#  AIMOCC -- AI: Modeling Oceans and Climate Change
## An ICRL 2021 Workshop

It is our distinct pleasure to invite you to the AI: Modeling Oceans and 
Climate Change (AIMOCC 2021) Workshop to be held in conjunction with the
Ninth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2021)
and hosted in virtual-only mode.

The Anthropocene has brought along a drastic impact on almost all life
forms on the planet. Considering the importance and amount of water in
this speck of dust in the middle of nowhere that we inhabit, we should
have called it Planet Ocean. Oceans are not only important because of
their volume but are also about the functions and contributions they
provide to biodiversity, the human species included [@Guidi2016].

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers that are
interested and/or applying AI and ML techniques to problems related to
marine biology, modeling, and climate change mitigation. We also expect
to attract natural science researchers interested in learning about and
applying modern AI and ML methods. Consequently, the workshop will be a
first stone on building a multi-disciplinary community behind this
research topic, with collaborating researchers that share problems,
insights, code, data, benchmarks, training pipelines, etc. Together, we
aim to ultimately address an urgent matter regarding the future of
humankind, nature, and our planet.

### Links

- Workshop schedule at ICRL 2021:
    > https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2021/Schedule?showEvent=2123
- Call for papers and further information:
    > https://oceania.inria.cl/#aimocc
- Shareable call for papers as PDF: 
    > https://oceania.inria.cl/assets/pdfs/AIMOCC_at_ICLR_2021___Workshop_call_for_papers.pdf
- Sharable call for papers as TXT: 
    > https://oceania.inria.cl/assets/txts/AIMOCC_at_ICLR_2021___Workshop_call_for_papers.txt
- AIMOCC 2021 CMT submission site:
    > https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/AIMOCC2021

## Submissions

We welcome submissions of long (8 pages) full papers and short (4 pages)
summary papers. To prepare your submission, please use the ICLR 2021
LaTeX style files provided at: <https://github.com/ICLR/Master-Template>.

Use the following link to submit your proposal: <https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/AIMOCC2021>.

## Important dates

- Submission deadline: March 19, 2021 (UTC-12).
- Notification of acceptance: March 26, 2021.
- Reception of final version: April 11, 2021.

## Topics

The topics of interest of this workshop can be grouped into two sets:

1. Addressing and advancing the state of the art in areas like AI, ML, mathematical modeling and simulation. Here the focus is set on:
  * improving neural network handling of graph-structured information,
  * improving the capacity of ML methods to learn in small data contexts,
  * understanding causal relations, interpretability and explainability in AI,
  * integrating model-driven and data-driven approaches, and
  * to develop, calibrate, and validate existing mechanistic models.
  
2. Focus on answering the questions from the application domain, where the main questions to be addressed are:
  * Which are the major patterns in plankton taxa and functional diversity?
  * Which are the major drivers of patterns and how do they interact?
  * How these patterns and drivers will likely change under climate change?
  * How will these changes affect the capacity of ocean ecosystems to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, that is the biological carbon pump?
  * What relations bind communities and local conditions?
  * What are the links between biodiversity functioning and structure?
  * How modern AI and computer vision can be applied as research and discovery support tools to understand planktonic communities?
  * How new biological knowledge can be derived from the application of anomaly detection, causal learning, and explainable AI.

## Organizers

- Nayat Sánchez-Pi and Luis Martí, Inria Research Center in Chile.

### Scientific committee

- Julien Salomon and Jacques Sainte-Marie, Inria Paris,
- Olivier Bernard, Inria Sophia-Antipolis,
- Michèle Sebag and Marc Schoenauer, Inria Saclay,
- Alejandro Maass, Center of Mathematical Modeling (CMM), Universidad de Chile.
- Pablo Marquet, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC).
- André Abreu, Fondation TARA Océan.
- Colomban De Vargas, GO-SEE CNRS Federation, and
- Damien Eveillard, ComBi, Université de Nantes.

## Diversity commitment

We will seek diversity in all aspects, both in school of thought,
nationalities, stages in the academic career, etc.

## Access

We will publish the accepted papers and talk abstracts (before the
event) and the slides of the speakers (after the event) on the workshop
website. We will include a bibliography of most relevant research papers
to facilitate cross pollination of ideas between these fields. We will
record the workshop and publish it online.