'21 M.A. program alum and current Ph.D. student in Astronomy, Ellie Abrahams, won the Best Poster Award at the International Conference on Learning Representations in Vienna for a recently published paper authored by Abrahams, Berkeley Statistics’ Fernando Pérez, and collaborators in the field of geophysics. 

"We're honored and thrilled to share that our recent paper won Best Poster at the Machine Learning for Remote Sensing Workshop at ICLR 2024. Our new approach is exciting because it provides a user-friendly way to help integrate visual scientific contexts into computer vision pipelines, a consideration that is essential to the scientific workflow, but previously missing from existing strategies," said Abrahams. "This collaborative work, bringing together researchers from statistics and the geosciences, helps progress the intersections between the computer vision and remote sensing communities. We developed our interdisciplinary approach into an open-source tool, making use of the Jupyter Meets the Earth (co-founded by Fernando Pérez) and CryoCloud (co-founded by Tasha Snow and Matthew Siegfried) cloud spaces that bring high-performance cloud computing to the Earth Sciences."

The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) is the premier gathering of professionals dedicated to advancing the branch of artificial intelligence called representation learning, generally called deep learning. ICLR is one of the fastest-growing artificial intelligence conferences in the world. Participants at ICLR span a wide range of backgrounds, from academic and industrial researchers to entrepreneurs and engineers to graduate students and postdocs.

Abrahams is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a Two Sigma Fellow in Berkeley's Astronomy and Statistics Departments. She builds novel machine learning architectures to study the time-domain properties of ice-ocean environments. Before coming to Berkeley, Abrahams was a Helen Fellow in Computational Science at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She is an alumna of City College of New York, where she was the valedictorian of the Class of 2017.

-Alex Coughlin