The Faceapp is a controversial phone app that manipulates a person’s picture to show how the person would look many years from now (Koetsier, 2019). Controversies aside, it is an interesting app that has sparked an explosive interest from the general population by showing them a personal and likely future of its user. In many ways, Schmidt and his colleagues had a very similar idea in their effort to gain public interest on climate change: show a personal and likely future of its user (Schmidt, et al., 2019). Instead of face, the team used house, and instead of just few years of aging, the team showed the future after 50 years with likely climate change and the related natural disaster in mind (Schmidt, et al., 2019).
Figure 1: "Before" and "After" Pictures. From Visualizing the consequences of climate change using cycle-consistent adversarial networks by V. Schmidt, et al., 2019
Conclusion
This is a refreshing effort by scientists to nudge the society on the right direction. The team explains that they want to help the society make an informed decision by bringing the latest scientific findings and applying it to something closer to home, or in this case, right at home.
References
Koetsier, J. (2019, July 18). Viral App FaceApp Now Owns Access To More Than 150 Million People's Faces And Names. Retrieved July 19, 2019, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/07/17/viral-app-faceapp-now-owns-access-to-more-than-150-million-peoples-faces-and-names/#20deb73c62f1
Schmidt, V., Luccioni, A., Mukkavilli, S. K., Balasooriya, N., Sankaran, K., Chayes, J., & Bengio, Y. (2019). Visualizing the consequences of climate change using cycle-consistent adversarial networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.03709.
Social Social aspect of the topic covers events or communication aimed towards the general public. The posts in this category consists of various social and political events that pertains to climate change and climate informatics.
AI for Earth In the Microsoft blog called “Researchers turn to AI in a bid to improve weather forecasts” by Roach, the author highlights some of the company's contribution to the research that benefits mankind. Through the AI for Earth initiative, the company funds various challenging research projects that studies Earth. The blog also highlights the social activities, such as hackathons, that illustrates some of the current trends of using machine learning to solve difficult problems. References Roach, J. (2019, May 20). Researchers turn to AI in a bid to improve weather forecasts. Retrieved May 26, 2019, from https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/ai-subseasonal-weather-forecast/
Upgrade or Replace There are two approaches when upgrading an existing system: improve the current system or replace the system. The former enjoys the extensive amount of previous work, but it also faces possible short-comings inherit to a design based on outdated technologies. The latter option provides an opportunity to design a solution based on the latest technologies, it but may prove costly to replace old system. Most of the researchers deemed replacement too expensive and opted to supplement the existing system by solving the existing problems. Professor Tapio Schneider and his colleagues decided otherwise (Perkins, 2018). They created a team called CliMA (Perkins, 2018). Picture 1. Professor Tapio Schneider. From New Climate Model to Be Built from the Ground Up by S. Diani, 2019, https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/styles/inline__699w__no_aspect/public/350cs_80727X_Tapio_0.jpg?itok=6HRPTU8g New Climate Model This young but ambitious project aims to replace ...
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