GsAL Director Professor David Saah, PhD, is a renowned expert in a variety of fields, including ecosystem and landscape ecology, and more broadly environmental applications of geographic information systems (GIS) and geospatial analysis. Dr. Saah, alongside with his colleague and GsAL lab manager, adjunct Professor Fernanda Lopez Ornelas, engages in a range of research collaborations with partners around the world. In this blog post, we are featuring insights from their recent trip to Morocco, where they participated in SAGE, an exchange between all the SERVIR Global hubs. SERVIR is a joint development initiative of NASA and USAID, which operates around the world with five hubs, two of which David and Fernanda are part of, namely SERVIR Amazonia and SERVIR South East Asia. At the meeting, Prof. Saah and Prof. Lopez met with partners, including the chief geographer of USAID to start the development and implementation of GeoAI, building on the insights gained at the 7th Annual GeoEducation Summit, hosted at USF in September.
The GeoAI research initiatives pursued by GsAL are inspired by USF’s philosophy of fostering an open community. Dr. Saah emphasized that the focus of the research stems from a “people first” approach, which promotes inclusivity and encourages being a “person for others.“ In the field of geospatial technologies, this is manifested by open-source principles and setting ethical standards in the sharing of information. Such inspiration has led to the open discussions that the GsAL team has held with global leaders in the GIS field, which served as a catalyst for influencing the trajectory of AI for environmental and earth science applications.
As the GeoAI summit at USF came to a close, public and private sector attendees highlighted the vast opportunities for collaborative research and innovation that can happen through the new datasets and tools available in geospatial science. As a result of these conversations, several projects have been able to jump-start this semester here at USF; computer science undergraduates in collaboration with GsAL have been developing an implementation of GeoAI prototypes for their capstone projects, which could be shared with NASA. Faculty from the economics department at USF, assisted by graduate students, have continued to develop a project on the relationship between fishing conditions and birth weight in coastal communities around the world using Google Earth Engine. Currently, in the Advanced GIS class, graduate students are working collectively with the World Food Project to quantify where vulnerable food populations are located.
In the interview, Dr. Saah shares how the summit led to these collaborations and ultimately to a very successful SERVIR Exchange meeting.
Q & A with David:
Q: After the 7th Annual GeoEducation summit, you held a workshop with conference attendees and industry leaders. What did your conversation during the workshop look like?
A: We asked the question, ‘How do you think about creating frameworks as they relate to geospatial artificial intelligence; what are its different components? What’s currently being done out there and how can we improve it? How can we get more people engaged?’
The format we used when we set that event up was that we really wanted to bring in a diverse set of folks that had certain objectives in common. The commonality was that all these partners believe that the underlying access or technology built from GeoAI initiatives and research should be open, as in open source and accessible. Everyone is trying to do their own part in GeoAI. With the Summit and this workshop, we wanted to work towards a general framework in discussion with experts on each of the different components, to see if we have the right building blocks to make this happen. It is several things that get combined to solve complex emerging problems and to drive innovation. So that was the conversation.”
Q: What happened for you and Fernanda after this workshop took place? It sounds like a series of events really sprung into action!
A: Yes, we have been in a series of meetings since then such as meeting with the computer science department to assist in their GeoAI capstone project. We have been invited to the White House, we just got back from Morocco where we were building GeoAI, and we are starting to prep for our NASA SERVIR Amazonian hub which includes work in Brazil, Columbia, Ecuador, Guyana, and Peru and then there’s also a Geospatial AI event happening in Bangkok early next year.
Q: Taking into account the USF ethos of open community involvement that we talked about earlier, would you say this direction is attainable with the technology behind AI projects?
A: We know that it has become a lot easier to learn these emerging technologies for students; we can see that through the new curriculum we are offering here at USF and how students engage and thrive with it. For the research community, being a domain expert continues to be a crucial part of using these technologies, and with direct access to these tools, researchers can be more productive and impactful. For the community at large, we need to be able to communicate the benefits of new technologies, highlight the connection to people’s real life experiences, while also addressing concerns. The key to all these is developing frameworks that are transparent, reliable and accessible by people at all levels. And with the acceleration of some of these newer AI techniques, the need for people that have all these skills – new tools, domain expertise and empathetic communication – are going to be more important than ever.
