IACS Faculty Wins AI for Earth Award
Heather Lynch and ten others win Microsoft and National Geographic Society grants
IACS core faculty member and Ecology and Evolution Associate Professor Heather Lynch
applied for a grant last July from a joint program involving a partnership between
Microsoft and National Geographic Society. The grant was aimed at researchers who
use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to tackle the world’s critical environmental challenges.
Winners were announced this week, and under the category of biodiversity conservation
was our own Heather Lynch, who has teamed up with Dimitris Samaras, from Stony Brook's
Computer Science Department, to develop AI-based algorithms for tracking penguins
from satellite imagery.
"I've been manually annotating imagery for nearly a decade," says Lynch, "but the
work is so labor intensive that it's just not a good solution for regular monitoring
across the entire Antarctic. Teaming up with Dimitris Samaras and his students has
opened an exciting new chapter in penguin conservation - their expertise in computer
vision is clearly where the field needs to go, and I'm delighted that this new grant
will allow us to plow ahead with this exciting interdisciplinary work."
Heather tracks Antarctic penguin populations to forecast the impacts of climate change.
She uses satellite imagery to find guano stains, which are indications of the penguins’
whereabouts and their population estimates. Winning this award will not only fund
two graduate students in Computer Science, but it also provides for considerable computing
support through Microsoft Azure. "Automated algorithms for penguin detection may be
labor saving from a human perspective, but this remains computationally-intense work,
and the support from Microsoft will be absolutely key as we work to scale up a sustainable
solution for penguin conservation," notes Lynch.
For more information, check out:
Press release: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/newsroom/eleven-changemakers-chosen-as-recipients-of-microsoft-and-national-geographic-ai-for-earth-innovation-grants/
Microsoft blog post: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2018/12/11/microsoft-and-national-geographic-society-announce-ai-for-earth-innovation-grantees/