<
https://mymodernmet.com/anika-puri-elephant-poaching-prevention-software-invention/>
"Despite conservationists’ efforts, animal poaching continues to devastate
vulnerable species. So, when New Yorker Anika Puri came across ivory jewelry at
a market in India four years ago, she felt inspired to do her part in stopping
elephant hunting. The solution: she invented a low-cost machine learning
software that can detect poachers in real time with 91% accuracy.
Discovering the numerous ivory objects in Mumbai was the catalyst for her
project. “I was quite taken aback because I always thought, ‘Well, poaching is
illegal, how come it really is still such a big issue?’” she says about the
incident. So, the 17-year-old delved into the poaching numbers and discovered
that Africa's forest elephant population declined by about 61% between 2002 and
2011, with numbers that continue to drop.
Poachers are usually detected by drones; however, Puri noticed the success rate
could be significantly higher. “I realized that we could use this disparity
between these two movement patterns in order to actually increase the detection
accuracy of potential poachers,” she explains. As a result, Puri spent two
years developing her solution: a machine learning software named ElSa (an
abbreviation for Elephant Savior). It analyzes the movement patterns of humans
and elephants in thermal infrared videos and is four times more accurate than
the existing detection methods. Even better, the software can be used with
low-cost cameras, eliminating the need for high-resolution thermal cameras.
Puri presented her project at the Regeneron Internation Science and Engineering
Fair, winning the $10,000 Peggy Scripps Award for Science Communication and
first place in the earth and environmental sciences category. “It's quite
remarkable that a high school student has been able to do something like this,”
Jasper Eikelboom, an ecologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands,
comments. “Not only the research and the analysis but also…being able to
implement it in the prototypes.” Puri will be attending MIT in fall 2022 with
hopes to expand her project to protect other endangered animal species."
Via Joyce Donahue and Muse.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
