Webinar #3 — Scaling Climate Services & Smart Agents for Decision Support

Professor Jason A. Lowe OBE is a Principal Fellow and Head of Climate Services for Government at the Met Office, and Chair in Interdisciplinary Climate Research, Priestley Centre, University of Leeds.
Jason has over 20 years of experience as a climate researcher and research leader, contributing to scientific journal publications on a diverse range of subjects relevant to both climate mitigation and adaptation. He leads the UKCP project, which developed innovative new climate scenarios for the UK that were used extensively in the most recent UK Climate Change Risk Assessment and are being used in the 3rd National Adaptation Programme. Internationally, Jason has contributed to all three working groups of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and many UN climate reports. He regularly provides advice to Government and other stakeholders on climate variability and change.
A recent focus has been to provide information and guidance on climate change to the finance sector, including to the adaptation working group of the Climate Financial Risk Forum (CFRF) in 2024.

Professor Hywel Williams is a computational scientist focused on challenges around sustainability and environmental change. He is a Professor in Environmental Data Science in the Department of Computer Science at University of Exeter, where he is also affiliated with the Institute for Data Science & Artificial Intelligence and the Global Systems Institute. He is a Visiting Fellow at Plymouth Marine Laboratory.

Professor Williams received his PhD in Complex Systems from University of Leeds in 2006. He then worked in the departments of Environmental Science and Computer Science at University of East Anglia. In 2011, he joined the University of Exeter, initially within the Biosciences Department (2011-2017), then within the Department of Computer Science (2017 – present). In 2019 he was promoted to Associate Professor in Data Science. In 2022, he was promoted to Professor in Environmental Data Science. He is a former Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, and he has launched a successful spinout company.

In his research, Professor Williams applies complex systems thinking and computational methods to problems in social sciences, environmental science, evolutionary ecology, and artificial intelligence. His work has applied a range of methods including modelling, network analysis, natural language processing and machine learning.