Speaker:  Dr. Genevieve Flaspohler

Date: 29th January, 2025

Time: 16:00 GMT

Genevieve Flaspohler

Dr. Genevieve Flaspohler is co-founder and Executive Director of Rhiza Research, a nonprofit organization developing open technology to serve people and the planet. She currently leads the Gates Foundation-funded SheerWater Project, which works to address global inequity in weather forecasting with a focus on providing actionable insights for smallholder farmers in East Africa. Previously, as Chief Data Officer at nLine, she led large-scale deployments of open power monitoring sensors across Africa, helping to collect and release the largest public dataset on grid performance on the continent (1,500+ sensors deployed over 6 years in Accra, Ghana), and using data to guide energy investments in Senegal, Kenya, the DRC, and Sierra Leone. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT CSAIL and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Joint Program, focusing on scientific machine learning and Bayesian inference.

Talk Abstract:

Smallholder farmers in Africa would substantially benefit from better rainfall forecasts weeks to months in advance. This is particularly urgent in the face of changing climates and rainfall patterns, as evidenced by the recent extreme droughts and flooding across East Africa. Can AI-based forecasting and data assimilation techniques overcome predictability challenges in long-term rainfall forecasting and the sparsity of meteorological data on the African continent to enable this and other critical agricultural advisories? This talk will introduce the SheerWater Project, an initiative to develop open, use-driven, and localized benchmarks of weather and climate models, and to democratize the tools upon which the next generation of weather intelligence services for agriculture in Africa can be built.

Registration Link here