Lily Xu knew from a young age how much the environment and conservation mattered to her. By 9 years old, she'd already decided to eat vegetarian because, as she put it, "I didn't want to hurt animals." Xu grew up believing her passions would always be separate from her professional interest in computer science. Then she became a graduate student in Milind Tambe's Teamcore Lab, and everything changed. Xu is now doing award-winning research into using machine learning and artificial intelligence to help conservation and anti-poaching efforts around the world.

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.