Dan Morris, Google - Getting to know your AI for Conservation Project

The information that an ecologist might use to determine whether a project is "AI-ready" is often different from the information an ML person might use for the same assessment. Both perspectives are important, and if you can learn to "ask the questions an ML person would ask" during your Summer School experience, you'll be able to make more informed decisions about when to develop new AI models, when to use off-the-shelf models, and when you really don't want AI in your life at all. In this talk, I'll review the questions I typically ask when someone is interested in using AI for a conservation project, and provide the motivation for asking those questions, and the different roads the answers might take us down. Time permitting, we'll hopefully have time for you to answer some of those questions for your own projects, and we can try to get to the "ML perspective" on your project's trajectory, expectations, and first steps. I'll also sneak in a brief description of several AI for conservation projects that I've worked on, in case any of the tools my collaborators have developed are useful to your projects.