On July 10, the 2020 World Artificial Intelligence Conference Cloud Summit "Artificial Intelligence Gives Power to Sustainable Future" Forum was held. The theme of the forum is to focus on the application of AI and Internet of Things technologies in urban construction, infectious disease protection, energy saving and emission reduction, etc., and discuss how cutting-edge technology can promote the sustainable development of society and create a permanent future. Professor Gong Peng, Dean of the School of Science and Director of the Department of Earth System Science (DESS) at Tsinghua University, attended the forum and delivered a speech.

Gong summed up the biggest problem facing the earth: the earth's ecosystem cannot support the rapid development of human society. At present, human activities are rapidly and dramatically changing the nature, resulting in the unsustainable function of the earth's ecological services, such as the decline of biodiversity, environmental pollution and other problems. To protect nature and biodiversity, scientists monitor and analyze the health of all species, but there is not enough integrated data to help scientists understand the full picture of the earth's ecosystems. At the same time, Gong also pointed out that the current increasingly subdivided and deepened discipline research, which is easy to cause researchers to lose the grand perspective, in the face of global change, such as macro and comprehensive problems difficult to come up with solutions.

Professor Gong Peng

In order to solve this problem, Lucas Joppa, Microsoft's chief environmental officer, proposed that this can be regarded as a global optimization problem, and artificial intelligence can help us solve this problem. Therefore, Lucas Joppa put forward the concept of "planet computer", that is, to create a system that can provide the distribution of all species and resources on the earth. Lucas Joppa further introduced that the "planet computer" is actually a huge database that can be accessed and updated anytime, anywhere. Its goal is to connect trillions of environmental data and ecosystem data worldwide to help scientists around the world monitor and build Model and manage the earth’s natural resources and jointly solve the challenges of the environment and sustainable development. However, the storage and computing performance of computers currently cannot meet the requirements of "planet computers".

Microsoft's chief environmental officer，Lucas Joppa

The current decline and recession of ecosystem services is the biggest challenge facing the planet, Gong said. Computers can combine simulation, scientific understanding and data observation to better assess future development policies. Whether it is to build a planetary computer with more detailed data scale, or to get the abstract understanding and simulation prediction of the earth through reasoning, the storage and computing performance of the computer is put forward a very high demand. In the future, earth science and computer science will continue to go hand in hand.