Hi all and thanks Steph for getting everything organized! 

I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do with this site to foster collaboration, awareness, and various community resources.

My own background is in deep learning, machine learning, neuroscience, and neuromorphic computing, and signal processing. I've been doing the startup thing Silicon Valley for the last 11 years after my post-doc, working on products ranging from speech recognition systems, to cloud-based deep learning platforms. These days, some use the blanket term "AI". For the last several years I've been developing software for Conservation Metrics which gives their analysists the ability to use deep learning to process large volumes of audio and image data from remote sensors in order to monitor population density changes of endangered species, detect collisions of birds and bats with infrastructure,  and find rare and elusive species. 

More broadly, I'm quite interested in integrating many disparate sensing domains from eDNA, to land-based sensors, to GIS data in order to provide tools to conservation scientists and ecologists that will enable them to develop a higher resolution understanding of the health of ecosysems around the globe and their response to positive or negative human interventions.

I'm looking forward to interacting with you all. Please let me know what other questions you have for me, and other ways I can help.

Regards,
David

Hi, everyone, I'm John Waugh.  I manage the climate and environment program for a small but growing consultancy, Integra LLC, based in Washington DC. Another core area for Integra is information and communications technology for development, hence my interest in the intersection between technology and biodiversity conservation.  I'm convinced that there's a bright future for the Internet of Things in the area of conservation, and I look forward to working with you to build a community of practice.  It would be very helpful to me to hear your thoughts about what information is most needed. Should we have a directory of experts?  Of vendors of hardware and software?  Or documentation of existing projects and the technologies being used? I'm sure all of these and more are in demand.  I'd like to help get the ball rolling; what should our initial focus be?  I'm looking forward to being in touch.

best

John

HI everyone - my name is Gautam Shah and I'm the founder of a new social enterprise called Internet of Elephants.   My background is as of an IT consultant, working at Accenture for most of my life on large custom software development projects, but my passion has always been around wildlife conservation and so I recently made the decision to put my background to good use.

I'm particularly interested in how tech, social media, IoT, etc. is doing so much to connect people with people and people with things, and how that could apply to connecting people with wild animals.  I see the data that conservation and research organizations gather about animals as a great asset that could be used to engage a wider audience and I think that gaming, betting, and interactive educational applications could be the key to massively increasing the number of people who care about wildlife and generate substantial revenue for the sector to boot.

My favorite place on earth is impossible to pin down, but I think I was most in awe of being in Danum Valley in Malaysian Borneo and the Kamchatka peninsula in Eastern Russia.  But the place I go the most because it is close is Aberdares National Park in Kenya.

Gautam!

Hi Everyone!

I'm Kate and I've just joined as the Marine Conservation group manager. I work for Fauna & Flora International in Cambodia managing our marine and coastal conservation project here.

I've worked in West Africa and the Seychelles and I'm particularly interested in trying to identify simple and low-cost solutions that can help tackle the global issue of Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing. The oceans are the most productive ecosystems on the planet but their resources are dissappearing at an alarming rate. 

As part of a younger generation of conservation scientists, I believe that there are simpler and more efffective ways for us to deliver marine conservation and I hope that by being a group manager I can connect some of the people with the problems and solutions to do so!

Cheers,

Kate