Projects Highlight Reel
Page still under construction -Sept 12, 2024

Table of contents

Item Brief Description Themes
Climate Change Artificial Intelligence Summer School at the Mila Institute A week of intensive lectures and workshops and the rapid development of a Climate Vulnerability Index Tool AI, Climate, Environment
Undergraduate Honours Thesis Transnational Solidarity: a Methodological Assessment of Sentiment Analysis in Digital Geography Academic, AI, Research
Courses at UW Small list of courses taken at University of Waterloo for my Bachelors in Geography Academic, Climate, Environment, Governance
Climate Change AI Summer School

Conducted and organised by Climate Change AI and hosted by the Mila Institute, I was invited to join their selective CCAI summer school in August 2024.
Throughout this inspiring week, I got to attend insightful lectures on climate and sustainability, responsible AI, and effective communication. This week's largest feature was the collaborative teams to develop a project on the intersection of climate change and AI. Read below to see more details!

Climate Vulnerability Communication Tool

First credits are due to my incredible teammates: Flávio Nakasato Cação and Donna Marie Mlyneck, and our amazing mentor, Ruth Schmidt.
While climate, environmental, and socioeconomic data continue to develop in both scale and resolution, particularily with the help of AI methods, we still see a major communication gap between the scientists and decision makers. There is a level of technical understanding necessary to decipher and understand the outputs that are continuously being made.
We decided to use this week as an interdisciplinary team to develop the basic prototype of a climate vulnerability communication tool- built for decision makers with limited access to localised data to pinpoint policy and research pathways to adapt to climate change.

See the tool in action!
Disclaimer: this prototype is not considered a working model, but a demonstration of the potentials of leveraging big data for climate adaptation- as a foundation for dynamic data, buildable in multiple dimensions.

Details on development can be found on our Github repo.
Undergraduate Honours Thesis

Title: Transnational Solidarity: a Methodological Assessment of Sentiment Analysis in Digital Geography
Abstract:
This thesis examines the applications of sentiment analysis to the notion of transnational solidarity through "Instagram Infographic Activism" comment sections. The prevalence of bite-sized social justice infographics on Instagram has led to an onslaught of criticism from academic and journalistic worlds for performativity in their activism. With a fuzzy framework of identifying the presence of performativity in digital activism, I utilise sentiment analysis as a means of developing such a framework, while testing and accounting for the limitations and capabilities of using sentiment analysis as an affective geography methodology. Through data analysis, I have identified elements that limit sentiment analysis, including emojis, hashtags, tags, sarcasm, and complicated emotions. Through the means of literature review and data analysis, I examined the consequences of information saturated environments as a platform for performativity to thrive. My analysis shows the benefits of using comment sections as a data source, and a metric in which performativity was not identified in the case study of transnational solidarity present in the dataset collected. I use these findings and conclusions to inform suggestions on future pathways for both the development of sentiment analysis to overcome limitations, as well as insight for transnational solidarity and performative activism research on Instagram.
Courses at University of Waterloo
Just the highlights- my favourite courses, divided by theme.

Political and economic geography
  • GEOG 436: Feminist Economic Geography: Gender, Identities, and Social Change
  • GEOG 426: Geographies of Development
  • GEOG 411: The Digital Economy
  • GEOG 302: Geographies of Work and Employment
  • GEOG 336: Space, Power, and Politics: Citizenship in a Changing World
  • GEOG 325: Geographies of Health
Environmental science and management
  • ENVS 444: Ecosystem and Resource Management in Parks & Natural Areas
  • GEOG 391: Field Research
  • GEOG 361: Food Systems and Sustainability
  • GEOG 306: Human Dimensions of Natural Hazards
  • GEOG 209: Hydroclimatology
  • ENVS 200: Field Ecology
Larger themes of governance
  • INDEV 475: Contemporary Development Issues: Governing the Commons
  • GEOG 319: Economic Analyses for Regional Planning
  • GEOG 307: Societal Adaptation to Climate Change
  • INDG 301: Critical Theories of Indigeneity in a Global Perspective
These were all taken towards my Bachelor of Environmental Studies in Geography and Environmental Management with a specialisation in "Society and Economics". Graduated in June 2023.
Get in touch !
Email me!
isabelmdrummond at gmail.com