CMES Seminar: AI in the Service of Socio-Politically Adapted Sustainable Dust-Storm Control in the Middle East

Hossein, Amir, Sara, Ali and Pengxiang will present the results of their MECW project AI in the Service of Socio-Politically Adapted Sustainable Dust-Storm Control in the Middle East.

Speakers

Hossein Hashemi received his doctoral degree from the Department of Water Resources Engineering at Lund University in 2014. His Ph.D. project was part of a joint collaboration between the faculty of Engineering and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. In his Ph.D. research, he primarily focused on the application of the numerical model in groundwater management, water harvesting techniques, and climate change impacts on surface water and groundwater resources in the Middle East. After completing Ph.D., he was admitted as postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Groundwater Evaluation and Management in the Geophysics Department at Stanford University (2015-2017). In the postdoctoral research, He mainly focused on remote sensing techniques in water resources, specifically, application of InSAR technique in the field of groundwater evaluation and management in the arid and semi-arid areas.

Amir Naghibi received his Ph.D. in Watershed Management Sciences and Engineering from Tarbiat Modares University, Iran, in 2019. Then, he worked on a postdoc project at the Faculty of Engineering and Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), Lund University where he focused on applying remote sensing and machine learning algorithms to manage groundwater resources. He currently works as an associate senior lecturer in the division of Water Resources Engineering. His main research interests include but are not limited to: developing AI-based frameworks for modeling and solving water-related issues; and modeling water resources quantity and quality as well as spatial and temporal modeling of natural hazards such as landslides, dust storms, and floods with interdisciplinary approaches with a focus on the Middle East.

Sara Brogaard is a researcher at CMES and Senior Lecturer at LUCSUS. Broadly speaking her research focuses on livelihoods in relation to land change processes and climate variability/change – hence often falling in the overlapping areas of this figure. Land use here is used synonymously with the wider “land change” concept incorporating changes in productivity through agricultural intensification processes as well as land degradation processes. She is also interested in related implications of policy aspects, such as climate change mitigation initiatives and rural reforms influencing both land use and livelihoods.

Ali Mansourian is Professor in GIS at the Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University, Sweden. He is Director of Lund University GIS Centre, coordinator of the “GIS & RS Master Programme”, and board member of the department. Mansourian has a background in Geomatics Engineering with specialisation in Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) and Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). He has a long-standing research direction in spatiotemporal modelling and analysis using Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques (GeoAI) with, applications in heath and spatial epidemiology, disaster management, urban planning, environment management, and sustainability.

Pengxiang Zhao received his doctoral degree from the School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, China in 2015. He works as a Researcher at the GIS Center, Department of  Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, and Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at Lund University. Before joining Lund University, he worked as a postdoc in the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation, ETH Zurich (2018-2020), Switzerland. His research interests are mainly focused on GIScience, spatial data modeling and mining, geospatial artificial intelligence, especially the applications of GIS methods and AI techniques in the field of urban planning, transportation, environment and health.

The talk is held at CMES, Finngatan 16 in Lund. If you are not able to attend in-person, there is an option to attend via Zoom. Please register here for Zoom attendance: https://lu-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5ElceqrqTsoHNV-RWlHRS4wBxoIjXpS…

This event is part of the CMES seminar series spring 2024. For more information, visit the CMES website.