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"Learning and Planning Under Uncertainty for Wildlife Conservation" - Lily Xu, Harvard University
Date & Time: March 23, 2023 from 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Location: Virtual via Zoom
This event is part of the Young Achievers Symposium series hosted by Penn State's Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence.
About the Talk
Wildlife poaching fuels the multi-billion dollar illegal wildlife trade and pushes countless species to the brink of extinction. To aid rangers in preventing poaching in protected areas around the world, we have developed PAWS, the Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security. We present technical advances in multi-armed bandits and robust sequential decision-making using reinforcement learning, with research questions that emerged from on-the-ground challenges. We also discuss bridging the gap between research and practice, presenting results from field deployment in Cambodia and large-scale deployment through integration with SMART, the leading software system for protected area management used by over 1,000 wildlife parks worldwide.
About the Speaker
Lily Xu is a Ph.D. student at Harvard where she is developing AI techniques to address environmental planning challenges. She has focused on advancing methods in machine learning and game theory for wildlife conservation through preventing wildlife poaching. Xu co-organizes the Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG) research initiative, and her research has been recognized with the best paper runner-up at AAAI, the INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR award, and a Google Ph.D. Fellowship.
About the Series
The CSRAI Young Achievers Symposium series highlights early career researchers in diverse fields of AI for social impact. The series seeks to focus on emerging research, stimulate discussions, and initiate collaborations that can advance research in artificial intelligence for societal benefit.
Our events and programs are open to all students regardless of sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, or any other protected class. The College of Information Sciences and Technology is committed to building a community of belonging for all.