A bursary set up by ICCS and conference sponsor AWS supported attendees to the 12th Annual Climate Informatics conference hosted in Cambridge this April. The bursary supported costs for registration, accommodation, travel, and other expenses. The bursaries are part of ICCS's ongoing commitment to widening participation in computer science, climate research, and the sciences more broadly.
One bursary was awarded to Zahir Nikraftar, a PhD student in the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London, to support his travel to and from the conference. Zahir explained that he submitted a paper on the major challenges of modelling and assessing climate and risk impacts when data is limited with his supervisor Rendani Mbuvha, and described the conference as an "invaluable experience".
Another bursary was awarded to Jennifer Ding, Research Application Manager at the Alan Turing Institute, to enable Jen to participate in all three days of the conference. Jen explained that she attended the conference to support her colleagues at the Turing Institute who presented, and to engage with other attendees to better understand the work that the Turing Institute might support in the future.
The 12th Annual Climate Informatics was hosted by ICCS in Trinity Hall, Cambridge, on April 19-21. The Climate Informatics conference series aims to bring together researchers and users across different disciplines and sectors to forge international collaboration between climate science, data science, and computer science, share state-of-art developments in climate data and informatics, and accelerate the rate of discovery in climate science and adaptation of climate applications.