CBI AI2ES Team Returns from New Orleans and Celebrates Accomplishments from first 4.5 years of AI2ES AI Institute
A large group of CBI AI2ES students and faculty spent a week in New Orleans for the 2025 American Meteorological Society Conference and an AI2ES workshop.
The team of 18 (also dubbed by some at AI2ES as “the army”), gave 13 oral, panel, and poster presentations. Additionally Dr. Starek presented Dr. Pashaei’s and his work. There was a large contingent of TAMUCC Atmospheric Science students and faculty. The presence of TAMUCC was felt in New Orleans!
We are also in the middle of our fifth and last year. AI2ES is one of the inaugural National Science Foundation (NSF) AI Institutes, a $20 million grant important to the US AI strategy originally announced at the White House in August 2020. TAMUCC was the only R2 PI or Co-PI institution for the initial group of awardees. The team of students and faculty has been very productive with a national impact. The team was headed by four outstanding former and present PhD students, Drs. Vicens-Miquel, Krell, Kamangir and PhD Candidate White along with several MS students and many undergraduate researchers at TAMUCC and Del Mar College. Faculty members King, Medrano, Starek and research scientist Williams, chaired, co-chaired, and participated to the students advising committees and publications. The team, along with its AI2ES partners in academia, government, and private sector, has been leading on the design and implementation of Deep Learning and other AI models for environmental emergency situations such as fog, coastal inundations, and cold stunnings. The team has also clarified the limitations of Explainable AI (XAI) for geoscience data sets and is providing growing insights into how stakeholders interact with AI predictions while developing AI uncertainty quantifications and visualization methods.
Some of the accomplishments of the CBI AI2ES team include:
31 peer reviewed publications as first authors and co-authors including in Nature Natural Hazards and Physics Today.
149 presentations including 95 with CBI students as first authors and 10 student presentation awards including two first place awards AMS AI conferences.
Supported 34 undergraduates, 7 graduate students
Knowledge/Technology transfer: our sea turtle cold-stunning method is operational (https://cbigrid.tamucc.edu/tpw/) and guided the coastal community during 5 cold stunning events including last week. 5 water level and 1 run up prediction models are also operational (e.g. https://sherlock-prod.tamucc.edu/cbocp/magnolia-beach.html)
The team installed 6 new low-cost water level sensors in collaboration with Texas Sea Grant and 4 water temperature sensors in collaboration with NOAA Fisheries, the Texas Mid-Coast Sea Turtle Rescue, and Texas Parks and Wildlife
The team is developing the software Semaphore helping to speed up the deployment of AI models and is freely available on GitHub.
The cold stunning model predictions are presently shared with a group now reaching over 140 stakeholders from local, state, federal agencies and volunteer groups guiding the decision making and preparation ahead of cold stunning events including the timing of interrupting navigation and dredging in the impacted water body. The model has been guiding mitigation efforts twice this month.
The AI2ES team worked over the past year on a renewed vision for the next 5 years and just submitted its renewal proposal. We are crossing our fingers for another 5 years and working on finishing strong the first phase of AI2ES.