New Naturalis team members on AI for nature
For our group at Naturalis, it's a great start to 2023 because we recently welcomed two new research team members - two postdocs with expertise in AI species recognition: Rita Pucci and Burooj Ghani. Their work is funded by Horizon Europe under three different (but related) projects: MAMBO, GUARDEN, and TETTRIs. Within all three of those projects, our role is centred around providing AI species recognition algorithms.
Burooj Ghani is working on AI methods for recognition of European birds, bats, marine mammals and grasshoppers based on sounds. Rita Pucci is working on AI methods for recognition of European animals and plants based on images. Together with me, Vincent Kalkman and the ICT AI-team (Laurens Hogeweg and Django Brunink), we'll be refining AI methods, making the algorithms available (among other things, through the Arise online services), and working with the project partners to make these methods fully useful for ecologists and institutions all around Europe.
They will also be members of the wider Evolutionary Ecology research group here.