TECH & AI

“ My time in the engineering support group within Google DeepMind gave me a bit of a feeling for the strengths and weaknesses of different methods and what it took to apply AI and develop it ,” he explains .

“ What I ’ m trying to do in my current role is coming back into the world of environmental sustainability , thinking about how we can apply those lessons . I ’ m coming back to the same topics that I ’ ve worked with before like biodiversity , conservation , nature-based solutions to climate issues , and thinking how we can approach that using AI .”

The team at Google Deepmind are world leaders in AI development , and Drew ’ s mission is to ensure that it works for sustainable good .

“ We ’ re trying to get as many of the smart researchers and engineers as possible pointing their talents towards the environment and other sustainability challenges , which are the most important challenges of our time .”

AI use case : Weather modelling One example of how technology can positively impact sustainability is Google Deepmind ’ s project using AI in weather modelling .

More than 1 billion people rely on forests for their livelihoods

“ We now have the world ’ s best weather predictions coming out of one of these deep neural nets that we use ,” he says . “ By best , we mean if you pick a certain time window into the future , it ’ s the most accurate prediction or you can say for a given level of accuracy , we can predict further out into the future .”

This feeds into many different areas of sustainability , including renewable energy generation , protecting energy grids , sustainable agriculture and many more .

As well as the applications presenting lots of avenues for sustainable action , the predictions themselves are a lot more sustainable than you might think .

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