After much careful consideration, I gave myself a happy birthday.

After returning to Brazil, I have not thought that I would be involved in academic affairs so early again. But life has its own time and ways, and at this recent year and a half, I have been involved in the ideation and structuring of a private-public partnership in AI in Brazil, and I am really happy about it.

Out of that, I have been selected to attend CIFAR/MILA Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning Summer School, which turned out to be a great experience. It was the first time I have been exposed to Reinforcement Learning in a more structured format, and it seems quite useful to my work in Ag modeling.

This week, as a consequence of being at DLRLSS, I was invited to mentor a group of students, in a DL hackathon. The UofT AI is a research group led by quite motivated students at the University of Toronto, who foster their community to learn and get involved in the R&D of artificial intelligence. They have been organizing events for some years, and at this one, even with the challenges that COVID19 has posed, they launched their hackathon.

ProjectX is a three-month research competition, that will be awarding CAD 70,000 to some of the best universities in the world to develop solutions using AI to Climate Change. That sounded great for me, with my background in researching the area, with a foot set in CS, and the other in Geosci.

Personally, I was cautious about joining this effort because it is quite challenging to bring measurable results in such a short timeframe. But it is great to be working with very intelligent people, for a relevant cause (again).

I intend to bring some thoughts and “reports from the field” while mentoring the group, and interacting with other people. There will be some good fun reading papers, and analyzing results, so it may be useful to share it here too. If any reader wants to discuss in further detail, ping me on twitter as this may interest a broader audience.

As the title mentions, I gave myself a nice birthday present, by being back to research, and useful to a nice cause 🙂