I am excited to share that I have successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation, Applications of Artificial Intelligence on Drought Impact Monitoring and Assessment. This work was conducted under the supervision of Dr. Michael Hayes and Dr. Tsegaye Tadesse. My dissertation committee included Dr. Brian Wardlow, Dr. Samal Ashok, and Dr. Xueheng Shi.
I will be officially conferred with a Ph.D. degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in August. In the meantime, I am thrilled to announce that I have accepted a postdoctoral position at Berkeley Lab, starting in June. My research will focus on decarbonization pathways and their societal and environmental impacts. For those interested in collaboration, please feel free to email me.
Although my dissertation has not been officially published yet, here is a brief abstract. The slides for my dissertation defense are also attached. Please consider citing my dissertation if you plan to reference my work.
Drought is a common natural disaster with complex characteristics and broad-reaching impacts. It has cost over 356 billion dollars in losses since 1980 in the US. However, while over a hundred drought indicators have been developed in recent decades, multi-dimensional drought impacts, such as those on socioeconomic sectors, are still understudied, particularly through quantitative approaches. This dissertation explores complex drought impacts using artificial intelligence (AI) across three research projects. The first study utilizes deep learning and natural language processing to predict drought impacts from diverse text sources like social media and news. The second study develops an explainable machine learning pipeline to investigate how different drought indicators relate to diverse drought impacts. The third study dives into a specific category of drought impacts. It examines the relationship between extreme drought events and social unrest in India, using causal machine learning to quantitatively investigate the causal effect of drought on the increasing frequency of human protests. Overall, the dissertation underscores the importance of applying advanced AI techniques in understanding and addressing the broad and complex drought impacts on both the natural environment and socioeconomic sectors for better climate adaptation and water resource management under the threats from climate change.