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Vahe Vardanyan

Alumni

Publications

ClimateGAN: Raising Climate Change Awareness by Generating Images of Floods
Victor Schmidt
Alexandra Luccioni
Mélisande Teng
Tianyu Zhang
Alexia Reynaud
Sunand Raghupathi
Gautier Cosne
Adrien Juraver
Vahe Vardanyan
Alex Hernandez-Garcia
Yoshua Bengio
Climate change is a major threat to humanity, and the actions required to prevent its catastrophic consequences include changes in both poli… (see more)cy-making and individual behaviour. However, taking action requires understanding the effects of climate change, even though they may seem abstract and distant. Projecting the potential consequences of extreme climate events such as flooding in familiar places can help make the abstract impacts of climate change more concrete and encourage action. As part of a larger initiative to build a website that projects extreme climate events onto user-chosen photos, we present our solution to simulate photo-realistic floods on authentic images. To address this complex task in the absence of suitable training data, we propose ClimateGAN, a model that leverages both simulated and real data for unsupervised domain adaptation and conditional image generation. In this paper, we describe the details of our framework, thoroughly evaluate components of our architecture and demonstrate that our model is capable of robustly generating photo-realistic flooding.
2022-01-28
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Using Artificial Intelligence to Visualize the Impacts of Climate Change
Alexandra Luccioni
Victor Schmidt
Vahe Vardanyan
Yoshua Bengio
T. Rhyne
Public awareness and concern about climate change often do not match the magnitude of its threat to humans and our environment. One reason f… (see more)or this disagreement is that it is difficult to mentally simulate the effects of a process as complex as climate change and to have a concrete representation of the impact that our individual actions will have on our own future, especially if the consequences are long term and abstract. To overcome these challenges, we propose to use cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to develop an interactive personalized visualization tool, the AI climate impact visualizer. It will allow a user to enter an address—be it their house, their school, or their workplace—-and it will provide them with an AI-imagined possible visualization of the future of this location in 2050 following the detrimental effects of climate change such as floods, storms, and wildfires. This image will be accompanied by accessible information regarding the science behind climate change, i.e., why extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and what kinds of changes are happening on a local and global scale.
2021-02-01
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (published)
doi.org
Using Simulated Data to Generate Images of Climate Change
Gautier Cosne
Adrien Juraver
Mélisande Teng
Victor Schmidt
Vahe Vardanyan
Alexandra Luccioni
Yoshua Bengio
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) used in domain adaptation tasks have the ability to generate images that are both realistic and perso… (see more)nalized, transforming an input image while maintaining its identifiable characteristics. However, they often require a large quantity of training data to produce high-quality images in a robust way, which limits their usability in cases when access to data is limited. In our paper, we explore the potential of using images from a simulated 3D environment to improve a domain adaptation task carried out by the MUNIT architecture, aiming to use the resulting images to raise awareness of the potential future impacts of climate change.
2020-01-26
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org