Artificial Intelligence and The Environment
AI BluePrints for 16 Environmental Projects Pioneering
Sustainability
Introduction by Cindy Mason
AI Researcher, Pioneer of the first US and international workshops
on AI and Environment/Sustainability.**
At the end of January, 2019, at the time I write this, two new
colors for heat maps have been added and the southern
hemisphere is seeing new records for heat with each passing
day. We hear frequent reports of pollution in the news
and people struggle just to get along. When the Paris
agreement finally happened it seemed like a miracle, until the US
pulled out. Then the U.N. and World Meteorology
Organization made an announcement that the early figures were wrong,
and its worse than we thought. “Climate scientists have rung
the alarm about the urgent need for drastic environmental action to
keep global warming from exceeding 1.5°C” [1].
In 1995 I created the first international gathering of AI and
Environment scientists, but the papers from this meeting were ‘lost’
due to a server crash and were never published. It was another
16 years before the next US AI meeting on the environment took
place. In this volume we finally make the first papers on AI
and the Environment available to the public. It establishes a
time line for initial efforts to use AI on everything from managing
fire fighting resources to storm alerts and the automatic indexing
and archiving of legal and policy documents.
The good news is we have a lot more technology now. And as Tierney
Thys, the National Geographic explorer said, we have a lot of caring
technologists. But wait, there’s more. Along side
technologists, scientists, educators and administrators from all
different disciplines and all areas of the world are learning how to
use these technologies for the public good. This volume
of papers is being made public for you. The hope is that
in this book you will see an idea, a software architecture, or
connect the dots to something or someone and give rise to something
real that helps us now - in our cities, in our classrooms, in our
world.
To get the know-how and technology you no longer need to be part of
an elite AI club. Much of the software and data is available
through online libraries and education videos. For instance,
take a look at the project “Argo Float”[2], with over 3000
ocean-going robots sampling our seas, it has a posted a data
collection on the net that anyone can access, including an active
map of the locations of each robot. Another inspiring
project, although not specific to AI, is the Rasperry Pi
project[3]. Its a small unix (Raspian) computer that fits in
the palm of your hand, yet it has usb slots, an hdmi port and
bluetooth/wifi. They can be stacked, mounted on a wall, or put
in your pocket. They can also be used to create hybrid AI systems
where conventional and AI systems work together.
Machine learning and big data mean we can make sense of what our
sensors are telling us. Common sense reasoning and knowledge
mean we can quickly make decisions in the face of uncertainty and
incomplete information. AI automation can run 24/7 and robots
can take us where we cannot go. When Fukushima happened,
robots went where we could not go, to show us what
happened. So yes, AI is helpful. We might even say
AI technology is part of Darwin’s next generation.
But we need more than technology to solve the problems we face - we
need cooperation. We need more ideas on how to bring together
governments, every day people, and technology to cooperatively work
together. For example, distributed crowd sourced weather data
collection in Canada is helping create new ways of predicting storms
and modeling climate. There is a phone app called ‘litterati’
that lets anyone upload a snapshot of litter they find so it can be
catalogued to track how much trash, what kind, and where it came
from so that cities, packers/shippers, and governments have real
data for prevention, budgets and decision making. For a good
reference on why cooperation offers economic advantages over
competition, Henry Lieberman, an early supporter of the AI and
Environment work and co-chair of the first international gathering,
has focused on the problems and advantages of cooperating over
competing in his book, “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?” If
you’re working on the politics and government issues related to the
environment this resource could be helpful in making the case to act
cooperatively.[4]
The people who contributed to this volume on AI and the
Environment The First Papers, are very special. Each one
was ahead of their time and overcame obstacles to do the work and to
share about it. When I wrote the proposal for this work
I was at NASA Ames working on cooperative software agent
systems. My projects at NASA included robotic telescopes and
planetary exploration, which had little to do with AI and the
Environment, although my sense is that when the the crew of Apollo
17 took a picture of Earth from space (the Blue Marble) we can never
really think of space again without also thinking of Earth. The idea
to organize an international AI gathering on the Environment took
priority over everything else I was doing. I cannot really explain
the obsession because there was little support, and instead there
were many obstacles… few people seemed to realize back then how
important it was to be focused on such a project. I am
grateful to give this collection of papers to the world now.
Please, by all means, share it as often and and as widely as you
can. Because you never know where a good idea will come
from. Listen to your instincts. They’re some
of the best intelligence we’ve got.
Good luck to us all.
Cindy
**The First AAAI Workshop on
AI and the Environment (U.S.)
**The First IJCAI Workshop
on AI and the Environment (International)
[1] UN Environment Report, 08 Oct. 2018,
https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/press-release/rapid-and-unprecedented-action-required-stay-within-15oc-says-uns,
accessed Jan. 23, 2019.
[2] http://www.argo.ucsd.edu. accessed Feb. 7, 2019.
[3] https://www.raspberrypi.org. accessed Feb. 3, 2019.
[4] Lieberman and Fry, “Why Can't We All Just Get Along?: How
Science Can Enable A More Cooperative Future.” USA, 2018.
www.whycantwe.org Accessed Jan. 31, 2019.