[Acm-announce] Reminder ACM Meeting with Prof Berger-Wolf Today Thursday October 23 at 5pm in SEO 1000

[Emily Austin]

Hi everyone,

Here's the information on the talk. Hope you can make it! :)

Title: Computational Animal Ecology

Abstract:
Computation has fundamentally changed the way we study nature. Recent
breakthroughs in data collection technology, such as GPS and other mobile
sensors, high definition cameras, satellite images, genotyping, and
crowdsourcing, are giving biologists access to data about wild populations,
from genetic to social interactions, that are orders of magnitude richer
than any previously collected. Ecology, being the science of connections
among living organisms and their environment, among different biological
scales, from organisms to the planet, is particularly well positioned and
is in need of those data. Such data offer the promise of answering some of
the big questions in ecology but only if we can have the methods, both
computational and ecological, to take those data to scientific insight.
This combination of ecology, technology, computation, and data science is
the emerging field of computational ecology.

In this talk I will show how computational approaches can be part of every
stage of the scientific process of understanding why animals do what they
do. I will present our developing Image-Based Ecological Information System
<http://compbio.cs.uic.edu/IBEIS>, which is a large autonomous
computational system that starts from image collections (from tourists,
scientists, camera traps, drones, etc.) and progresses all the way to
answering ecological and conservation queries, such as population sizes,
species distributions and interactions, and movement patterns. I will
demonstrate, using our computational framework for analysis of dynamic
social networks <http://compbio.cs.uic.edu/projects.html>, how the data
obtained from such a system can be used to understand social structure of
endangered species and its implication on the species survival.

--------------------------------------

Bio:
Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she heads
the Computational Population Biology Lab. Her research interests are in
applications of computational techniques to problems in population biology
of plants, animals, and humans, from genetics to social interactions. As a
legitimate part of her research she gets to fly in a super-light airplane
over a nature preserve in Kenya, taking a hyper-stereo video of zebra
populations.

Dr. Berger-Wolf has received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002. After spending some time as a
postdoctoral fellow working in computational phylogenetics and doing
research in computational epidemiology, she returned to Illinois. She has
received numerous awards for her research and mentoring, including the US
National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the UIC Mentor of the Year and
Graduate Mentor awards.

-- 
Emily Austin
Vice President of ACM
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