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Using artificial intelligence, scientists at the Chesapeake Conservancy were able to track the increasing number of large solar arrays in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Image courtesy of the Chesapeake Conservancy.

The mere mention of artificial intelligence inspires a lot of dread and wonder in the general populace.

Yet its an overbroad subject. AI can mean anything from self-driving cars to facial recognition technology. Robots that perform unenviable tasks to new mashups of popular songs. Enhanced fraud detection at banks to deep video fakes meant to dupe the public.

I cant think of any endeavor where AI in some ways cant be helpful, said Anupam Joshi, chair of the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. And as you think about AI, theres a lot of hype around this.

But a number of academics, scientists, intellectuals and environmentalists in Maryland are starting to buy the hype in at least one critical way: AI, they believe, may be able to help protect the worlds land, air and water and could help to mitigate climate change.

In the last couple of years theres been a lot of excitement about AI, a lot of fear about AI, said Joel Dunn, president and CEO of the Chesapeake Conservancy, an Annapolis-based regional conservation nonprofit. Theres really no doubt that its touching every part of our livesIt comes with some controversy as we come to understand how AI will change society as we know it. But what some people may not know is that AI may have the potential to save the planet, including right here in the Chesapeake Bay region.

The concept is hardly new: After all, WALL-E, a popular animated movie from 2008, featured a robot who traveled a desecrated Earth, cleaning up humans environmental messes.

Today, at its most basic level, AI is helping climate scientists and meteorologists with the rudiments of their profession.

Our ability to predict the weather has vastly improved over the last decade, and a big reason is machine learning, said Tim Finin, another computer science and electrical engineering professor at UMBC, who, like Joshi, was testifying at a state legislative hearing on AI earlier this summer.

When policy experts talk about using AI to help the environment, they arent talking about the latest and hottest and most controversial iteration, known as ChatGPT. Thats anAI-powered language model, capable of generating human-like text based on context, past conversations and prior writing samples.

Click here to read more from our Climate Calling series.

This AI stuff is not as new as everyone is making it out to be, said Andrew J. Elmore, a professorof landscape ecologyat the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, who just completed a project mapping forestland in Pennsylvania, using artificial intelligence.

In a recent conversation with reporters at the states Wye Island Natural Resources Management Area, where he announced a new state plan for monitoring the Chesapeake Bays health, Gov. Wes Moore (D) said AI may become part of Marylands climate solutions strategy.

Being able to understand the role that AI is going to be able to playis important, and its something our administration is going to move very deliberately on, he said.

The Chesapeake Conservancy is regularly putting the application to the test. It is perhaps the leading institution in Maryland thats using AI for climate research and advocacy though it is by no means the only one. The organization has recently completed two projects that conservancy leaders believe can be extrapolated in unlimited ways. One relied on models the conservancys researchers developed to map waterways in discreet areas. The other tracked large solar energy installations and offered predictions for where future solar arrays may be sited.

Last year, using deep computing, conservancy researchers helped the Harry R. Hughes Center for Agro-Ecology on the Eastern Shore compile a comprehensive look at Marylands disappearing forestlands and tree canopy. The study resulted this year in the first meaningful forest protection legislation in the General Assembly in decades.

Theres this acknowledgement that we need to leverage new approaches in technology and financing and application to advance the movement, Dunn said. And AI and machine learning are one component of that, and a major component of that.

Mapping of waterways, of course, is not a new exercise. The National Wetlands Inventory, overseen by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, has existed for decades. The agency produces and distributes maps and other geospatial data on wetland and deepwater habitats and monitors changes in those habitats over time, using photographs, satellite technology and other data.

But at a time when federal and state officials, farmers, ranchers, scientists, corporate leaders and environmentalists cannot even agree on what actually constitutes a body of water and have been slugging out their differences in legislative debates and through litigation Chesapeake Conservancy has sought a more aggressive and comprehensive survey. A decade ago, the conservancycreated the Conservation Innovation Center, and began raising money to hire scientists to run it.

That was a conscious effort to leverage emerging technologies, particularly geographic imaging systems and cloud-based computing to help us develop better data to make better decisions, Dunn said.

When it came to mapping wetlands, conservancy scientists trained a machine-learning neural network model for high-resolution wetland mapping with publicly available data from Mille Lacs County, Minn., a region north of the Twin Cities with abundant lakes and rivers; Kent County, Del., which lies along the Delaware Bay; and St. Lawrence County, N.Y., which is partly in the Adirondack Park and features the St. Lawrence River and several other significant waterways. Using three different technologies (AI, remote sensing data from satellites, and cloud computing), researchers were able to map the waterways in the three counties including assessing where water bodies had been before they disappeared or were covered up by construction projects at a very high accuracy rate of 94%.

Its pretty unusual for an organization of our size to have that level of integration, said Mike Evans, Chesapeake Conservancys senior data scientist. It puts us at the forefront of what conservation organizations are doing.

AI helped the Chesapeake Conservancy map wetlands in three U.S. counties. This graphic shows areas where the training data (in green) did not map a wetland, but where the conservancys model correctly mapped that a wetland is present (in purple). This is likely an area here a wetland has been restored. Photo courtesy of the Chesapeake Conservancy.

The study results werepublishedin the Science of the Total Environment, an academic journal, which gave the Chesapeake Conservancy researchers a great deal of satisfaction and peer-reviewed validation. And the scientists believe what they found in the three counties can be extrapolated to the entire Chesapeake Bay region. They have shared the results with the leaders of the Chesapeake Bay Program, the regional partnership of federal, state and local officials that has been working on Bay clean-up for the past four decades.

Its a great example of how you can leverage better data to make better policy, Dunn said. The wetlands are like the kidneys of the Chesapeake Bay. Theyre crucial to maintaining and restoring critical parts of the bay. So were really excited to add this tool and data to the decision framework for the community moving forward.

The technology exists to map this data in ways we couldnt do before

The Chesapeake Conservancy solar array study sought to map where big solar installations have been placed throughout the six Bay watershed states Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York. Using the AI technology was essential, conservancy leaders said, because its hard to distinguish solar arrays from bodies of water and runoff on impervious surfaces on standard satellite images. So the AI mapping enabled researchers to not only see where the solar installations are, but also to project where they are likely to wind up in the future. The results were published in Biological Conservation, a scientific journal.

It was a challenge that lent itself to the strengths of AI so it made a lot of sense, Evans said. Theres this need for the data. The technology exists to map this data in ways we couldnt do before. So that is really a nice example of the sweet spot where AI can really make a difference in the conservation space.

Using artificial intelligence, scientists at the Chesapeake Conservancy were able to track the increasing number of large solar arrays in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Photo courtesy of the Chesapeake Conservancy.

Evans presented the conclusions at a clean water conference in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, earlier this year. He said some conservation leaders were dismayed seeing the projections that a number of large solar projects are inevitably going to wind up on land that environmental groups are trying to protect.

You could hear some grumbles in the audience, Evans recalled, because people didnt like seeing their area lit up as a high probability solar place, and my comment is, If you dont like how this map looks, good. Now is the time to do something about it. This is what we think will happen if the status quo continues.

Moving ahead, the conservancy is in the early stages of a project thats using AI to map the biodiversity of the Chesapeake Bay region. Kumar Mainali, a data scientist who is heading the research, said the group aims to track the distribution of hundreds of species and pinpoint suitable habitats for each species throughout the region, so that we can manage and conserve them efficiently.

To do anything, first we need the data about the species, Mainali said.

The AI will enable researchers to home in and observe smaller species, using aresolution thats 1,000 times finer than conventional mapping.

Its a multi-year project, Mainali said. I have completed modeling about 10 species so far.

Mapping Pennsylvania forests and the undersea world

Chesapeake Conservancy researchers arent the only people in Maryland using AI to make environmental inquiries.

Elmore, the professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Appalachian Laboratory in Frostburg, just finished his project mapping forestland in Pennsylvania, but it has yet to be published. UMCES was hired for the job by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is interested in managing forests to maximize bird habitat.

Elmore said the state of Pennsylvania does a good job of keeping track of where forests are harvested on public land, but struggles to monitor what is taking place on private lands. UMCES researchers used photos and data taken from airplane radar and combined it with what was known about logging activity on public lands to hypothesize whats been happening around the state.

It really helped that the state kept such great training data on public lands, Elmore said. The researchers basic conclusions: People on private lands in some cases follow best practices, but in other cases, they dont. On some private lands theyll just come along and harvest the most valuable trees.

Eventually, UMCES wants to model the bird habitat itself in the Pennsylvania forests.

We want to know where the birds are, but what we really want to know is where the created habitat is, Elmore said. The goal eventually is to give people tools to know what is the best treatment you can get for bird habitat.

UMCES will turn over its data to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, but will also offer the federal government options for how to best preserve, protect and extend bird habitat in Pennsylvania, based on what the researchers found.

The opportunities are pretty wide open if we can identify those situations that are really valuable and unique for mapping conservation, Elmore said.

Meanwhile, a Johns Hopkins University professor has recently brought his longtime expertise using AI to study the ocean floor to classrooms and research institutes in Baltimore.

James Bellingham is a pioneer in the field of autonomous marine robotics who has led research expeditions from the Arctic to the Antarctic and is now executive director of Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy. Bellingham has spent decades developing and employing autonomous underwater vehicles for research, through high-level positions at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod and at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, among other institutions.

Bellingham said research of marine life and weather conditions has always been years behind the ability to probe what takes place on dry land or in the sky, calling the conditions miles beneath the oceans surface an observational challenge. Much of what takes place in the ocean is opaque to most satellite systems and opaque to radio frequency, he said.

Bellingham and his colleagues have developed autonomous vehicles that can spend up to six hours at a time on the ocean floor, collecting data. But what theyve discovered over the years is that transmitting information from the sea floor to the surface is a major challenge. Initially, they would bring the vehicle up to the surface and spend six hours downloading the information it had collected. But they came to realize that given the volatile conditions at the bottom of the ocean, by the time they were able to observe the data they were no longer doing so in real time.

We did a terrible job, though it was better than anything else you could do, Bellingham said. In the ocean, it takes a long time to get stuff to work.

What Bellingham and his collaborators have developed more recently is an autonomous vehicle with communications systems capable of transmitting data to researchers at the surface in real time, likening the process to sending and receiving text messages. What theyre attempting to measure is how conditions at the bottom of the sea are affecting the biology and chemistry of the ocean, the life that currently exists there and vice-versa. Its a less obvious and visible aspect of climate change.

Theyre beginning to tease apart how these organisms are being shaped by the environment theyre in and how theyre shaping the environment, Bellingham said. Some people think were moving to an ocean that doesnt exist today. Theres a zillion hypotheses for what might happen.

A legislative response?

At a recent conference of state environmental regulators in Washington, D.C., AI was a frequent topic of discussion. Amanda Lefevre, the deputy commissioner at the Kentucky Department for the Environment, said environmental work is a really good application for AI.

You can run lots of scenarios, thousands of different scenarios, in thousands of different ways, she said. But she also joked about the technologys prevalence. I may not have a job in two months.

Colby Manwaring, vice president of Innovyze, a tech company in Portland, Ore., that develops software for water infrastructure companies, told the state officials that in his view, AI can only go so far in deconstructing environmental conditions and challenges.

We dont always need AI, he said. We always have a lot of analytics tools and planning and operational tools. AI can help optimize some of that.

Manwaring said that AI cant, for example, tell someone how much its going to rain on any given day because forecasts can only be so precise.

Incomplete data is a fact of everyones life, he said. Its never as complete as you want.

And AI continues to raise fears in society and is drawing more scrutiny from lawmakers across the country, inspiring 80 separate bills in state legislatures across the country this year, Quinn Laking, a University of Maryland School of Law student who has been researching AI for the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security, testified at a legislative hearing recently.

Its definitely the new hot topic, she said.

Maryland is no exception. The legislatures Joint Committee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Biotechnology, held the first of two public hearings on AI in late June. It was a general survey about the applications of AI, with an array of experts and scholars speaking. The committees co-chairs, Sen. Katie Fry Hester (D-Howard) and Del. Anne Kaiser (D-Montgomery), said the panel would discuss potential legislation for overseeing AI in the state at a hearing in October.

Its past time for there being some kind of legislative framework, Kaiser said.

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When Georgia Tech started its distance calculus programme nearly two decades ago, the face of the programme was a venerable mathematics professor standing in the front of a small auditorium in full cycling gear. He lectured wide-eyed first-year university students in the room and beamed his recitations live to five maths classrooms in metro Atlanta high schools. Everything about the programme was unorthodox, starting with the availability of post-calculus maths for high school students in Georgia.

Fast-forward to today, and the class reaches more than 90 high schools in Georgia and models the possibility of dual enrolment, allowing us to use innovative delivery and solid partnerships to serve the state and to create pipelines. Here are strategies we have learned along the journey.

Some campuses include dual-enrolment students in classes that would otherwise have empty seats. But what do you do if your campus cant offer this option because youre always operating at near capacity? You can create programmes that invite high-school students to enjoy your courses in designs intended for them.

When I picture our early days in distance dual enrolment, Iunderstand that broadcasting a college calculus class in Atlanta to suburban high schools was innovative. Today, reaching students who started their high school experience in an entirely virtual setting, innovation is still evident in the delivery of courses and the human element is also present. Math classes include a hybrid set-up of recorded lectures and live studio sessions. Teaching staff who never see these students in person hold office hours and study sessions for them. They keep staff chats and discussions to make sure that students understand the material. Students can work at their own pace when they need to and have present support when they need that, too.

Dual enrolment allows colleges and universities to provide educational programmes that local school systems cannot support. As an institute of technology, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to provide STEM courses that our schools in Georgia struggle to fund and operate. So, 18 years into teaching advanced maths through dual enrolment, we find the need greater than ever; more than 1,100 students applied for the programme for fall 2023. Weve expanded our programme and renamed it Distance Math to acknowledge that we teach four mathematics courses, only one of which is calculus.

If you know the fields in which your campus excels and where your programmes meet the needs in your community, you can both fill a need and create a pipeline. Legislation of the Georgia General Assembly requires computer science for every high school student beginning in 2024. Using the model of our maths programme, we have expanded our distance dual enrolment offerings to include introductory computer science classes. When computer science teachers are in short supply, providing another option for this critical subject reflects our commitment to serving the state.

Successful dual enrolment programmes can create pipelines for individual institutions, systems and even for majors and programmes. And aligning offerings to the communitys needs and the institutions curriculum can improve overall retention and graduation rates.

Nearly 20 per cent of our first-year students from Georgia participated in our dual enrolment programmes. Other institutions in our university system automatically admit dual enrolment students as first-year students, allowing natural retention on their campuses. Without natural retention, we retain 60per cent of our dual enrolment students on our campus and 75per cent in the university system. The University System of Georgia compared the performance of first-year students who had participated in dual enrolment with those who had not and found that the dual enrolment students consistently outperformed their classmates.

When dual enrolment participants enter our institution as first-year students, they bypass heavily subscribed first-year maths and computer science courses. Every bit of flexibility in scheduling relieves stress on our urban campus with limited space.

The success of any dual enrolment programme depends on key partnerships across your campus and with high schools and districts. For us, collaborators designing and implementing new programmes include the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing (our official arm to the K-12 community), Professional Education (our experts in online delivery) and academic units. Enrolling students requires partnerships among the offices of undergraduate admission, financial aid, registrar and bursar.

On the high school side, we work with counsellors who assist with scheduling and approving registration and funding. We work with facilitators who proctor tests in the maths courses. Building these relationships ensures that your dual enrolment programme can sustain enrolment and relevance over decades.

Laura Brown Simmons is director of non-degree programmes in undergraduate admission at Georgia Tech.

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RALEIGH, N.C. If youve ever felt overwhelmed by all of the cybersecurity rules, verbiage, and instructions you should be keeping up with, youre not alone. Countless people dont understand the guidelines they receive at work to keep their computers and data safe. Luckily, researchers from North Carolina State University are calling attention to a key problem with how these instructions are created, and outlining a series of simple steps that could improve upon current cybersecurity practices and help keep your computer safer too.

Specifically, this project focused on the computer security guidelines that organizations like businesses and government agencies provide to their employees. These guidelines are generally designed and intended to help employees protect their personal and employer data, as well as minimize risks associated with threats like malware and phishing scams.

As a computer security researcher, Ive noticed that some of the computer security advice I read online is confusing, misleading or just plain wrong, says Brad Reaves, corresponding author of the new study and an assistant professor of computer science at NC State, in a university release. In some cases, I dont know where the advice is coming from or what its based on. That was the impetus for this research. Whos writing these guidelines? What are they basing their advice on? Whats their process? Is there any way we could do better?

To research this topic, the team conducted 21 in-depth interviews with professionals responsible for writing the computer security guidelines used by organizations including large corporations, universities, and government agencies.

The key takeaway here is that the people writing these guidelines try to give as much information as possible, Prof. Reaves adds. Thats great, in theory. But the writers dont prioritize the advice thats most important. Or, more specifically, they dont deprioritizethe points that are significantly less important. And because there is so much security advice to include, the guidelines can be overwhelming and the most important points get lost in the shuffle.

Researchers report one prevalent reason security guidelines tend to be so overwhelming is that the writers often incorporate every possible item from a wide assortment of authoritative sources.

In other words, the guideline writers are compiling security information, rather than curating security information for their readers, Prof. Reaves explains.

Drawing on what they learned from their interviews, study authors developed two recommendations for improving future security guidelines:

Look, computer security is complicated, Reaves says. But medicine is even more complicated. Yet during the pandemic, public health experts were able to give the public fairly simple, concise guidelines on how to reduce our risk of contracting COVID. We need to be able to do the same thing for computer security.

In conclusion, researchers say that security advice writers need help.

We need research, guidelines and communities of practice that can support these writers, because they play a key role in turning computer security discoveries into practical advice for real world application, Prof. Reaves concludes.

I also want to stress that when theres a computer security incident, we shouldnt blame an employee because they didnt comply with one of a thousand security rules we expected them to follow. We need to do a better job of creating guidelines that are easy to understand and implement.

Researchers presented their findings at the USENIX Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security in Anaheim, California.

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As state lawmakers rush to get a handle on fast-evolving artificial intelligence technology, they're often focusing first on their own state governments before imposing restrictions on the private sector.

Legislators are seeking ways to protect constituents from discrimination and other harms while not hindering cutting-edge advancements in medicine, science, business, education and more.

We're starting with the government. We're trying to set a good example, Connecticut state Sen. James Maroney said during a floor debate in May.

Connecticut plans to inventory all of its government systems using artificial intelligence by the end of 2023, posting the information online. And starting next year, state officials must regularly review these systems to ensure they wont lead to unlawful discrimination.

Maroney, a Democrat who has become a go-to AI authority in the General Assembly, said Connecticut lawmakers will likely focus on private industry next year. He plans to work this fall on model AI legislation with lawmakers in Colorado, New York, Virginia, Minnesota and elsewhere that includes broad guardrails and focuses on matters like product liability and requiring impact assessments of AI systems.

Its rapidly changing and theres a rapid adoption of people using it. So we need to get ahead of this, he said in a later interview. Were actually already behind it, but we cant really wait too much longer to put in some form of accountability.

Overall, at least 25 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia introduced artificial intelligence bills this year. As of late July, 14 states and Puerto Rico had adopted resolutions or enacted legislation, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The list doesnt include bills focused on specific AI technologies, such as facial recognition or autonomous cars, something NCSL is tracking separately.

Legislatures in Texas, North Dakota, West Virginia and Puerto Rico have created advisory bodies to study and monitor AI systems their respective state agencies are using, while Louisiana formed a new technology and cyber security committee to study AIs impact on state operations, procurement and policy. Other states took a similar approach last year.

Lawmakers want to know Whos using it? How are you using it? Just gathering that data to figure out whats out there, whos doing what, said Heather Morton, a legislative analysist at NCSL who tracks artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, privacy and internet issues in state legislatures. That is something that the states are trying to figure out within their own state borders.

Connecticut's new law, which requires AI systems used by state agencies to be regularly scrutinized for possible unlawful discrimination, comes after an investigation by the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School determined AI is already being used to assign students to magnet schools, set bail and distribute welfare benefits, among other tasks. However, details of the algorithms are mostly unknown to the public.

AI technology, the group said, has spread throughout Connecticuts government rapidly and largely unchecked, a development thats not unique to this state.

Richard Eppink, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho, testified before Congress in May about discovering, through a lawsuit, the secret computerized algorithms Idaho was using to assess people with developmental disabilities for federally funded health care services. The automated system, he said in written testimony, included corrupt data that relied on inputs the state hadn't validated.

AI can be shorthand for many different technologies, ranging from algorithms recommending what to watch next on Netflix to generative AI systems such as ChatGPT that can aid in writing or create new images or other media. The surge of commercial investment in generative AI tools has generated public fascination and concerns about their ability to trick people and spread disinformation, among other dangers.

Some states haven't attempted to tackle the issue yet. In Hawaii, state Sen. Chris Lee, a Democrat, said lawmakers didnt pass any legislation this year governing AI simply because I think at the time, we didnt know what to do.

Instead, the Hawaii House and Senate passed a resolution Lee proposed that urges Congress to adopt safety guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence and limit its application in the use of force by police and the military.

Lee, vice-chair of the Senate Labor and Technology Committee, said he hopes to introduce a bill in next year's session that is similar to Connecticut's new law. Lee also wants to create a permanent working group or department to address AI matters with the right expertise, something he admits is difficult to find.

"There arent a lot of people right now working within state governments or traditional institutions that have this kind of experience, he said.

The European Union is leading the world in building guardrails around AI. There has been discussion of bipartisan AI legislation in Congress, which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in June would maximize the technologys benefits and mitigate significant risks.

Yet the New York senator did not commit to specific details. In July, President Joe Biden announced his administration had secured voluntary commitments from seven U.S. companies meant to ensure their AI products are safe before releasing them.

Maroney said ideally the federal government would lead the way in AI regulation. But he said the federal government can't act at the same speed as a state legislature.

And as weve seen with the data privacy, its really had to bubble up from the states, Maroney said.

Some state-level bills proposed this year have been narrowly tailored to address specific AI-related concerns. Proposals in Massachusetts would place limitations on mental health providers using AI and prevent dystopian work environments where workers don't have control over their personal data. A proposal in New York would place restrictions on employers using AI as an automated employment decision tool to filter job candidates.

North Dakota passed a bill defining what a person is, making it clear the term does not include artificial intelligence. Republican Gov. Doug Burgum, a long-shot presidential contender, has said such guardrails are needed for AI but the technology should still be embraced to make state government less redundant and more responsive to citizens.

In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed legislation that would prohibit voting machines from having any artificial intelligence software. In her veto letter, Hobbs said the bill attempts to solve challenges that do not currently face our state.

In Washington, Democratic Sen. Lisa Wellman, a former systems analyst and programmer, said state lawmakers need to prepare for a world in which machine systems become ever more prevalent in our daily lives.

She plans to roll out legislation next year that would require students to take computer science to graduate high school.

AI and computer science are now, in my mind, a foundational part of education, Wellman said. And we need to understand really how to incorporate it.

___

Associated Press Writers Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu, Ed Komenda in Seattle and Matt O'Brien in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to this report.

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