Title: Computer-Aided Discovery in Earth Science
Presenting Author: Victor Pankratius
Organization: MIT

Abstract:
The process of scientific discovery is traditionally assumed to be entirely executed by humans. This talk highlights how increasing data volumes and human cognitive limits are challenging this traditional assumption in the geosciences. Intelligent systems for computer-aided discovery are needed to help answer fundamental questions, such as how empirical detections fit into hypothesized models and model variants to ease the scientist's work of placing large ensembles of detections into a theoretical context. In particular, these systems facilitate the generation and exploration of connections between physics model candidates and empirical data sets. A new discovery made with this approach has recently been confirmed in volcanology by peer-review, based on data that has been available for over a decade. Other successful case study applications will be discussed for groundwater studies on a continental scale and for atmospheric lee wave studies. This work has been supported by NASA AIST14-NNX15AG84G. Bio: Dr. Pankratius leads the Astro-& Geo-Informatics group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Haystack Observatory. He serves as a principal investigator in projects supported NASA AIST and the NSF to advance computer-aided discovery. Throughout his computer science career he enjoyed working with students, teaching graduate and undergraduate level courses, and advising more than 30 undergraduate and graduate thesis students. At MIT, he helped create new courses on astroinformatics and geoinformatics in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Contact him at pankrat@mit.edu or victorpankratius.com