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There are so many of the SDGs that can be helped with environmental and planetary monitoring, and satellite imagery is a huge source of information for that. said Rolf, one of five winners out of more than 450 submissions. If you look at the award winners and runners-up from the other categories, it was a surprise to get that recognition as an academic team. This speaks to the amount of effort and consistent work our broader team has put into making this actually helpful and accessible.

Rolf developed MOSAIKS as part of her Ph.D. research in computer science at the University of California-Berkeley, and her research was first published in Nature Communications in 2021. She worked on an interdisciplinary team whose interests included computer science, environmental economics, public policy and statistics, and that same interdisciplinary approach drew her to Harvard for her postdoctoral fellowship. She now uses MOSAIKS frequently with her research with faculty advisor Milind Tambe, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and CRCS Director.

I mostly focus on geospatial problems such as environmental monitoring, she said. The CRCS and HDSI are places where this type of interdisciplinary conversation and development is happening. Its exciting for computer scientists who want their research to be more interdisciplinary or focused on social impact to be able to have these hubs of people. Now theres a network of people that can help and have conversations, and its a network Ive relied on and am now happy to be part of.

Rolf will finish her two-year fellowship this spring, and next fall will become a computer science professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder. She has always wanted to use her computer science training to help the world, and shell soon be able to help impart that passion onto the next generation of computer scientists.

I love math, I love statistics, and I love computing, she said. I find them all very powerful, that we can use math and statistics to describe the world and then combine that with optimization in computer science to make solutions that work fast.

Read more from the original source:

Easing access to satellite data - Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences