Elephants Under Attack Have An Unlikely Ally: Artificial Intelligence 7wData

A few years ago, Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, published the results of something called the Great Elephant Census, which counted all the savanna elephants in Africa. What it found rocked the conservation world: In the seven years between 2007 and 2014, Africa's savanna Elephant population decreased by about a third and was on track to disappear completely from some African countries in as few as 10 years. To reverse that trend, researchers landed on a technology that is rewriting the rules for everything from our household appliances to our cars: artificial intelligence. AI's ability to find patterns in enormous volumes of information is demystifying not just Elephant behavior but human behavior -- specifically poacher behavior -- too. "AI can process huge amounts of information to tell us where the elephants are, how many there are," said Cornell University researcher Peter Wrege.