Joshua Dimasaka

Joshua Dimasaka is an applied AI (doctoral) researcher at the UKRI EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in the Application of Artificial Intelligence to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER) of the University of Cambridge. He both develops benchmark datasets and investigates artificial intelligence methods to quantify exposure and risk of the built environment at large scales, enabling the beginnings of a global risk audit. His work measures the changes in disaster risk profiles over time to assess whether countries are making progress in reducing disaster risk, ultimately to inform our collective efforts on the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030.

Joshua received his BS in Civil Engineering (2018) from the University of the Philippines, his MS in Civil & Environmental Engineering (2022) and MA in Public Policy (2022) from Stanford University, and his MRes in Environmental Data Science (2023) from the University of Cambridge. He also took up an Executive Education Certificate in Entrepreneurship and Innovation (2021) at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a recipient of the Stanford Knight-Hennessy Graduate Fellowship, 2018 BPI-DOST Science Award, 2017 3rd MOCES PICE National Award, and DOST & RSFI Undergraduate Scholarships.

News

Jul 4, 2024 - Happy Philippine Republic Day! Sharing the spirit of independence, I also celebrate another milestone, completing my first-year PhD oral examination. To more exciting engagement!
Jun 30, 2024 - I started my research stay in DLR Earth Observation Center, Germany. Thankful for the Helmholtz Association. Let's explore Munich and Germany!
Jun 25, 2024 - I gave an invited presentation to the Innovations Group WG5 of LandAware, an international network on early warning systems. Many thanks for the good questions from our community. See their LinkedIn post here and Twitter/X post here.
May 22, 2024 - I delivered an oral presentation version of our ICLR ML4RS workshop poster at the Cambridge Hazard and Risk Research Day. Access the slides here.
May 11, 2024 - I presented our developing work "Global Mapping of Exposure and Physical Vulnerability Dynamics in Least Developed Countries using Remote Sensing and Machine Learning" at 2nd Machine Learning for Remote Sensing Workshop, 12th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in Vienna, Austria. Access the poster here, the 4-page paper here, the animated poster here, and the OpenSendaiBench Version 1 here.
Apr 29, 2024 - Joseph (University of Bath), Lois (Philippine Space Agency) and I (University of Cambridge) are building an online community PAIRL (Philippine AI Research and Learning Community) to democratize AI for the Philippine public and support PH AI researchers & learners to ignite meaningful collaborations and knowledge sharing. Follow us on a Twitter/X or join our growing community on Slack (free to join)!
Mar 4, 2024 - I won the Natural Hazards - Outstanding Student Presentation Award (OSPA) for my AGU 2023 presentation of "Near-real-time Country-wide Estimation of Susceptibility and Settlement Exposure from Norwegian Mass Movements via Inter-graph Representation Learning", which is now available here on Earth and Space Science Open Archive. Official press release and publication to follow.
Mar 3, 2024 - Our developing work "Global Mapping of Exposure and Physical Vulnerability Dynamics in Least Developed Countries using Remote Sensing and Machine Learning" has been accepted as a poster presentation at 2nd Machine Learning for Remote Sensing Workshop, 12th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in Vienna, Austria, on 11th of May 2024. More details to follow.
Feb 8, 2024 - I have been awarded a three-month fully-funded Helmholtz Visiting Researcher Grant to do an exciting summer research with the "Team Geo-risks" at the German Aerospace Center in July, August, and September 2024. If you'd be around and would like to chat about our work on the intersection of machine learning, disaster risk, and remote sensing, please feel free to send me an email.
Jan 12, 2024 - I have been accepted to attend the Bayesian Machine Learning as a tool for Climate Scientists Workshop at the Institute of Computing for Climate Science, University of Cambridge on March 25-27, 2024.
Jan 4, 2024 - I have been accepted to attend the Probabilistic Numerics Spring School 2024 at the University of Southampton on April 8-10, 2024.
Dec 14, 2023 - I led our Filipino community for a courtesy call on the Philippine Consulate General in San Francisco as we (20+ Filipino researchers) came together to share the Philippine stories of Earth sciences at the American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting 2023. Read more here.
Dec 13, 2023 - I presented "Near-real-time Country-wide Estimation of Susceptibility and Settlement Exposure from Norwegian Mass Movements via Inter-graph Representation Learning" at American Geophysical Union Meeting 2023 in San Francisco, California. Access here the YouTube recording.
Oct 5, 2023 - Our work "Near-real-time Country-wide Estimation of Susceptibility and Settlement Exposure from Norwegian Mass Movements via Inter-graph Representation Learning" has been accepted as an oral presentation at American Geophysical Union Meeting 2023 in San Francisco, California, on 13th of December 2023. Learn more about the presentation here.
Oct 1, 2023 - I officially began my PhD studies with Dr. Emily So (Cambridge University Centre for Risk in the Built Environment) and Dr. Christian Geiß (German Aerospace Center) and got my third master's degree MRes.
Jul 31, 2023 - I started an exciting remote summer research project at Bonn's Center for Remote Sensing of the Land Surface (ZFL) to collaborate with Dr. Emily So (Cambridge University Centre for Risk in the Built Environment) and Dr. Christian Geiß (German Aerospace Center) for a project about quantifying our global disaster risk. If you are also based in the Philippines seeing the possiblity of AI for DRR public policymaking, feel free to connect with me.
Jun 30, 2023 - Our MRes team (myself, Andrea, and Sakthy) ended our three-month research project on "Near-real-time Country-wide Estimation of Susceptibility and Settlement Exposure from Norwegian Mass Movements via Inter-graph Representation Learning". You may access the data and code in our Zenodo and GitHub repositories.
Jun 26, 2023 - I joined the UK Alliance for Disaster Research and the Disasters Research Group (DRG) to review and discuss current disaster research practice in the UK at Wellcome Trust, London.
Jun 21, 2023 - I presented my research on artificial intelligence and disaster risk assessment at Risk Management Solutions in London.
Mar 9, 2023 - I started working with Dr. Andrea Marinon (Engineering) and Dr. Sakthy Selvakumaran (Engineering) to characterize human-environment factors for climate change adaptation and mitigation in the Arctic by causal graph inference.
Mar 1, 2023 - I co-authored "Seismic Impacts Report for M7.8 and M7.5 Turkey-Syria Earthquake Using Near Real-time Crowdsourcing and Remote Sensing Information".
Jan 27, 2023 - Our team's work on "Classifying sea ice in high-resolution SAR imagery using deep learning" has been accepted to EGU General Assembly 2023.
Jan 21, 2023 - EMI delivered 20 reports on updated climate and disaster risk assessment of Quezon City to the local government (read more).
Dec 17, 2022 - I co-authored a Nature Communications paper "Seismic multi-hazard and impact estimation via causal inference from satellite imagery".
Sep 26, 2022 - I started MRes+PhD in Application of Artificial Intelligence to the study of Environmental Risks at the University of Cambridge with a very generous full-funding studentship from UK Research & Innovation and Department of Earth Sciences. I will be part of Sidney Sussex College postgraduate community.
Aug 31, 2022 - I completed Global Urban Resilience Fellowship at EMI (Philippines). I am very grateful for the valuable mentorship from Dr. Fouad Bendimerad and for our hardworking team - Jaja, Mam Lourdes, Doc Renan, Laarni, Hector, Jom!
Aug 4, 2022 - I participated as part of the EMI expert observers for the Quezon City Public Service Continuity Plan Tabletop Exercise preparing for the "Big One" Mw-7.2 earthquake.
Jun 12, 2022 - I graduated MS Civil & Environmental Engineering (Sustainable Design and Construction - Structures) and MA Public Policy at Stanford University.