NeurIPS 2020

Climate change is one of the greatest threats humans have ever faced, with increasingly severe consequences feared as sea levels rise, ecosystems falter, and natural disasters multiply. Tackling climate change is a huge and complex challenge, where it's hoped that AI-powered efforts can play an equally huge and beneficial role. Organizers of NeurIPS 2020 (Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems) see machine learning (ML) as an invaluable tool in the fight against climate change. A wide array of applications and techniques are already being explored, from smart electric grid design to satellite-tracking of greenhouse gas emissions and countless others. Last Friday, NeurIPS 2020 partnered with Climate Change AI (CCAI) -- an organization of researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, companies and NGOs aiming to catalyze impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning -- to host the Tackling Climate Change with ML Workshop, which explored how the ML community could collaborate with other fields and practitioners in this fight. The all-virtual format of NeurIPS 2020, which ran December 6-12, provided a unique opportunity to foster cross-pollination between ML researchers and experts across diverse fields.