Abstract: 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.
