David Rolnick

Biography

David Rolnick is an assistant professor at McGill University’s School of Computer Science, a core academic member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute and holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. Rolnick’s work focuses on applications of machine learning to help address climate change. He is the co-founder and chair of Climate Change AI, and scientific co-director of Sustainability in the Digital Age. After completing his PhD in applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he was a NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow, an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar. He was named to MIT Technology Review’s “35 Innovators Under 35” in 2021.

Current Students

Benjamin Akera Binen

Collaborating Alumni - McGill University

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Collaborating researcher - Cambridge University

Co-supervisor :

Mohit Anand

Collaborating researcher - The University of Dresden, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research Leipzig

Ayush Ayush Prasad

Collaborating researcher

Nikolaos Ioannis Bountos

Collaborating researcher - National Observatory of Athens

Postdoctorate - McGill University

Michael Bunsen

Collaborating researcher - McGill University

Juan Sebastián Cañas

Collaborating researcher

Collaborating researcher - N/A

Co-supervisor :

Yuyan Chen

Master's Research - McGill University

Eya Cherif

Research Intern - Leipzig University

Amna El-Mustafa

Collaborating researcher

Mohamed Elabbas

Collaborating researcher

Paula Harder

Independent visiting researcher

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Christina Humer

Collaborating researcher - Johannes Kepler University

Christina Isaicu Isaicu

Collaborating researcher - University of Amsterdam

Gaurav Iyer

Master's Research - McGill University

Julia Kaltenborn

PhD - McGill University

Devin Kwok

PhD - McGill University

Collaborating researcher

Vanessa Mac

Collaborating researcher - University of Waterloo

David Mickisch

Collaborating researcher

Felix Andreas Nahrstedt

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Arthur Ouaknine

Postdoctorate - McGill University

Co-supervisor :

Lena Podina

PhD - University of Waterloo

Co-supervisor :

Venkatesh Ramesh

PhD - Université de Montréal

Marlena Reil

Master's Research - McGill University

luca.schmidt@uni-tuebingen.de

Luca Marie Schmidt

Collaborating researcher - University of Tübingen

Collaborating researcher

seth.pratinav@gmail.com

Collaborating researcher - RWTH Aachen University (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen)

Co-supervisor :

Ilija Trajković

Collaborating researcher - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Gabriel Tseng

PhD - McGill University

Donna Vakalis

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating researcher

anna.viklund@mila.quebec

Catherine Villeneuve

PhD - McGill University

Tiffany Vlaar

Collaborating Alumni - McGill University

Publications

ClimateSet: A Large-Scale Climate Model Dataset for Machine Learning

Julia Kaltenborn

Charlotte Emilie Elektra Lange

Venkatesh Ramesh

Philippe Brouillard

Yaniv Gurwicz

Chandni Nagda

Jakob Runge

Peer Nowack

Climate models have been key for assessing the impact of climate change and simulating future climate scenarios. The machine learning (ML) c… (see more)ommunity has taken an increased interest in supporting climate scientists’ efforts on various tasks such as climate model emulation, downscaling, and prediction tasks. Many of those tasks have been addressed on datasets created with single climate models. However, both the climate science and ML communities have suggested that to address those tasks at scale, we need large, consistent, and ML-ready climate model datasets. Here, we introduce ClimateSet, a dataset containing the inputs and outputs of 36 climate models from the Input4MIPs and CMIP6 archives. In addition, we provide a modular dataset pipeline for retrieving and preprocessing additional climate models and scenarios. We showcase the potential of our dataset by using it as a benchmark for ML-based climate model emulation. We gain new insights about the performance and generalization capabilities of the different ML models by analyzing their performance across different climate models. Furthermore, the dataset can be used to train an ML emulator on several climate models instead of just one. Such a “super-emulator” can quickly project new climate change scenarios, complementing existing scenarios already provided to policymakers. We believe ClimateSet will create the basis needed for the ML community to tackle climate-related tasks at scale.

SatBird: a Dataset for Bird Species Distribution Modeling using Remote Sensing and Citizen Science Data

Mélisande Teng

Amna Elmustafa

Benjamin Akera

Hager Radi

Multi-variable Hard Physical Constraints for Climate Model Downscaling

Jose Gonz'alez-Abad

'Alex Hern'andez-Garc'ia

Paula Harder

Jos'e Manuel Guti'errez

2023-08-02

ArXiv (preprint)

FAENet: Frame Averaging Equivariant GNN for Materials Modeling

Alexandre AGM Duval

Victor Schmidt

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Santiago Miret

Fragkiskos D. Malliaros

Applications of machine learning techniques for materials modeling typically involve functions known to be equivariant or invariant to speci… (see more)fic symmetries. While graph neural networks (GNNs) have proven successful in such tasks, they enforce symmetries via the model architecture, which often reduces their expressivity, scalability and comprehensibility. In this paper, we introduce (1) a flexible framework relying on stochastic frame-averaging (SFA) to make any model E(3)-equivariant or invariant through data transformations. (2) FAENet: a simple, fast and expressive GNN, optimized for SFA, that processes geometric information without any symmetrypreserving design constraints. We prove the validity of our method theoretically and empirically demonstrate its superior accuracy and computational scalability in materials modeling on the OC20 dataset (S2EF, IS2RE) as well as common molecular modeling tasks (QM9, QM7-X). A package implementation is available at https://faenet.readthedocs.io.

2023-07-03

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

Hidden Symmetries of ReLU Networks

J. Grigsby

Elisenda Grigsby

Kathryn Lindsey

2023-07-03

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

Maximal Initial Learning Rates in Deep ReLU Networks

Gaurav Iyer

Boris Hanin

2023-07-03

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

Fourier Neural Operators for Arbitrary Resolution Climate Data Downscaling

Qidong Yang

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Paula Harder

Venkatesh Ramesh

Prasanna Sattegeri

D. Szwarcman

C. Watson

Climate simulations are essential in guiding our understanding of climate change and responding to its effects. However, it is computational… (see more)ly expensive to resolve complex climate processes at high spatial resolution. As one way to speed up climate simulations, neural networks have been used to downscale climate variables from fast-running low-resolution simulations, but high-resolution training data are often unobtainable or scarce, greatly limiting accuracy. In this work, we propose a downscaling method based on the Fourier neural operator. It trains with data of a small upsampling factor and then can zero-shot downscale its input to arbitrary unseen high resolution. Evaluated both on ERA5 climate model data and on the Navier-Stokes equation solution data, our downscaling model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art convolutional and generative adversarial downscaling models, both in standard single-resolution downscaling and in zero-shot generalization to higher upsampling factors. Furthermore, we show that our method also outperforms state-of-the-art data-driven partial differential equation solvers on Navier-Stokes equations. Overall, our work bridges the gap between simulation of a physical process and interpolation of low-resolution output, showing that it is possible to combine both approaches and significantly improve upon each other.

2023-05-23

ArXiv (preprint)

Bird Distribution Modelling using Remote Sensing and Citizen Science data

Mélisande Teng

Amna Elmustafa

Benjamin Akera

Hugo Larochelle

2023-05-01

ArXiv (preprint)

FAENet: Frame Averaging Equivariant GNN for Materials Modeling

Alexandre AGM Duval

Victor Schmidt

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Santiago Miret

Fragkiskos D. Malliaros

2023-04-28

ArXiv (preprint)

FAENet: Frame Averaging Equivariant GNN for Materials Modeling

Alexandre AGM Duval

Victor Schmidt

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Santiago Miret

Fragkiskos D. Malliaros

2023-04-28

ArXiv (preprint)

FAENet: Frame Averaging Equivariant GNN for Materials Modeling

Alexandre AGM Duval

Victor Schmidt

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Santiago Miret

Fragkiskos D. Malliaros

2023-04-28

ArXiv (preprint)

Lightweight, Pre-trained Transformers for Remote Sensing Timeseries

Gabriel Tseng

Ruben Cartuyvels

Ivan Zvonkov

Mirali Purohit

Hannah Kerner

Machine learning methods for satellite data have a range of societally relevant applications, but labels used to train models can be difficu… (see more)lt or impossible to acquire. Self-supervision is a natural solution in settings with limited labeled data, but current self-supervised models for satellite data fail to take advantage of the characteristics of that data, including the temporal dimension (which is critical for many applications, such as monitoring crop growth) and availability of data from many complementary sensors (which can significantly improve a model's predictive performance). We present Presto (the Pretrained Remote Sensing Transformer), a model pre-trained on remote sensing pixel-timeseries data. By designing Presto specifically for remote sensing data, we can create a significantly smaller but performant model. Presto excels at a wide variety of globally distributed remote sensing tasks and performs competitively with much larger models while requiring far less compute. Presto can be used for transfer learning or as a feature extractor for simple models, enabling efficient deployment at scale.

2023-04-27

ArXiv (preprint)