Monitoring Climate Change at the Edge of the Cloud

This page accompanies the talk Monitoring Climate Change at the Edge of the Cloud which I gave at Applied Machine Learning Days 2020. It also contains sound examples which I had the opportunity to present at the ZHdK's Environmental Listening Session organized by Marcus Maeder. For more information click here, here or contact me.

Abstract

Thawing permafrost in alpine regions poses an increasing threat to human life and infrastructure. We maintain a wireless sensing system which enables long-term and multi-modal monitoring of mountain slopes in harsh, high-alpine regions. To acquire as much information as possible under the constraints given by this environment we develop and optimize learning-based algorithms for the edge and for the cloud.
Sorting relevant from irrelevant information on the edge reduces the transmission cost and increases reactivity while cloud computing permits a qualitative, long-term analysis.
By taking the whole chain into account from low-power embedded device via data transmission and processing to data visualization and analysis we present an optimized tool suite for monitoring the effects of climate change in steep permafrost rock.

Sound Examples

Below are examples of the data captured by our geophones. These examples have been converted to an audio format and slightly post-processed (offset compensation, amplification, resampling). The processed and unprocessed audio files can be downloaded here.

Note: The signal is very low-frequent, therefore it will be hardly audible on laptop speakers. The best listening experience can be achieved by using a dedicated subwoofer.