Vinko Lešić, IEEE Region 8 Vice-Chair, Member Activities
IEEE has almost 500k members from over 4000 universities and over 10k companies worldwide. In Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region called IEEE Region 8, we have 80k members at 787 universities and few thousand companies. We are now bringing this capacity to help the world with climate change problems. We took few years to brainstorm and pinpoint what we do and what people need, and transformed climate change into tangible things where we could help: those are food, water, energy, communications, and more, varying on specific geographic priorities. We now focus on technology that increases anticipation and resilience to climate impact.
The IEEE Region 8 Climate Challenges is a program of Region-wide competitions aiming at climate change mitigation by technological initiatives. As series of large-scale international competitions from different technical areas, challenges are focused to specific objectives, member focus groups and geographic areas to address the local perspectives. The three challenges are selected: (a) AI in Enhanced Weather Forecasting, (b) Disaster-resilient Communication, and (c) Technical Innovations – with academic and startup initiatives.
The program is organized by an international team of experts that are coming from industry and academia and countries of Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Slovenia, Bahrain, Nigeria, Sudan, Germany, Greece, Sweden, United Kingdom, Cyprus, Egypt, Italy and Croatia, all joining together after a series of global difficulties during the past few years. Even broader, a recognized characteristic among our members is the willingness to help from their particular technological perspective and specialized areas of expertise, including utilization of local and global network of contacts.
IEEE acts as kind of a technical authority where our best experts sit down together, and with external professionals from industry and NGO, but most of all with business sector to select the promising technologies for the imminent future, to boost humanity answer to climate challenges.
AI in Enhanced Weather Forecasting
The challenge gathers world’s best machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) experts to bring this expertise to the meteorology – to combine huge data that is globally available and open source from our climate experts, together with it combine many models, and long-term to network every weather sensor available to create a global weather observation platform. We start with pinpointing best AI algorithms through this global 1-month hackathon. We then bring the best experts to present and share their knowledge, which we then combine and scale up.
Disaster-resilient Communication
This one calls for the best first respond devices and software support that would promptly establish communication after natural disasters, and to train our engineers worldwide and on site of such territories in crisis to be able to quickly replicate the technology and establish means for our emergency services to operate with full capacity.
Technical Innovations – with academic and startup initiatives
This one aims for the new cutting-edge technologies on two fronts: 1) putting scientific research directly in front of investors, hopefully to make disruptive steps in bringing new products to solve climate crises, 2) bringing young startups to the same goal and from another angle, scaling up their idea internationally, regionally to EMEA, and worldwide.