Fragile Earth 2023
Fragile Earth: AI for Climate Sustainability - from Wildfire Disaster Management to Public Health and Beyond

Since 2016, the Fragile Earth Workshop has brought together the research community to find and explore how data science can measure and progress climate and social issues, following the framework of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The Fragile Earth Workshop was one of three workshops associated with the planned Earth Day event at KDD 2019 (organized by our OC members, Shashi Shekhar and James Hodson), provided keynotes and panels for Earth Day in 2020, and has been a recurring workshop at the annual KDD conference for the past seven years. We hope to continue this tradition in 2023.
Fragile Earth 2023
Dates: August 7, 2023
KDD Conference August 6-10th
Long Beach, CA
Contact:
Paper submission deadline: June 16th, 2023
Notification Date: June 23rd, 2023
- full papers (up to 8 pages)
- position papers (up to 4 pages), and
- policy notes (up to 2 pages).
Call for Papers
Call for Papers
Background Info
Since 2016, the Fragile Earth Workshop has brought together the research community to find and explore how data science can measure and progress climate and social issues, following the framework of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Over the years, Fragile Earth workshop has focused on SDGs. This year we also focus on two other aspects, Environmental Justice and Planetary Health. Environmental Justice can be defined as the effort to “document and redress the disproportionate environmental burdens and benefits associated with social inequalities” (Chakraborty et. al 2016), as well as SDG 13: Climate Action. Planetary Health involves complex spatial–temporal interactions. Various methods in earth data analytics, including spatial–temporal statistics, spatial evolutionary algorithms, remote sensing image analysis, wireless geo-sensors, and location-based analytics, are emerging disciplines in understanding complex interactions in planetary health.
The application problems and agenda of interest include the Sustainable Development Goals, accelerating progress on the United Nations’ 2030 agenda, envisioning solutions for climate mitigation and adaptation, and measuring and diminishing the inequitable benefits and burdens across socioeconomic groups. In particular, the workshop has maintained a strong focus and community in the following areas: food security, sustainable agricultural practices and supply chains, ecosystem restoration, water management, sustainable energy, climate action and adaptation, socioeconomic equality, and resilience across a broad range of natural disasters such as wildfires, storms, and hurricanes. Fragile Earth Workshop invites ML and AI researchers, social and behavioral scientists, as well as natural scientists and engineers, to convene and discuss interdisciplinary solutions for progress towards
List of Topics
The Workshop will target both methodological and applied research agenda within these areas of investigation.
- The methodological topics of interest are relevant areas of KDD, including but not limited to:
- the integration of physics into data-driven modeling and the use of machine learning to enhance physical simulations
- model explainability, uncertainty quantification, privacy and fairness questions in environmental modeling
- integration of symbolic and neural machine learning for accurate and interpretable models
- causal learning in complex physical world as foundations for model trustworthiness
- ML applications at low-energy edge devices
- frameworks for helping the scientific and KDD communities to work together
- combining predictive and prescriptive tasks
- multi-agent systems for participatory modeling that integrate stakeholders into knowledge creation and decision processes
- geometric and topological deep learning for environmental modeling and assessment of environmental justice
- Domains of interest include but are not limited to:
- food security, sustainable agricultural practices and supply chains, ecosystem restoration, water management, sustainable energy, climate action and adaptation, socioeconomic equality, and disaster resilience
- wildfire analytics: detection, prediction, and discovery; wildfire smoke and environmental fairness
- innovations in data science and predictive modeling, applied to earth sciences
- investigations centering sustainability, including but not limited to environmental justice
- data-informed climate change and resource management policy discussions
- carbon removal technologies
- easily usable and publicly available data+model+frameworks (possibly challenge problems) based on satellite/drone data to monitor and predictively model the fragile earth
- natural catastrophes under a changing climate ranging from improved modeling to development of resilient infrastructures
- economic/quantitative characterization of climate change risk and associated incentives towards policy/decision making.
- Any other topics related to the themes of the workshop are welcome!
The papers from last year can be found here:
Papers
- GaLeNet: Multimodal Learning for Disaster Prediction, Management and Relief - Best Paper
- CIMF - Climate Impact Modelling Framework - Best Paper Runner Up
- Urban Forests for Carbon Sequestration and Heat Island
- Robustness of Urban Coastal Rail Network Under Projected Future Floods
- Multi-fidelity Hierarchical Neural Processes for Climate Modeling
- Feature Scaling and Attention Convolutions for Extreme Precipitation Prediction
- Evaluation of Surface Runoff Projections from Earth System Models in Major Basins of the World
- Estimation of Nearshore Water Depth Using Physics-Informed Deep Learning
- AI Enabled Decarbonization Framework
- A Multi-Perspective Content Analysis Platform for Sustainability Assessment
Organizers

Naoki Abe

Auroop Ganguly

Emre Eftelioglu

Bistra Dilkina

Kathleen Buckingham

Ramakrishnan Kannan

James Hodson

Rose Yu

Yuzhou Chen

Jiafu Mao

Yulia R. Gel

Huikyo Lee
Share this Page
Get Involved
Join our efforts to unlock AI’s potential towards serving humanity.
Support us
Become a Partner
Volunteer with us
Newsletter
