Featured Guest Speaker: Dr. Eric Kihn, Director, NCEI's Center for Coasts, Oceans and Geophysics at the NOAA.

While NOAA has achieved local successes in applying AI, a central entity to coordinate activities across NOAA will enable it to more effectively integrate AI in all NOAA’s mission areas. Successful AI integration requires both domain knowledge and modern AI technologies. It requires careful stewardship with domain knowledge since many of the challenges NOAA faces are constrained by physical principles. The NCAI is an essential component of the implementation of the NOAA AI strategic goals. The NOAA Center for AI (NCAI) serves as the hub to coordinate NOAA AI activities across LOs and with partners to ensure trustworthy adoption of AI technology to support the NOAA mission.

“Data preparation and engineering tasks represent over 80% of the time consumed in most AI and Machine Learning projects.” [Cognilytica Research]

Fundamentally, all effective AI applications rely on efficient access to high-quality, well-understood data, and most steps in an AI workflow are about proper data management and handling . Colocated with the National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) , NOAA’s data archive and access center, NCAI is leading the efforts to modernize the NOAA data enterprise architecture, optimize data storage and accessibility, and make the data AI ready for mission AI tools via Cloud computing. NCAI will orchestrate the vast NOAA data holdings to make them AI-ready. NCAI will provide the bridge between existing systems and capabilities and the emerging cloud infrastructure allowing NOAA to successfully transition from research to operations and apply the transformative technology at scale. . NCAI will provide centralized AI resources, including a repository for AI software and application packages tailored for NOAA applications to provide transportability, catalogs of existing tools, collections of successful applications, and skilled data scientists, thereby enabling NOAA offices to more effectively exploit AI for mission needs. This talk will describe the NCAI Initial Operational Capacity (IOC) focused on requirements gathering and engaging key NOAA stakeholders and its evolution to a Full Operational Capacity (FOC) under specific appropriated funds. More information available at: https://events.cognilytica.com/CLNTg2MnwxOA

Agenda:
11:30-12:30pm: Featured Presentation
12:30-13:00pm: Your Q&A and interaction