Tanya Berger-Wolf, Ohio State University

Abstract

Photographs, taken by field scientists, tourists, automated cameras, and incidental photographers, are the most abundant source of data on wildlife today. I will show how fundamental data science and machine learning methods can be used to turn massive collections of images into high resolution information database, enabling scientific inquiry, conservation, and policy decisions. I will demonstrate how computational data science methods are used to collect images from online social media, detect various species of animals and even identify individuals. I will present data science methods to infer and counter biases in the ad-hoc data to provide accurate estimates of population sizes from those image data. I will also point out the risks that AI poses to endangered species data.

I will show how it all can come together to a deployed system, Wildbook, a project of tech for conservation non-profit Wild Me, with species including whales (flukebook.org), sharks (whaleshark.org), giraffes (giraffespotter.org), and many more. In January 2016, Wildbook enabled the first ever full species (the endangered Grevy’s zebra) census using photographs taken by ordinary citizens in Kenya.The resulting numbers are now the official species census used by IUCN Red List and we repeated the effort in 2018, becoming the first certified census from an outside organization accepted by the Kenyan government. The 2020 event has just concluded on January 25-26. Wildbook is becoming the data foundation for wildlife science, conservation, and policy. Read more: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/11/artificial-intelligence-counts-wild-animals/

Bio:
Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf is a Professor of Computer Science Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology at the Ohio State University, where she is also the Director of the Translational Data Analytics Institute. As a computational ecologist, her research is at the unique intersection of computer science, wildlife biology, and social sciences. She creates computational solutions to address questions such as how environmental factors affect the behavior of social animals (humans included). Berger-Wolf is also a director and co-founder of the conservation software non-profit Wild Me, home of the Wildbook project, which enabled the first ever full census of the entire species, the endangered Grevy’s zebra in Kenya, using photographs from ordinary citizens. Wildbook has been featured in media, including The New York Times, CNN, and National Geographic.

Prior to coming to OSU in January 2020, Berger-Wolf was at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Berger-Wolf holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has received numerous awards for her research and mentoring, including University of Illinois Scholar, UIC Distinguished Researcher of the Year, US National Science Foundation CAREER, Association for Women in Science Chicago Innovator, and the UIC Mentor of the Year.

SPECIAL NOTE: This seminar is presented online only.

You can join via Webex

Meeting number (access code):  120 841 0284

Meeting password: 1234

Presented in association with the DATA-INSPIRE TRIPODS Institute.