New grant offers awards of more than $1.2 million to advance uses of artificial
intelligence in scientific exploration and research on critical
environmental challenges
WASHINGTON, Dec. 11, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Eleven
changemakers have been selected to receive Microsoft and National
Geographic AI for Earth Innovation Grants to apply artificial
intelligence (AI) to help understand and protect the planet. Each
AI for Earth Innovation Grant recipient will be awarded between
$45,000 and $200,000 to support their innovative
projects.
"The National Geographic Society is committed to achieving a
planet in balance, and in joining forces with Microsoft on the AI
for Earth Innovation Grant program, we are providing incredible
potential to drive fundamental change through our unique
combination of expertise in conservation, computer science,
capacity building and public engagement," said Jonathan Baillie, executive vice president and
chief scientist of the Society. "We look forward to seeing these
talented individuals create solutions to some of the most
challenging environmental issues of the 21st century using the most
advanced technologies available today."
Eleven projects were selected from an impressive pool of more
than 200 applicants. The high caliber of the applications
prompted Microsoft and National Geographic to increase the funding
for the 11 chosen projects from the initially planned $1 million to more than $1.28 million. This furthers the organizations'
commitment to investing in novel projects that use AI to help
monitor, model and ultimately manage Earth's natural systems for a
more sustainable future.
"Human ingenuity, especially when paired with the speed, power
and scale that AI brings, is our best bet for crafting a better
future for our planet and everyone on it," said Lucas Joppa, chief
environmental officer at Microsoft Corp. "The caliber of the
applications we received was outstanding and demonstrates the
demand we've seen for these resources since we first launched AI
for Earth. We're looking forward to continuing our work with the
National Geographic Society to support these new grantees in their
work to explore, discover and improve the planet."
The grant recipients and their project members will have the
funds, computing power and technical support to advance exploration
and discover new environmental solutions in the following core
areas: sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, climate change and
water. The diverse group hails from around the globe, originating
from six countries and working in eight regions across five
continents.
The 11 AI for Earth Innovation Grant recipients were announced
at an event on Tuesday at National Geographic headquarters in
Washington, D.C.:
- Ketty Adoch: Geographical information systems specialist
from Uganda. Her AI for Earth
Innovation Grant project will detect, quantify and monitor land
cover change in the area surrounding Lake Albert and Murchison
Falls National Park, Uganda's
largest and oldest national park.
- Torsten
Bondo: Business development manager and senior
remote sensing engineer at DHI GRAS in Denmark. With the AI for Earth Innovation
Grant, his team aims to use machine learning and satellites to
support irrigation development and improve crop water efficiency in
Uganda together with the Ugandan
geo-information company Geo Gecko. The goal is to contribute to
food security, poverty alleviation and economic growth.
- Kelly
Caylor: Director of the Earth Research Institute
and professor of ecohydrology in the Department of Geography and in
the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the
University of California, Santa
Barbara. His team will use the AI for Earth Innovation Grant
to help produce an online web map and geospatial analysis tools
that will improve estimates of agricultural land use change and
groundwater use.
- Joseph Cook: Polar
scientist from the United Kingdom.
With his AI for Earth Innovation Grant, he aims to develop new
tools that use modern techniques of machine learning and drone and
satellite technology to explore the changing cryosphere.
- Gretchen Daily:
Co-founder and faculty director of the Natural Capital Project,
based at Stanford University in
Stanford, California. With this AI
for Earth Innovation Grant, her team will develop a way of
detecting dams and reservoirs around the world — most of which are
hidden today, in digital terms — to quantify their impact and
dependence on nature and guide investments in green growth that
secure both people and the biosphere.
- Stephanie Dolrenry:
Director of Wildlife Guardians, based in Washington, D.C. Her team will use the AI for
Earth Innovation Grant to help support the Lion Identification
Network of Collaborators, an AI-assisted collaborative database for
lion identification and interorganizational research.
- Africa Flores: Research scientist at the Earth
System Science Center at the University of
Alabama in Huntsville and originally from Guatemala. Her AI for Earth Innovation Grant
project will focus on developing a prototype of a harmful algal
bloom (HAB) early warning system to inform Guatemalan authorities
about upcoming HAB events in Lake Atitlan, a landmark of
Guatemala's biodiversity and
culture.
- Solomon
Hsiang: Chancellor's associate professor of public
policy at the University of California,
Berkeley, where he founded and directs the Global Policy
Laboratory. With this AI for Earth Innovation Grant, his team will
use 1.6 million historical aerial photographs to discern the effect
of major droughts and climate change on human migration in
Africa.
- Holger Klinck: Director
of the Cornell Lab's Bioacoustics Research Program in Ithaca, New
York. His team will use the AI for Earth Innovation Grant to
develop a machine-learning algorithm for detecting and classifying
the songs of insects in tropical rainforests to monitor species
composition and spatial distribution, information that is critical
for monitoring ecosystem health.
- Justin Kitzes: Assistant
professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the
University of Pittsburgh in
Pennsylvania. With this AI for
Earth Innovation Grant, he aims to develop the first free,
open source models to allow academic researchers as well as
agency, nonprofit and citizen scientists to identify bird songs in
acoustic field recordings, with the goal of radically increasing
global data collection on bird populations.
- Heather J. Lynch:
Quantitative ecologist and associate professor jointly appointed in
the Department of Ecology and Evolution and in the Institute for
Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University in
New York. Her AI for Earth
Innovation Grant project will couple AI with predictive-population
modeling for real-time tracking of Antarctic penguin populations
using satellite imagery.
The AI for Earth Innovation Grant program will provide award
recipients with financial support, access to Microsoft Azure and AI
tools, inclusion in the National Geographic Explorer community, and
affiliation with National Geographic Labs, an initiative launched
by National Geographic to accelerate transformative change and
exponential solutions to the world's biggest challenges by
harnessing data, technology and innovation. The grants will support
the creation and deployment of open source trained models and
algorithms so they are available to other environmental researchers
and innovators, and thereby have the potential to provide
exponential global impact. The AI for Earth Innovation Grant
program builds upon Microsoft's AI for Earth program, which
counts as grantees nearly 200 individuals and organizations on all
seven continents, and the National Geographic Society's 130-year
history of grantmaking, supporting more than 13,000 grant projects
along the way.
About National Geographic Society
The National
Geographic Society is an impact-driven global nonprofit
organization based in Washington,
D.C. Since 1888, National Geographic has been pushing the
boundaries of exploration, investing in bold people and
transformative ideas to increase understanding of our world and
generate solutions for a healthy, more sustainable future for
generations to come. Our ultimate vision: a planet in balance. To
learn more about the Society and its programs, visit
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft)
enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud
and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and
every organization on the planet to achieve more.
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