Portrait de David Rolnick

David Rolnick

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur adjoint, McGill University, École d'informatique
Professeur associé, Université de Montréal, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle
Sujets de recherche
Théorie de l'apprentissage automatique

Biographie

David Rolnick est professeur adjoint et titulaire d’une chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR à l'École d'informatique de l'Université McGill et membre académique principal de Mila – Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle. Ses travaux portent sur les applications de l'apprentissage automatique dans la lutte contre le changement climatique. Il est cofondateur et président de Climate Change AI et codirecteur scientifique de Sustainability in the Digital Age. David Rolnick a obtenu un doctorat en mathématiques appliquées du Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Il a été chercheur postdoctoral en sciences mathématiques à la National Science Foundation (NSF), chercheur diplômé à la NSF et boursier Fulbright. Il a figuré sur la liste des « 35 innovateurs de moins de 35 ans » de la MIT Technology Review en 2021.

Étudiants actuels

Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Cambridge University
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - The University of Dresden, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research Leipzig
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - National Observatory of Athens
Postdoctorat - McGill
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - McGill
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - N/A
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Stagiaire de recherche - Leipzig University
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Visiteur de recherche indépendant
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Johannes Kepler University
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Amsterdam
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Waterloo
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM
Postdoctorat - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - University of Waterloo
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Tübingen
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - RWTH Aachen University (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen)
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Doctorat - McGill
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Doctorat - McGill
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill

Publications

Assessing SAM for Tree Crown Instance Segmentation from Drone Imagery
Mélisande Teng
Arthur Ouaknine
Etienne Lalibert'e
A Joint Space-Time Encoder for Geographic Time-Series Data
David Mickisch
Konstantin Klemmer
Mélisande Teng
Many real-world processes are characterized by complex spatio-temporal dependencies, from climate dynamics to disease spread. Here, we intro… (voir plus)duce a new neural network architecture to model such dynamics at scale: the \emph{Space-Time Encoder}. Building on recent advances in \emph{location encoders}, models that take as inputs geographic coordinates, we develop a method that takes in geographic and temporal information simultaneously and learns smooth, continuous functions in both space and time. The inputs are first transformed using positional encoding functions and then fed into neural networks that allow the learning of complex functions. We implement a prototype of the \emph{Space-Time Encoder}, discuss the design choices of the novel temporal encoding, and demonstrate its utility in climate model emulation. We discuss the potential of the method across use cases, as well as promising avenues for further methodological innovation.
Harnessing artificial intelligence to fill global shortfalls in biodiversity knowledge
Justin Kitzes
Sara Beery
Kaitlyn M. Gaynor
Marta A. Jarzyna
Oisin Mac Aodha
Bernd Meyer
Graham W. Taylor
Devis Tuia
Tanya Berger-Wolf
Galileo: Learning Global and Local Features in Pretrained Remote Sensing Models
Gabriel Tseng
A. Fuller
Marlena Reil
Henry Herzog
Patrick Beukema
Favyen Bastani
James R. Green
Evan Shelhamer
Hannah Kerner
From crop mapping to flood detection, machine learning in remote sensing has a wide range of societally beneficial applications. The commona… (voir plus)lities between remote sensing data in these applications present an opportunity for pretrained machine learning models tailored to remote sensing to reduce the labeled data and effort required to solve individual tasks. However, such models must be: (i) flexible enough to ingest input data of varying sensor modalities and shapes (i.e., of varying spatial and temporal dimensions), and (ii) able to model Earth surface phenomena of varying scales and types. To solve this gap, we present Galileo, a family of pretrained remote sensing models designed to flexibly process multimodal remote sensing data. We also introduce a novel and highly effective self-supervised learning approach to learn both large- and small-scale features, a challenge not addressed by previous models. Our Galileo models obtain state-of-the-art results across diverse remote sensing tasks.
Galileo: Learning Global and Local Features in Pretrained Remote Sensing Models
Gabriel Tseng
A. Fuller
Marlena Reil
Henry Herzog
Patrick Beukema
Favyen Bastani
James R. Green
Evan Shelhamer
Hannah Kerner
From crop mapping to flood detection, machine learning in remote sensing has a wide range of societally beneficial applications. The commona… (voir plus)lities between remote sensing data in these applications present an opportunity for pretrained machine learning models tailored to remote sensing to reduce the labeled data and effort required to solve individual tasks. However, such models must be: (i) flexible enough to ingest input data of varying sensor modalities and shapes (i.e., of varying spatial and temporal dimensions), and (ii) able to model Earth surface phenomena of varying scales and types. To solve this gap, we present Galileo, a family of pretrained remote sensing models designed to flexibly process multimodal remote sensing data. We also introduce a novel and highly effective self-supervised learning approach to learn both large- and small-scale features, a challenge not addressed by previous models. Our Galileo models obtain state-of-the-art results across diverse remote sensing tasks.
Using Image-based AI for insect monitoring and conservation - InsectAI COST Action
Tom August
Mario Balzan
Paul Bodesheim
Gunnar Brehm
Lisette Cantú-Salazar
Sílvia Castro
Joseph Chipperfield
Guillaume Ghisbain
Alba Gomez-Segura
Jérémie Goulnik
Quentin Groom
Laurens Hogeweg
Chantal Huijbers
Andreas Kamilaris
Karolis Kazlauskis
Wouter Koch
Dimitri Korsch
João Loureiro
Youri Martin
Angeliki Martinou … (voir 27 de plus)
Kent McFarland
Xavier Mestdagh
Denis Michez
Charlie Outhwaite
Luca Pegoraro
Nadja Pernat
Lars Pettersson
Pavel Pipek
Cristina Preda
Tobias Roth
David Roy
Helen Roy
Veljo Runnel
Martina Sasic
Dmitry Schigel
Julie Sheard
Cecilie Svenningsen
Heliana Teixeira
Nicolas Titeux
Thomas Tscheulin
Elli Tzirkalli
Marijn van der Velde
Roel van Klink
Nicolas Vereecken
Sarah Vray
Toke Thomas Høye
Insect Identification in the Wild: The AMI Dataset
Aditya Jain
Fagner Cunha
M. J. Bunsen
Juan Sebastián Cañas
L. Pasi
N. Pinoy
Flemming Helsing
JoAnne Russo
Marc Botham
Michael Sabourin
Jonathan Fréchette
Alexandre Anctil
Yacksecari Lopez
Eduardo Navarro
Filonila Perez Pimentel
Ana Cecilia Zamora
José Alejandro Ramirez Silva
Jonathan Gagnon
Tom August
K. Bjerge … (voir 8 de plus)
Alba Gomez Segura
Marc Bélisle
Yves Basset
K. P. McFarland
David Roy
Toke Thomas Høye
Maxim Larrivée
Insects represent half of all global biodiversity, yet many of the world's insects are disappearing, with severe implications for ecosystems… (voir plus) and agriculture. Despite this crisis, data on insect diversity and abundance remain woefully inadequate, due to the scarcity of human experts and the lack of scalable tools for monitoring. Ecologists have started to adopt camera traps to record and study insects, and have proposed computer vision algorithms as an answer for scalable data processing. However, insect monitoring in the wild poses unique challenges that have not yet been addressed within computer vision, including the combination of long-tailed data, extremely similar classes, and significant distribution shifts. We provide the first large-scale machine learning benchmarks for fine-grained insect recognition, designed to match real-world tasks faced by ecologists. Our contributions include a curated dataset of images from citizen science platforms and museums, and an expert-annotated dataset drawn from automated camera traps across multiple continents, designed to test out-of-distribution generalization under field conditions. We train and evaluate a variety of baseline algorithms and introduce a combination of data augmentation techniques that enhance generalization across geographies and hardware setups.
Alberta Wells Dataset: Pinpointing Oil and Gas Wells from Satellite Imagery
Pratinav Seth
Michelle Lin
BREFO DWAMENA YAW
Jade Boutot
Mary Kang
Millions of abandoned oil and gas wells are scattered across the world, leaching methane into the atmosphere and toxic compounds into the gr… (voir plus)oundwater. Many of these locations are unknown, preventing the wells from being plugged and their polluting effects averted. Remote sensing is a relatively unexplored tool for pinpointing abandoned wells at scale. We introduce the first large-scale benchmark dataset for this problem, leveraging medium-resolution multi-spectral satellite imagery from Planet Labs. Our curated dataset comprises over 213,000 wells (abandoned, suspended, and active) from Alberta, a region with especially high well density, sourced from the Alberta Energy Regulator and verified by domain experts. We evaluate baseline algorithms for well detection and segmentation, showing the promise of computer vision approaches but also significant room for improvement.
Alberta Wells Dataset: Pinpointing Oil and Gas Wells from Satellite Imagery
Pratinav Seth
Michelle Lin
BREFO DWAMENA YAW
Jade Boutot
Mary Kang
Millions of abandoned oil and gas wells are scattered across the world, leaching methane into the atmosphere and toxic compounds into the gr… (voir plus)oundwater. Many of these locations are unknown, preventing the wells from being plugged and their polluting effects averted. Remote sensing is a relatively unexplored tool for pinpointing abandoned wells at scale. We introduce the first large-scale benchmark dataset for this problem, leveraging medium-resolution multi-spectral satellite imagery from Planet Labs. Our curated dataset comprises over 213,000 wells (abandoned, suspended, and active) from Alberta, a region with especially high well density, sourced from the Alberta Energy Regulator and verified by domain experts. We evaluate baseline algorithms for well detection and segmentation, showing the promise of computer vision approaches but also significant room for improvement.
Causal Representation Learning in Temporal Data via Single-Parent Decoding
Philippe Brouillard
Sébastien Lachapelle
Julia Kaltenborn
Yaniv Gurwicz
Peer Nowack
Jakob Runge
Scientific research often seeks to understand the causal structure underlying high-level variables in a system. For example, climate scienti… (voir plus)sts study how phenomena, such as El Ni\~no, affect other climate processes at remote locations across the globe. However, scientists typically collect low-level measurements, such as geographically distributed temperature readings. From these, one needs to learn both a mapping to causally-relevant latent variables, such as a high-level representation of the El Ni\~no phenomenon and other processes, as well as the causal model over them. The challenge is that this task, called causal representation learning, is highly underdetermined from observational data alone, requiring other constraints during learning to resolve the indeterminacies. In this work, we consider a temporal model with a sparsity assumption, namely single-parent decoding: each observed low-level variable is only affected by a single latent variable. Such an assumption is reasonable in many scientific applications that require finding groups of low-level variables, such as extracting regions from geographically gridded measurement data in climate research or capturing brain regions from neural activity data. We demonstrate the identifiability of the resulting model and propose a differentiable method, Causal Discovery with Single-parent Decoding (CDSD), that simultaneously learns the underlying latents and a causal graph over them. We assess the validity of our theoretical results using simulated data and showcase the practical validity of our method in an application to real-world data from the climate science field.
Linear Weight Interpolation Leads to Transient Performance Gains
Pushing the frontiers in climate modelling and analysis with machine learning
Veronika Eyring
William D. Collins
Pierre Gentine
Elizabeth A. Barnes
Marcelo Barreiro
Tom Beucler
Marc Bocquet
Christopher S. Bretherton
Hannah M. Christensen
Katherine Dagon
David John Gagne
David Hall
Dorit Hammerling
Stephan Hoyer
Fernando Iglesias-Suarez
Ignacio Lopez-Gomez
Marie C. McGraw
Gerald A. Meehl
Maria J. Molina
Claire Monteleoni … (voir 9 de plus)
Juliane Mueller
Michael S. Pritchard
Jakob Runge
Philip Stier
Oliver Watt-Meyer
Katja Weigel
Rose Yu
Laure Zanna