Interview with Lily Xu – applying machine learning to the prevention of illegal wildlife poaching

Lily Xu is a PhD student at Harvard University, applying machine learning and game theory to wildlife conservation. She is particularly focused on the prevention of illegal wildlife poaching, and she told us about this interesting, and critically important, area of research. Green security is the challenge of environmental conservation under some unknown threat. The three domains that we focus on are illegal wildlife poaching, illegal logging and illegal fishing. Across all of these settings we have an environmental challenge, which is to preserve our natural ecosystems.