Ibrahim El-chami
AI's beneficial and harmful effects on the environment
AI-RD.ca, mostalabs.com,agrobotic.io
Bio
Researcher, entrepreneur, mentor. Building (cool) tech for good. Supervising students to develop edge AI/IoT solutions for climate change adaptation for their capstone, including water quality, air quality, and proactive wildfire detection sensors. Teaching (and learning more about) responsible AI adoption practices.
Mentee must-haves/nice-to-haves
Must have: Passionate about studying, researching, and building tools that could benefit climate change adaptation and the impact on wildlife Work well with team members, with mutual respect and cooperatively positive and collaborative environment.
Wants: Some domain knowledge expertise.(e.g. oceanic clean energy, zoology, air quality, air quality, simulations, math/stats, policy, philosophy, AI, etc...) willingness to build a solution by the end of the program
Mentee role
Discuss, innovate, research, and (ideally) build
❓ Sample mentee tasks
(propose) architect technical solutions to build the solution, research, including literature review, drafting reports of findings, cooperate with and support team members
Mentor support
technical advice on building, researching/literature review, shaping direction, guidance on drafting (not drafting on behalf), facilitating connections, accountability.
Questions for applicants
What's a project you've worked on in the past that you're most proud of? What are you passionate about?
Mentor-led project
Power generation's impact on wildlife
With the growing demands for power generation, especially to power datacenters the sizes of cities, there's an unprecedented need for (renewable) energy adoption. However, the current practices by large corporations leading the AI race do not prioritize the overall safe adoption. In addition, there doesnt seem to be enough research and solutions that are studying the impact on wildlife.
For example, companies like Microsoft and Google have tested submerging datacenter capsules into the ocean for more effective cooling. However, there were no studies or solutions on how this new way of cooling will affect the oceanic biodiversity. Similarly, building datacenters the sizes of cities, as mentioned by Meta and OpenAI, are unprecedented, along with their effects on wildlife, biodiversity, and overall mitigation steps on climate change adaptation.
How can we leverage AI-based solutions to study and build solutions to: Monitor oceanic biodiversity (some examples include: computer vision model to detect underwater species. Anomaly detection model of underwater acoustic and radar signals) Monitor wildlife behavior (large populations monitoring and shifts in migration trends, behavioral analysis of pets before, during, and after large projects) Quantitative monitoring of the the overall effects of implementing large datacenters (increased GHG emissions, water quality degradation within the vicinity of large projects, clean water uptake and usage, drought analysis) Simulations/quantitative analysis of new/alternative power generation sources, and their adaptation into current power systems. Create policy recommendation tools (for example, building a tool that can help forecast when countries will meet their GHG emissions mitigation obligations based on current trajectories)
Most of the above are projects I have been a part of in the past. There's no need to recreate any of them, but they could be takes as an inspiration to innovate within these or tangential spaces.