Upcoming Talks

Speaker: Meeyoung Cha, Scientific Director, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP)

AI agents powered by individuals' data are reshaping everyday interactions on social platforms and marketplaces. At a planetary scale, the aggregation of multi-modal data enables transformative applications such as poverty mapping, socioeconomic predictions, and disaster assessments. However, these advancements also bring systemic risks, including biases, misinformation, and threats to democratic institutions. 

This talk explores how thoughtful design in database systems and AI can mitigate these challenges, foster sustainable development, and uphold human-centered values. It further advocates for the vigilant oversight of societal-scale AI applications to prevent dual-use and other ethical concerns and instead promote the benefit for humanity. I will also discuss my journey through my research on misinformation, as well as my life as a data scientist, based on my experiences collaborating with world-class scientists at Meta, AT&T Research, and Microsoft, as well as NGOs such as the United Nations Pulse Lab and the World Customs Organization.

Bio: Meeyoung (Mia) Cha is a leading AI and data science researcher dedicated to applying technology for societal benefit. She is a Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP), an Adjunct Faculty at Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) in Germany, and a Professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Her research focuses on data science and computational social science, particularly in areas such as misinformation, poverty mapping, fraud detection, and human-machine interactions. Her work has earned widespread recognition, including Best Paper Awards, Test-of-Time Awards, the Hong Jin-Ki Creator Award, the Korean Young Information Scientist Award, and the ACM Distinguished Member status.

Speaker: David Battisti, University of Washington

The annual forested area that has burned in the western US and the boreal forests has increased markedly in the past 40 years. Here we examine the causes and for the western US present 25-year projections of future area burned due to climate change, including the potential for fire-fuel feedbacks to limit future fire area burned. 

Speaker: Christian Flachsland, Professor of Climate Policy and Director of the Hertie School Centre for Sustainability, Lead Author for the 7th Assessment Report of the IPCC (AR7), Working Group III

For the first time, the mandate for the Working Group III (Mitigation) contribution to the next IPCC Assessment Report (AR7, likely due in 2028) requires authors to assess the scientific literature on "political economy of mitigation including public preferences, interest groups, and political institutions" as part of a novel chapter on Enablers and Barriers of Mitigation. In my talk, I outline some of the challenges and opportunities associated with this task and offer ideas on how to approach it. 

Speaker: Andrew King, University of Melbourne

As climate scientists, we are used to thinking about the effects of humanity's continuing greenhouse gas emissions. We are used to studying what further warming will mean for global and regional climates, extreme events, and impacts for society, the economy and the environment. However, Germany, Australia, and most nations around the world are signatories to the Paris Agreement which aims to limit global warming to relatively low levels. This has informed our policy goals of achieving net zero emissions within a generation.

This begs the question: what would a post-net zero world actually look like? Also, does it matter if we delay achieving net zero by a few years? In this presentation, I will discuss work my collaborators and I have been doing to try to understand how and why a post-net zero climate will evolve. We use a range of multi-model Earth System Model experiments and scenarios as well as bespoke millennial-scale net zero emissions simulations run with the Australian model. I will present results that demonstrate substantial changes and hysteresis to be expected under net zero and overshoot projections, and highlight the need for continued adaptation even under climate trajectories in line with policy goals.

Speaker: Michael Schnegg, UHH

Speaker: Dargan Frierson, University of Washington 

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Speaker: Franziska Glassmeier, MPI-M

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Speaker: Eleonora Rohland, Bielefeld University

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