About EarthSenseAI Center

Our mission at EarthSenseAI, a new 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, is to make Artificial Intelligence (AI) accessible to scientists and government agencies who have only minimal cross-training in AI by providing scalable ocean health and conservation insights and reducing barriers to AI and Machine Learning (ML) adoption.

Why AI is Needed in Conservation?

Climate change is driving ever more rapid shifts in our ecosystems. Understanding how our changing climate affects critical habitats and key species requires more and more data. Increasingly, conservation scientists utilize devices such as unmanned vehicles, camera traps, and hydrophone arrays. Unfortunately, they are now starting to drown in the enormous amount of data being generated.

Our ability to analyze the impacts of climate change and plan for the future is not keeping pace. We are reaching a tipping point. Artificial Intelligence can help!

“There is a mismatch between the ever-growing volume of raw measures (videos, images, audio recordings) acquired for ecological studies and our ability to process and analyze this multi-source data to derive conclusive ecological insights rapidly and at scale.” - Nature 2020

EarthSenseAI Center Founding Team

With decades of combined experience applying AI methods to complex problems, the EarthSenseAI founding team is excited to launch this conservation-focused non-profit.

Sam McKennoch

Executive Director

PhD in ML, 15+ years of research and machine learning industry experience including 5+ years managing teams of applied researchers in Conservation Technology. Passion for using “AI For Good”.

Scott Smith

Chief Advancement Officer

AI researcher with more than 30 years of industry experience applying artificial intelligence to solve complex problems. Passion for using machine learning and autonomous systems to address conservation challenges. Team nature photographer.

Louisa van Zealand

Chief Technology Officer

Researcher with a PhD in signal and image processing and 15+ years of research and applied machine learning experience. Focuses on building data-driven ML models for conservation, working with challenging imperfect real-world data.

EarthSenseAI Center Volunteers

The EarthSenseAI Center sincerely thanks the wonderful volunteers that are bringing their invaluable experiences to further our mission of accelerating conservation through the application of artificial intelligence.

Kirk Larsen

Board President

Kirk has been developing impactful data solutions for over twenty years, including technical implementation, strategic development, and facilitation of project funding. His work has been in both marine and terrestrial conservation and on projects from local to global scale.

Ben Luks

ML Engineer

MSc in AI with 2 years working in the ML industry in research and development. Strong proponent of responsible AI, and sustainability through technological innovation.

How we drive impact

Build strategic collaborations with conservation scientists to accelerate integration of machine learning into their processes and reduce technical barriers to broader adoption.
Train machine learning models to automate conservation tasks needed to monitor important habitats and key species.
Open source a new generation of conservation focused model training tools, scalable across domains. Develop software to integrate machine learning into conservation programs.
Disseminate the models and software we develop to a broader community of conservation practitioners.

Respond to a rapidly changing world by significantly reducing the time between data acquisition and real-world impact.

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