Global Environmental Policy Seminar
Deploying AI for Ecology
AI has been widely proposed as a useful and valuable tool to expand systems for monitoring and understanding the natural world, for diverse taxa including wildlife, plants, insects, and even microbes, in order to determine how to best conserve and protect these ecosystems. However, ecological data collected in the field presents a number of challenges that current AI methods struggle to overcome. These include strong spatiotemporal correlations, imperfect data quality, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions. In this talk, I will introduce several research projects that address these challenges through the development of AI methods and expert-in-the-loop systems, and set new priorities for the AI research community to ensure that application-driven innovation in this space matches the needs of the diverse community of end users of these technologies, from land managers to scientists to policy-makers.
 

Biography:
Sara Beery is an assistant professor at MIT EECS' Faculty of AI and Decision Making and CSAIL, and she was previously a visiting researcher at Google working on Auto Arborist. Sara has always loved the natural world, and have seen a growing need for technology-based approaches to conservation and sustainability challenges. Her research focuses on building computer vision methods that enable global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring across data modalities, tackling real-world challenges including strong spatiotemporal correlations that lead to domain shift, imperfect data quality, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions. Sara received her PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) at Caltech, advised by Pietro Perona, where she received the Amori Doctoral Prize for my dissertation. Sara has been honored to be awarded an AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, a PIMCO Data Science Fellowship an Amazon AI4Science Fellowship, and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Sara’s work has been supported by the NSF, NASA, Google, Microsoft, IBM, the USAF, MIT J-WAFS, and the Caltech Resnick Sustainability Institute.

Sara seeks to break down knowledge barriers between fields: she founded the successful AI for Conservation slack community (with over 2500 members), she is Co-PI on the NSF/NSERC Global Center on AI and Biodiversity Change, she is the Biodiversity Community Lead for Climate Change AI, and is the founding director of the Caltech Summer School on Computer Vision Methods for Ecology. Sara works closely with industry, including the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Microsoft AI for Good, Google Research, Wildlife Insights, and Wild Me where she helps turn her research into usable, deployed tools.
 

*Environmental Social Sciences Seminars are in person only*