Michele Volpi

Michele Volpi

Lead Data Scientist
Academia
(Alumni)

Michele received a Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) in 2013. He was then a visiting postdoc in the CALVIN group, Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour of the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (2014-2016). He then joined the Multimodal Remote Sensing and the Geocomputation groups at the Geography department of the University of Zurich, Switzerland (2016-2017). His main research activities were at the interface of computer vision, machine and deep learning for the extraction of information from aerial photos, satellite optical images and geospatial data in general.

Projects

BioDetect

Completed
Deep Learning for Biodiversity Detection and Classification
Energy, Climate & Environment

Inter-Detect

In Progress
Quantifying Plant-Pollinator Interactions Using Computer Vision
Energy, Climate & Environment

DNAi

In Progress
High throughput eDNA processing using artificial intelligence for ecosystem monitoring

PHENO-MINE

In Progress
Pheno-Mine: Extracting dynamic ideotypes from seasonal image time series of wheat taken in the field

DATSSFLOW

In Progress
Data Science and Mass Movement Seismology: Towards the Next Generation of Debris Flow Warning

DIMPEO

In Progress
Detecting drought impacts on forests in earth observation data
Energy, Climate & Environment

SPEED2ZERO

In Progress
Sustainable pathways towards net zero Switzerland
Energy, Climate & Environment

EAGLE

In Progress
Enhanced understanding of Alpine mass movements Gathered through machine LEarning
Energy, Climate & Environment

ADOPT

In Progress
AI for Detecting Ocean Plastic Pollution with Tracking
Energy, Climate & Environment

DeepDown

In Progress
Multivariate climate downscaling using deep learning models
Energy, Climate & Environment

CLIMIS4AVAL

In Progress
Real-time cleansing of snow and weather data for operational avalanche forecasting
Energy, Climate & Environment

deepLNAfrica

In Progress
Mapping changes in urban informal settlements in sub-Saharan Africa using deep learning and open-access satellite imagery
Energy, Climate & Environment

ArcticNAP

Completed
Arctic climate change: Exploring the Natural Aerosol baseline for improved model Predictions
Energy, Climate & Environment

MACH-Flow

Completed
Machine learning for Swiss river flow estimation
Energy, Climate & Environment

DEAPSnow

Completed
Improving snow avalanche forecasting by data-driven automated predictions
Energy, Climate & Environment

MSEI

Completed
Molecular structure elucidation by integrating different data mining strategies
Energy, Climate & Environment

ACE-DATA

Completed
Delivering Added-value To Antarctica
Energy, Climate & Environment

Publications

Boyd Pernov, J.; Harris, E.; Volpi, M.; Baumgartner, T.; Hohermuth, B.; Henne, S.; Aeberhard, W. H.; Becagli, S.; Quinn, P. K.; Traversi, R.; Upchurch, L. M.; Schmale, J."Pan-Arctic Methanesulfonic Acid Aerosol: Source regions, atmospheric drivers, and future projections"7166.01-18
Stalder, S.; Volpi, M.; Büttner, N.; Law, S.; Harttgen, K.; Suel, E."Self-supervised learning unveils urban change from street-level images"112102156
Maissen, A.; Techel, F.; Volpi, M."A three-stage model pipeline predicting regional avalanche danger in Switzerland (RAvaFcast v1.0.0): a decision-support tool for operational avalanche forecasting"1721.07569-7593
Simeon, A.; Pérez-Guillén, C.; Volpi, M.; Seupel, C.; van Herwijnen, A."Autoencoder-based feature extraction for the automatic detection of snow avalanches in seismic data"20241-37
Pérez-Guillén, C.; Hendrick, M.; Techel, F.; van Herwijnen, A.; Volpi, M.; Olevski, T.; Pérez-Cruz, F.; Obozinski, G.; Schweizer, J."Data-driven automatic predictions of avalanche danger in Switzerland"EGU General Assembly Conference AbstractsEGU21–61542021
Stalder, S.; Perraudin, N.; Achanta, R.; Perez-Cruz, F.; Volpi, M."What You See is What You Classify: Black Box Attributions"Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)2022

Mentioned in

November 4, 2024

MeteoSwiss and the SDSC join forces

MeteoSwiss and the SDSC join forces

The Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology (MeteoSwiss) and the Swiss Data Science Center have signed a framework agreement.
March 6, 2024

RAvaFcast | Automating regional avalanche danger prediction in Switzerland

RAvaFcast | Automating regional avalanche danger prediction in Switzerland

RAvaFcast is a data-driven model pipeline developed for automated regional avalanche danger forecasting in Switzerland.
November 30, 2023

A simple dashboard facilitates the work of parliamentary services

A simple dashboard facilitates the work of parliamentary services

The SDSC has developed a dashboard with which parliamentary services can calculate the composition of the committees of the National Council.
November 30, 2023

La Liberté | AI to better detect plastic waste at sea [In French]

La Liberté | AI to better detect plastic waste at sea [In French]

Scientists at EPFL and Wageningen University have developed an AI model that recognizes plastic objects floating on water in satellite images.
October 31, 2023

Street2Vec | Self-supervised learning unveils change in urban housing from street-level images

Street2Vec | Self-supervised learning unveils change in urban housing from street-level images

It is difficult to effectively monitor and track progress in urban housing. We attempt to overcome these limitations by utilizing self-supervised learning with over 15 million street-level images taken between 2008 and 2021 to measure change in London.
October 25, 2023

Computerworld | AI predicts avalanche danger [In German]

Computerworld | AI predicts avalanche danger [In German]

The AI project "DEAPSnow" takes avalanche forecasting to a whole new level.
October 9, 2023

DEAPSnow | AI for avalanche forecasting

DEAPSnow | AI for avalanche forecasting

“DEAPSnow”, a project by the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) and the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support avalanche forecasters in creating the avalanche bulletin. This product provides essential information about the prevailing snow and avalanche conditions in the Swiss Alps and the Jura.
September 23, 2022

What you see is what you classify: black box attributions

What you see is what you classify: black box attributions

The lack of transparency of black-box models is a fundamental problem in modern Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. This work focuses on how to unbox deep learning models for image classification problems.
October 28, 2021

DEAPSnow | Supporting avalanche forecasting in the Swiss Alps using machine learning

DEAPSnow | Supporting avalanche forecasting in the Swiss Alps using machine learning

The creation of avalanche bulletins is still a largely expert-driven and manual task. DEAPSnow aims to explore the feasibility of using data-driven models to support the process of avalanche danger forecast.
May 2, 2019

ACE-DATA | Antarctic circumnavigation expedition – delivering added value to Antarctica

ACE-DATA | Antarctic circumnavigation expedition – delivering added value to Antarctica

Understanding the complexity of the Earth systems and our climate is important to be able to make predictions about how they may change in the future. To do this, scientists use models which describe the relevant processes.

Case Studies

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