Madeline C. Lisaius

interests

People and Data: Building teams and supporting each member to their full potential. From leading National Geographic trips and outdoor experiences, building The Rocekfeller Foundation's remote sensing portfolio and our Foundation Model team at Cambridge, and starting a dance school, I know what it takes to make community thrive. Prototyping team building, workflow, and learning, I love creating social landscapes that thrive.

Nature Based Solutions: Mitigating climate catastrophe is urgent. I am interested in approachs to transform economies, move capital and invest in projects that work towards net zero.

Remote Sensing: I have been working with satellite remote sensing for almost a decade. I believe that human-environment interactions are inheretly spatial and satellite remote sensing using freely available sensors can be a democratic, empowering tool for decision making. In my doctoral work, I have focused on SSL and foundation models for multimodal time series Earth observation to make remote sensing more accesssible and applicable for less technical and less resourced groups.

Subjectivity, Surveilance and Opression: I am worried about the ways that Earth observation imagery is currently and can be used. There are large discrepancies between who has the power to observe and the groups who are largely observed. I am intereted in conversations, especially in the remote sesing and machine learning communities, about how we can best explain the subjectivity inherent in our work, how we can advocate for better regulations in the satellite Earth Observation space, and pathways for stronger ethical codes of conduct using satellite data.

Food Systems: Food systems are important. Here are some stats that have really impacted me: about 78% of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas and rely on subsistance agriculture (World Bank). One in four (about 1.9 billion people) are food insecure and that number is growing (FAO, 2021). Agriculture accounts for about 25% of global emissions and occupies about 38% percent of global land surface. Diet related disease is the #1 cause of death globally and half of all deaths of children under 5 are attributed to hunger (The Lancet, 2019). I fully believe that working in the food systems space is a meaningful and impactful way to engage with the wellbeing of people and the planet. I am interested in working towards a more food sogerign and food secure future, and thinking more critically about how to realize true access (Ribot & Peluso 2003).

Intersectionality and Interdisciplinarity: I situate myself as an interdisciplinary scientist and an intersectional (Kimberle Crenshaw) feminist. I am interested in discussing approaches, thoughts, etc. that take collective approaches. This is an area that I listen in.

Other: When away from screens, I spend most of my time running a dance school, taking long walks outside, reading, and spending time with people I love.

Work

Earth observation foundation models for remote sensing of agriculture and difficult pixels, currently building the team.

Using Barlow Twins to Create Representations From Cloud-Corrupted Remote Sensing Time Series, JSTARS, 2024

A More Accessible and Replicate Method for Satellite-Based Mapping of HandHarvested Crops in California, TDS 2021

Using Satellites to Map Economic Opportunity in New York City, TDS 2020

Mapping the Real and Imagined: Deforestación in Waorani Territory, Thesis @ Stanford 2019, recipient of Firestone Medal. Availble upon request.

Mapping Smallholder Wheat Yields and Sowing Dates Using Micro-Satellite Data, Remote Sensing 2016 (work from summer internship)

About

Before joining the AI4ER CDT at Cambridge, I was the Lead Data Scientist for topics of remote sensing, food and climate and Tom Ford Fellow at The Rockefeller Foundation. I have continued to consult with Rockefeller since and provide executive decision support, interfacing with grantees and partners on topics of data science, AI and remote sensing, and I advise on continuing data science work. I graduated from Stanford University in 2019 with a B.S. with Honors in Earth Systems and an M.S. in Earth Systems with a focus on remote sensing for applications in macro land systems. During my time at Stanford, I spent four years collaborating with indigenous women in the Ecuadorian Amazon as a National Geographic Young Explorer working on projects of forest disturbance, women's empowerment through new land management regimes and the accute limitations and opportunities of Earth Observation for community-lead management.

An innfluential person in my life once told me "know your mountain, know your river." I grew up in the beautiful Pacific Northwest around Seattle Washington; temperate rainforests will always feel like home. I spent four years across Latin America, and part of my heart stays in the high Andes. I lived in NYC for the first years of the pandemic, and have deep afinity with Fort Greene and Downtown Brooklyn. Now, Cambridge, England, is my home.

Contact

Contact me about anything here (or absent) at madeline.c.lisaius [at] gmail [dot] com

• GitHub
• LinkedIn

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