The I-GUIDE Summer School: An annual learning experience that promotes geospatial convergence science and AI to tackle complex scientific and societal challenges

Each summer, the Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE) project, funded by NSF’s Harnessing the Data Revolution initiative, organizes a Summer School. I-GUIDE’s vision is to “Drive digital discovery and innovation by harnessing the geospatial data revolution.”

 

The I-GUIDE Summer School is a gathering of graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and early career scholars who go on a week-long intellectual journey. The Summer School is not just an event; it's a convergence of minds, ideas, and cutting-edge methodologies to shape the future of geospatial understanding.  The Summer School champions the spirit of Geospatial Convergence Science, leveraging AI, and it is rooted in the belief that some of the most pressing societal challenges demand a collaborative, multidisciplinary approach.

 

I-GUIDE has thus far conducted three highly successful Summer Schools with themes Convergence Science in Action, Leveraging AI for Environmental Sustainability, and Spatial AI for Extreme Events and Disaster Resilience. The three Summer Schools were held at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research facilities in Boulder, CO, and they share a few common key features:

 

• Convergence Science in Action: Participants navigate the intersection of various disciplines, strategically integrating knowledge, tools, and modes of thinking. The program emphasizes collaborative and professional interactions, fostering an environment where participants learn to work comprehensively on convergence science problems.
• Interactive Learning: Participants engage in a week-long immersive experience, collaborating with I-GUIDE members to develop novel solutions to computation- or data-intensive geospatial data science challenges. They delve into geoethics, geo-enabling reproducible and open science, geovisualization, and the latest in geoAI via cloud and high-performance computing.
• Diverse Application Areas: Each year, the participants address critical topics such as climate change, biodiversity, water security, sustainable development, changes in wildland-urban interface, social science data and ethical implications.
• Integration of Ethics: Ethical considerations, including Collection Bias and Limitations, Missing Perspectives, Assumption of Homogeneity, and Unintended uses.
• Independent External Evaluation: Conduct surveys, focus group interviews, and use other evaluation tools to capture participant feedback to improve learning outcomes through continuous evaluation and refinement.
• Ongoing Engagement: Participants continue to stay engaged with the I-GUIDE project by participating in various events and activities, including attending and presenting at the I-GUIDE forum and giving talks to the broader community via the Virtual Consulting Office.

 

In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the Summer Schools, along with relevant highlights, key outcomes, and the lessons learned. We will discuss the geospatial, computational and AI/machine learning, and collaborative working skills the participants learn and apply to work on the projects, along with the incentives I-GUIDE provides for the participants’ success.