Episode 5 - AI for Wildlife Conservation and Imageomics with Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf

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 study that she has established, known as Imageomics.

About Dr. Berger-Wolf

Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf is a Professor of CS Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology at The Ohio State University, where she is also Director of the Translational Data Analytics Institute. 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).

She a director/co-founder of the conservation software non-profit Wild Me, home of the Wildbook project, which was recently chosen by UNSECO as one of the top AI 100 projects worldwide supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It's been featured in media including Forbes, The NYTimes, CNN, NatGeographic, and The Economist.

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.

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

- Imageomics

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