2021 Responsible Machine Learning Summit: AI anD Social Good
Chandra Krintz, Professor and Vice Chair, Computer Science, UC Santa Barbara
Where's the Bear?
Abstract: Wildlife monitoring is essential to a wide range of scientific activities and societal interests. Digital photography provides an effective, non-intrusive way to monitor wildlife. It is safe, cost effective, and accessible to people with a wide range of backgrounds. To scale the process of wildlife monitoring in remote locations, researchers are increasingly turning to automatically activated, battery, or solar powered trail cameras. We present a hybrid cloud application that couples in situ "edge" systems with remote cloud computing systems to perform automatic and low overhead classification of images collected by trail cameras. Our system integrates recent advances in Internet-of-Things, open source software, and cloud services for deep learning, data analytics, and image processing to provide easy access to labeled images by scientists and citizen scientists via the web.
Biosketch: Chandra Krintz is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and co-founder and Chief Scientist of AppScale Systems, Inc. She joined the UCSB faculty in 2001 after receiving her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Chandra has led a number of different research projects that have advanced the state-of-the-art in programming and distributed systems in ways that improve performance and energy consumption, and that ease development and deployment of software. Recently, her work has focused on the intersection of IoT, cloud computing, and data analytics with applications in farming, ranching, and ecology (cf SmartFarm and WTB). Chandra has advised over 60 undergraduate and graduate students, has published numerous research articles regarding the implementation of programming languages in venues that include ASPLOS, IEEE IoTDI, HotCloud, IEEE Cloud, PLDI, TPDS, IEEE IC2E, and others, participates in efforts to broaden participation in computing, and is the progenitor of the AppScale project. Chandra's efforts have been recognized with a NSF CAREER award, the CRA-W Anita Borg Early Career Award (BECA), the UCSB Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award, and as the 2015 UCSB Sustainability Champion.