Tanya Berger-Wolf (1972–) is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Department of Computer Science (UIC).
Her contributions to computational ecology and biology, data
science and network analysis, and artificial intelligence for social benefit
have earned her acclaim.
She is a pioneer in the subject of computational population
biology, which employs artificial intelligence algorithms, computational
methodologies, social science research, and data collecting to answer questions
about plants, animals, and people.
Berger-Wolf teaches multidisciplinary field courses with
engineering students from UIC and biology students from Prince ton University
at the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya.
She works in Africa because of its vast genetic variety and
endangered species, which are markers of the health of life on the planet as a
whole.
Her group is interested in learning more about the effects
of the environment on social animal behavior, as well as what puts a species at
danger.
Wildbook, a charity that develops animal conservation
software, is her cofounder and director.
Berger-work Wolf's for Wildbook included a crowd-sourced
project to photograph as many Grevy's zebras as possible in order to complete a
full census of the endangered animals.
The group can identify each individual Grevy's zebra by its
distinctive pattern of stripes, which acts as a natural bar code or
fingerprint, after analyzing the photographs using artificial intelligence
systems.
Using convolutional neural networks and matching algorithms,
the Wildbook program recognizes animals from hundreds of thousands of images.
The census data is utilized to focus and invest resources in
the zebras' preservation and survival.
The Wildbook deep learning program may be used to identify
individual mem bers of any striped, spotted, notched, or wrinkled species.
Giraffe Spotter is Wild book software for giraffe
populations.
Wildbook's website, which contains gallery photographs from
handheld cameras and camera traps, crowdsources citizen-scientist accounts of
giraffe encounters.
An intelligent agent extracts still images of tail flukes
from uploaded YouTube videos for Wildbook's individual whale shark catalog.
The whale shark census revealed data that persuaded the
International Union for Conservation of Nature to alter the status of the
creatures from “vulnerable” to “endangered” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened
Species.
The software is also being used by Wildbook to examine
videos of hawksbill and green sea turtles.
Berger-Wolf also serves as the director of technology for
the conservation organization Wild Me.
Machine vision artificial intelligence systems are used by
the charity to recognize individual animals in the wild.
Wild Me keeps track of animals' whereabouts, migration
patterns, and social groups.
The goal is to gain a comprehensive understanding of global
diversity so that conservation policy can be informed.
Microsoft's AI for Earth initiative has partnered with Wild
Me.
Berger-Wolf was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1972.
She went to high school in St. Petersburg, Russia, and graduated from Hebrew University in Jerusalem with a bachelor's degree.
She received her doctorate from the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Department Champaign's of Computer Science, and did postdoctoral work
at the University of New Mexico and Rutgers University.
She has received the National Science Foundation CAREER
Award, the Association for Women in Science Chicago Innovator Award, and the
University of Illinois at Chicago Mentor of the Year Award.
~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan
You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.
See also:
Deep Learning.
Further Reading
Berger-Wolf, Tanya Y., Daniel I. Rubenstein, Charles V. Stewart, Jason A. Holmberg, Jason Parham, and Sreejith Menon. 2017. “Wildbook: Crowdsourcing, Computer Vision, and Data Science for Conservation.” Chicago, IL: Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange Conference. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.08880.pdf.
Casselman, Anne. 2018. “How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Wildlife Research.” National Geographic, November. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/11/artificial-intelligence-counts-wild-animals/.
Snow, Jackie. 2018. “The World’s Animals Are Getting Their Very Own Facebook.” Fast
Company, June 22, 2018. https://www.fastcompany.com/40585495/the-worlds-animals-are-getting-their-very-own-facebook.
