NY Climate Week
A couple of weeks ago I attended NY Climate Week. The restart of GeoNYC was a hit:
Something cool mentioned was the Wherobots startup accelerator, recommend checking it out:
We had a fantastic Tech Workshop: Open Data and Applied Risk Analysis the next day. All 12 presenters got through their talks on time, we managed to keep the two networking slots in the schedule and retained enough space for the two longer keynotes. Here is Tom Nicholas talking through the Earthmover Marimo notebook in the final keynote:
Of course I had to visit the Wall Street bull, the true highlight of NYCC and an inspiration for creating something with true impact:
One of the presenters was Arham, who appears in today’s episode of the podcast.
CLIPS
Where are our flood alarms?
How political shifts kill life saving programs:
Ignoring earth’s curve causes big flood errors:
His Model Rivals World’s Best Flood Systems:
So let’s get into it.
EPISODE
Arham Ansari confronts some challenges that most of us in the liberal democratic Western world do not. For example, in a small town near Delhi in northern India he only has 8-10hrs of power per day. There had also been a blackout the whole 3 days prior to the first day of recording the episode. India is not a wealthy country and he cannot afford to pay for expensive cloud computing/storage services to handle the large volumes of data required to train a flood prediction service on decades of records about 100+ parameters. This sharpens our appreciation of what he has achieved.
Arham is a civil engineering graduate applying for jobs in India’s public service. Whilst cramming for entrance exams, he has applied some of his knowledge to the risks of heat waves, floods and landslides. He has grouped those solutions under GeoRiskAI. I appreciated his candor on LinkedIn about learning the ropes. For example he admitted to making his flood predictions 24% less accurate after correcting the inputs. It is good to see openness about the learning process on LinkedIn where people are usually posting glitzy, perfect demos.
If you’re looking for a determined individual with the intellect required to make meaningful progress against the challenge of flood prediction, I recommend reaching out to him.
