The first seminar was held in February and featured Christer Andersson, analyst at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, Sweden on AI and analysis of environmental data: a perspective from the Swedish defence researchers?
Next up is Bill Adam. Claudio Segré Professor of Conservation, Graduate Institute, Geneva; Downing College Cambridge, who among many other things has spent a semester at the Division (2017).
The Digital Animal and Conservation by Algorithm
Digital innovation has brought about a revolution in devices to observe, track and locate animals. These range from fixed devices such as webcams and camera traps (trail cams), through airborne and satellite remote sensing to tracking and imaging devices fitted to living animals (collars and tags). Digital data from these devices is streamed, shared, archived and analysed, yielding new knowledge and new systems of knowledge accumulation, and enabling new modes of intervention in non-human lives and human society, ‘conservation by algorithm’. This seminar will discuss some of these innovations, and their implications. It will explore the new digital lives that animals take on within databases and information networks, and their implications for human understandings of nature, and for conservation management.
Time: Tue 2022-03-29 13.00
Location: Zoom – link can be found here
Discussant: Finn-Arne Jørgensen, Professor in Environmental History, University of Stavanger
Recommended reading:
Adams, William, “Digital Animals,” The Philosopher, vol. 108, no. 1 (2022).
Adams, William, “Geographies of conservation II: Technology, surveillance and conservation by algorithm,” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 43, no. 2 (2019): 337–350.