WIA After Hours

Episode #

5

AI for Wildlife Conservation and Imageomics with Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf

Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf
Professor and Director
The Ohio State University
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Episode Overview

Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf joins us to discuss the development of computational ecology, the latest in the field of conservation AI, and the new field of Imageomics that she's working to establish.

About Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf

Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf is a Professor of Computer Science Engineering, Electrical and ComputerEngineering, and Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology at the Ohio StateUniversity, where she is also the Director of the Translational Data AnalyticsInstitute. Recently she was awarded a US National Science Foundation $15M grant to establish a new Harnessing Data Revolution Institute, founding a new field of study: Imageomics.

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 brings together computer vision, crowdsourcing, and conservation. Wildbook has been recently chosen by UNSECO as one of the topAI 100 projects worldwide supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It has been featured in media, including Forbes, The New York Times, CNN,National Geographic, and most recently The Economist.

Berger-Wolf has given hundreds of talks about her work, including at TED/TEDx, UN/UNESCO AI for the Planet, and SXSW EDU.

Prior to coming toOSU 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 theYear, US National Science Foundation CAREER, Association for Women in ScienceChicago Innovator, and the UIC Mentor of the Year.

Relevant Links

- Biometric animal databases from field photographs: identification of individual zebra in the wild (Paper)

- StripeSpotter (Google Code Archive)

- HotSpotter-Patterned species instance recognition (Paper)

- Some like it hot: Repeat migration and residency of whale sharks within an extreme natural environment (Paper)

- International Union for the Conservation of Nature

- Science and Method (Book by Henri Poincaré)

- iNaturalist

- Gregor Mendel (Wikipedia page)

- Mendel's experiments (Article)

- eBird

Follow Wild Me

- Website

- Twitter

- LinkedIn

 

Follow Imageomics

- Website

- Twitter

Follow Tanya

- Webpage

- LinkedIn

Follow Lauren

- LinkedIn

- Twitter

- Website

Episode Transcript

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