Up to 1M species face extinction in the next several decades, with biodiversity loss a major factor. In this talk, I will describe my team’s efforts to leverage advances in deep learning to monitor and improve biodiversity health. Our work is bolstered by the $24M University of Guelph-led BIOSCAN project, a global interdisciplinary effort to build a biodiversity observation system; and LIFEPLAN, a global biodiversity monitoring effort that collects data, including images, audio and DNA samples, from around 100 sites worldwide. Manual analysis of the data collected in these massive international biodiversity efforts are resource prohibitive and their success will depend on automating the analysis of images, sets, sequences, and graphs.
About the presenter:
Graham Taylor is a Canada Research Chair and Professor of Engineering at the University of Guelph. He co-directs the University of Guelph Centre for Advancing Responsible and Ethical AI and is the Research Director of the Vector Institute for AI. He has co-organized the annual CIFAR Deep Learning Summer School, and trained more than 80 students and researchers on AI-related projects. In 2016 he was named as one of 18 inaugural CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars. In 2018 he was honoured as one of Canada's Top 40 under 40. In 2019 he was named a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. He spent 2018-2019 as a Visiting Faculty member at Google Brain, Montreal. He is the Academic Director of NextAI, a non-profit accelerator for AI-focused entrepreneurs.
