IS-GEO announces Anuj Karpatne as 2019 inaugural Fellow

Anuj Karpatne, an assistant professor of computer science and a Discovery Analytics Center faculty member, has been named the 2019 Intelligent Systems and Geoscience (IS-GEO) inaugural Fellow.

The announcement was made by Suzanne Pierce, a research scientist at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and principal investigator for the IS-GEO Research Coordination Network, during the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in Washington, D.C., today.

“I am pleased to announce the IS-GEO Fellows Program,” Pierce said. “The program is designed to support researchers as they commit to in-depth projects to accelerate discoveries. Dr. Karpatne was selected because of his expertise in scientific theory{or physics}-guided machine learning. Throughout his fellowship year, he will evaluate applied machine learning approaches to Earth datasets for the energy industry.”

“We are at a crossroads of data-driven discovery in a number of scientific disciplines, such as earth sciences, that are witnessing a deluge of data and increased acceptance of data-driven, AI methodologies. However, to fully capitalize the promise of AI in accelerating scientific discovery, what is a needed is a paradigm shift that goes beyond current standards of ‘black-box’ AI research and embraces a deep synergy between scientific theories and AI, termed as theory-guided machine learning,” Karpatne said.

“Through the IS-GEO Fellows Program, I aim to expand the horizons of theory-guided machine learning, build new collaborations in the IS-GEO community, and solve impactful problems in the energy industry by using physics and data,” he said.

IS-GEO Fellow awardees are selected from the active membership of the IS-GEO community and receive an honorarium to explore new research areas with direct domain and real-world applications. Selected Fellows are encouraged to combine theoretical and scientific knowledge with applications to data problems from earth and environmental topics.

The AAAS Annual Meeting is the most widely reported global science gathering and the premier event to network with future collaborators across disciplines.