A.I. Became the Perfect Lab Assistant for Wildlife Conservationists

It's on us to be better caretakers for this beautiful, warming planet that we (and a few million other species) call home. Thankfully, a computer vision algorithm learned how to do a job that once required the help of tens of thousands of citizen wildlife scientists in a fraction of the time. The A.I. successfully labeled roughly three million images taken by Snapshot Serengeti, a project whose goal is to preserve biodiversity and seek out new phenomena by more carefully monitoring endangered species by filling the Serengeti with unobtrusive cameras. This is all thanks to team of computer scientists, led by Mohammad Sadegh Norouzzadeh at the University of Wyoming, who together developed an algorithm to analyze the images. Now, this animal-identifying A.I. published in the journal Proceedings of the National Acamedy of Science allows these citizen scientists to devote their time to conservation endeavors instead of spending hours sorting through photos.