguly co-led a panel discussion in a workshop hosted by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, on February, 2022. The workshop (report under preparation) was titled Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to Advance Earth System Science. A recording is available on Vimeo (Ganguly’s short talk is from around 1:37:00). Ganguly’s previous NAS-hosted presentation was as a keynote speaker in a 2019 Urban Sustainability workshop (report here , and Vimeo there: first ~24 minutes).
24. Jan 2022
CEE Professor Auroop Ganguly’s SDS Lab spinout company risQ , a climate modeling and analytics company focused on cities, founded by him and his former PhD students, was acquired by the Fortune 500 company </a> Intercontinental Exchange .
06. Oct 2021
Evan Kodra, SDS Lab alumnus and CEO of climate risk analytics startup risQ , delivers an invited keynote titled Climate Resilience from Academia to Startup at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay.
24. Sep 2021
A report on climate change and wildfires by SDS Lab spinout risQ gets acknowledged in an NBC News video on climate justice.
20. Sep 2021
SDS Lab PhD student Nishant Yadav starts an internship with the Hitachi AI Labs in Santa Clara, CA.
04. July 2021
Happy Fourth! Kate Duffy’s PhD dissertation defense is on July 15 at noon Eastern. Join the public defense here. Her work at the intersection of climate-ecology broadly continues the theme of Daiwei Wang’s Nature paper. Her work on deep emulation for satellite remote sensing is joint with NASA.
1. July 2021
Welcome Dr. Antonia Sohns and Dr. Sebastian Ruf as Postdoctoral Research Associates. Read their papers on participatory modeling and contagion spread respectively.
28. June 2021
Poulomi Ganguli’s Scientific Reports paper, based on her postdoctoral research at the SDS Lab in the climate-water-energy nexus, is highlighted in an E&E News article.
1. June 2021
Stone Chen has moved back to Boston and will officially join the SDS Lab as a PhD student starting Fall 2021. See his prior collaborative work with the SDS Lab on physics-guided uncertainty quantification.
26. May 2021
Subimal Ghosh, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and a long time collaborator of the SDS Lab, gets AGU’s prestigious DL Memorial award. Read a Nature Climate Change paper which resulted from Subimal’s prior collaboration with the SDS Lab.
10. May 2021
Doctoral students Puja Das and Jack Watson start internships at NASA’s Ames Research Center and US DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) respectively.
22. March 2021
Shashank Konduri, PhD student at the SDS Lab, joins NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (see NU-COE news article ). Read one of Shashank’s papers on remote sensing here.
21. October 2020
Auroop Ganguly is quoted in an article on the climate-water-energy nexus by S&P Global.
8. January 2020
Northeastern SDS Lab climate risk analytics spinout risQ emerges from stealth (BusinessWire News). The co-founders include former SDS Lab PhD student Evan Kodra, currently the CEO, and SDS Lab PI Auroop Ganguly, currently the Chief Scientific Adviser.