Bio
Dr Alejandro Coca-Castro is a Physical Geographer and Research Fellow of the Environment & Sustainability Grand Challenge at The Alan Turing Institute. He has more than 13 years of experience working with artificial intelligence (AI) and data science for environmental sustainability. He has contributed to multidisciplinary projects by developing data-driven pipelines supported by AI and data science for decision-making among a variety of international research, public and private institutions. His most notable projects include an early warning system of deforestation in the pantropics, the automation of digital soil mapping processes in data-scarce environments in Colombia, and modelling environmental variables including soil moisture in the UK using open-source software.
Research interests
Alejandro's main research includes modelling Earth systems and Environmental phenomena using artificial intelligence and data science. He is currently contributing to the AI for Numerical Weather Prediction project which uses state-of-the-art ML models and cloud computing towards an operational product.
Beside his involvement in scientific and applied research challenges, he is an active contributor and lead in open science education and open-source development. For instance, he is founder and lead of the Environmental Data Science book, a computational notebook community promoting open source software, reproducibility and collaborative research in Environmental science. In addition, he has contributed to software development, tutorials, content and events led by community-driven initiatives including Scivision (core member), the Turing Way (core member), Open Life Science (mentee/mentor) and Pangeo (member).