about me
I am a PhD candidate in the Earth System Science department at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. I am part of the EchoLab and lucky to be advised by Marshall Burke. I am supported by a Stanford Data Science Fellowship and the Ram and Vijay Shriram Sustainability Fellowship. In the past, I was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Energy Policy Institute (EPIC) at the University of Chicago, working at the Climate Impact Lab. In a previous life, I was a Data Scientist at DSaPP (now @CMU), and a career bureaucrat at the Central Bank of Colombia.
research interests
I evaluate the effects of environmental changes on humans. I also develop machine learning models to create cool datasets that help us track humans and nature in data-scarce scenarios. I am interested in downscaling climate data products, multi-modal classification, measurement error in causal inference models, and wildfires in the Western US.
news and updates
- [11/23] Me and my
weakaccepted paper on wildfire house’ burning risk will be in the CompSust Workshop at NeurIPS 2023 in New Orleans. - [09/23] I received the Stanford Data Science Fellowship (2 years) and now I am part of the SDS PhD Scholars 💻🤖.
- [08/23] I am presenting our work on wildfire house’ burning risk using multimodal classification and recent developments in contrastive learning in TWEEDS in Portland.
publications, working papers & workshops
1. Higuera-Mendieta, I, Wen, J., & Burke, M. (2023). A table is worth a thousand pictures: Multi-modal contrastive learning in house burning classification in wildfire events. NeurIPS 2023 Computational Sustainability: Promises and Pitfalls from Theory to Deployment.
2. Farah, A., Higuera-Mendieta, I, Song, Y., Franke, J. A., Moyer, E., & Nakamura, N. (2020). Arctic airmass displacement and reduced midlatitudes wintertime temperature variability under climate change. [In preparation for Geophysical Research Letters].
- Presented at the American Geophysical Union Meeting AGU 2020.
3. Rodolfa, K. T., Salomon, E., Haynes, L., Higuera-Mendieta, I, Larson, J.,& Ghani, R. (2020). Case study: Predictive fairness to reduce misdemeanor recidivism through social service interventions. In Proceedings of the 2020 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (142–153). FAT* ‘20
4. Bonilla-Mejia, L., & Higuera-Mendieta, I. (2019). Protected Areas under Weak Institutions: Evidence from Colombia. World Development, 122
- Ranked second-best paper by the International Sustainable Development Research Society.
- Press coverage (in Spanish): El Tiempo