Wildlife.ai programme co-ordinator Potia Smith, Wildlife.ai secretary Amy Brasch and general manager Dr Victor Anton.
Wildlife.ai programme co-ordinator Potia Smith, Wildlife.ai secretary Amy Brasch and general manager Dr Victor Anton.
A new Curious Minds project will empower school students to use artificial intelligence to help with biodiversity.
Wildlife.ai, a charitable trust that uses artificial intelligence to help with wildlife conservation, will work with students to investigate locally relevant scientific issues.
Programme co-ordinator and facilitator Portia Smith says the programme isfunded by Curious Minds, Toi Foundation and the Mazda Foundation.
“Wild about AI is a collaboration between Wildlife.ai, the Department of Conservation (DoC) and Te Ara Taiao. The new programme will tie in with Wildlife.ai’s established project Spyfish Aotearoa, a citizen science and machine-learning approach to identify fish in baited underwater videos. We will use the baited videos captured in Spyfish Aoateroa for this programme.”
The programme will run in Waitara High School, Devon Intermediate, Te Paepae o Aotea, the Head Office, Ōmata School and one more location yet to be confirmed. Each school will have three one-and-a-half-hour sessions, which will be adapted to suit the schools.
She says Wildlife.ai aims to produce and deliver an engaging educational program that will teach Taranaki children about Aotearoa’s marine reserves and how AI technology is used in wildlife conservation.
“The programme will teach the students the history of Aotearoa’s marine environment, explain the importance of marine reserves, how artificial intelligence is used in wildlife conservation, how to use data trends from baited underwater video to develop questions about how to train a machine-learning model to identify marine life species and to build a machine-learning model using code blocks to identify a fish species. As the project evolves, members of the public will be able to actively contribute to monitoring surveys and build their own awareness of marine conservation.”
Wildlife.ai will also produce a specialised learning program that can be taught by more educators in the future. She says the Wildlife.ai team are excited about the programme.
