David Dao
david@gainforest.net
PhD candidate at ETH Zurich | Past: Stanford, Berkeley, MIT
I'm a Ph.D. candidate at ETH Zurich building AI and Data Systems for Sustainable Development.๐๏ธ Media features (selected):
I'm leading the Climate + AI initiative at DS3Lab, mapping the ethical use of AI, and directing the Kara research project with Stanford and UC Berkeley. I'm also the founder of GainForest, a non-profit grantee of Microsoftโs AI for Earth program, which leverages decentralized technology to prevent deforestation. Previously, I was an engineer in Silicon Valley and a research fellow at Berkeley AI Research (BAIR), Stanford University and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. I'm a Global Shaper at World Economic Forum, a Core Member of Climate Change AI, a Climate Leader at Climate Reality Project, a Mentor at Creative Destruction Lab, a United Nations delegate at COP (since COP23 Bonn), and organized conferences with thousands of attendees in in Germany, Silicon Valley, and at Harvard.
Want to work on the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and finish your thesis at the same time? Here are some thesis proposals!
Data Marketplaces
Data Valuation: How much is your data worth?
ยท Joint project with UC Berkeley
AI Systems to help restore the natural world
Komorebi: Deforestation prediction of the Amazon Rainforest using satellite imagery
ยท 2 x Microsoft AI for Earth Grant ยท Grand Prize UNFCCC Hack4Climate at COP23 ยท Presentation at COP24 ยท Presentation at COP25
ForestBench: A global benchmark for forest carbon stock prediction
ยท Joint project with MIT and TUM
GainForest X Prize: Biodiversity monitoring with satellites, drones and eDNA
ยท Joint project with Stanford
AI Systems for Medicine and Science
Kara: A privacy-preserving tokenized data market for medical data
ยท Joint project with UC Berkeley and Stanford
Piximi: Interactive machine learning for cell biology
ยท Joint project with Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
tldr; Design systems such that society and AI gain from each other.
Here is my mission statement and a timeline.
Almost all of my work is open source
Star ยท Awful-AI
๐ is a curated list to track current scary usages of AI - hoping to raise awareness
Star ยท Awesome-Deep-Learning ๐ฅ is a
curated list of papers about very deep neural networks
Star ยท
Spatial Transformer ๐ is
part of TensorFlow Models (where I'm co-author)
Star ยท CellProfiler
Analyst ๐ฌ is an adaptive machine learning tool for biologists
Star ยท Green Artificial Intelligence Standard
๐ฑ aims to develop a standard and raise awareness for best environmental practices in AI research and development
Star ยท BioJS
๐ฌ is an interactive visualization ecosystem for life science
I'm grateful to work with my scientific collaborators
ยท Lucas Czech (Carnegie Institution of Science)
ยท Crowther Lab (ETH Zurich)
ยท Bjรถrn Lรผtjens (MIT)
ยท Dawn Song (UC Berkeley)
ยท Robert Chang (Stanford Medicine)
ยท Anne Carpenter (MIT Broad Imaging Platform)
ยท Joe Near (University of Vermont)
ยท Yan Meng (Mercedes-Benz Research)
I'm proud of my students
ยท Ghjulia Sialelli (ETH)
ยท Marc Watine (ETH)
ยท Gyri Reiersen (TUM / Founded Tanso
ยท Kenza Amara (ETH / Went to Facebook AI)
ยท Simona Santamaria (ETH / Founded RYVER.AI
ยท Iveta Rott (ETH / Went to McKinsey)
ยท Mina Huh (KAIST)
ยท Levin Moser (ETH / Went to MIT)
ยท Catherine Cang (UC Berkeley / Went to AirBnB)
ยท Ming Zhang (ETH / Went to Roche)
ยท Luca Lanzendorfer (ETH / Went to Mercedes-Benz Research)
ยท Florian Chlan (ETH / Went to Amazon)
ยท Nino Weingart (ETH / Went to BSI)
ยท Christopher Friedrich (Reutlingen / Went to MIT)
Proud and active member of the scientific community
ยท Reviewer for CCAI Innovation Grant (Total value of 1.8 Mio USD)
ยท Organizer CCAI Side Event at COP26 (together with ClimateTRACE and CAIC)
ยท Program Committee NeurIPS Climate Change AI'21
ยท Tutorial KDD Challenges in ML for Sustainable Development'21
ยท Program Committee ICML Climate Change AI'21
ยท Co-Lead Organizer NeurIPS Climate Change AI'20
ยท Organizer ICML Economics of Privacy and Data Labor'20
ยท Co-Organizer ICLR Climate Change AI'20
ยท Program Committee NeurIPS Climate Change AI'19
ยท Reviewer ISC-HPC'15
