Clean Technology Meets Data Science: News and Articles

  After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a question that came up frequently was – how long would it be before the environment recovered? This was a concern both for the ocean surrounding the spill area as well as the marshes and beaches inland where the oil washed up. Not all spills are as bad as the Deepwater Horizon one – but a concern that comes up repeatedly when anything needs to be extracted from the Earth is –   what is the impact on the local environment and how long will it take for it to recover or at least return to a state as close to the original one as possible? This is true whether it’s minerals being extracted or gold or oil and natural gas. The recovery of land after oil and gas wells have been drilled is a question that has been studied for quite a while now. In general, most of the work has looked at individual sites and evaluated how they are doing after the extraction is complete and the system has been shut down, but there are very few studies that have been able

  A fun and exciting area to use data science in clean tech is in monitoring wildlife! This sector uses a combination of computer vision, remote sensing, artificial intelligence among other tools to help us track wildlife across the world. Here are a few examples of the kinds of problems and technologies that are in play these days! First, An interesting   study   came out of California recently, where scientists from the University of Delaware, University of California at Davis and the US Geological Survey partnered to track the movement of waterfowl in the region. My first question when I read the study was – why would people, other than wildlife biologists and conservationists, care about what happened to waterfowl? And it turns out that the answer is really important from the perspective of the agricultural industry as well as from a human health perspective. Looking at how close or how far away waterfowl are from poultry farms can help track the spread of avian influenza or “bird