Computational Ecology, Environment, and Conservation - CEEC Lab

https://artsandsciences.osu.edu/news/berger-wolf-ai-wildlife-conservation

Using AI, machine learning to confront biodiversity loss The world is in the midst of the next mass extinction. By using artificial intelligence to scan thousands of photos of animals, Tanya Berger-Wolf, a professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology, is opening a wealth of newfound information for conservationists at a time when the stakes have...

paper on and for in Nature Communications
Devis Tuia, Benjamin Kellenberger, Sara Beery, Blair R. Costelloe, Silvia Zuffi, Benjamin Risse, Alexander Mathis, Mackenzie W. Mathis, Frank van Langevelde, Tilo Burghardt, Roland Kays, Holger Klinck, Martin Wikelski, Iain Couzin, Grant van Horn, Meg Crofoot, Chuck Stewart, Tanya Berger-Wolf
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-27980-y

Perspectives in machine learning for wildlife conservation - Nature Communications Animal ecologists are increasingly limited by constraints in data processing. Here, Tuia and colleagues discuss how collaboration between ecologists and data scientists can harness machine learning to capitalize on the data generated from technological advances and lead to novel modeling approaches.

An article on discourse on social media and how it changed as -19 started to spread. We discovered Russian TV efforts to promote anti-vaccination early in the pandemic. Specifically, they featured pre-pandemic Robert F. Kennedy "interview," in which he claimed that the CDC is a vaccine factory. It is interesting that the anti-vaccination movement frequently relies on pseudo science and pseudo media to advance their messages.
Tamar Ginossar, Iain Cruickshank, Elena Zheleva, Jason A. Sulskis, Tanya Berger-Wolf

Cross-platform spread: vaccine-related content, sources, and conspiracy theories in YouTube videos shared in early Twitter COVID-19 conversations (2022). Cross-platform spread: vaccine-related content, sources, and conspiracy theories in YouTube videos shared in early Twitter COVID-19 conversations. Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics. Ahead of Print.

Congratulations to CEEC lab member Craig Fouts ! His team's 1st place at HackOHI/O earned some hometown paper coverage from the Newark Advocate for their webcam-based mouse software that makes 3D-modeling programs easier and more accessible.

Granville alumni win Ohio State University coding competition by going mouseless Three Granville High School alumni were part of a first-place team during OSU's annual hackathon.

Continuing the lab tradition, congratulations to our undergraduate student Craig Fouts and the team on winning the Hack OHI/O at The State University!
The team Angry Pixies (Craig Fouts, Baker Poling, Noah LaPolt, Noah Charlton) won the HackOHI/O 2021 hackathon organized by OHI/O Ohio State College of Engineering. They received the grand prize for their work on a gesture-recognition accessibility tool called Space Rat that enables users to perform input on Windows that might otherwise be difficult or impossible with a conventional keyboard and mouse.
https://engineering.osu.edu/news/2022/01/students-companies-win-annual-hackathon

Students, companies win at annual hackathon HackOHI/O enables students to work in teams to build something meaningful or solve an industry-sponsored challenge.

New name, new logo, new location, new members!
Computational Population Biology Lab is now CEEC Lab: Computational Ecology, Environment, and Conservation. We moved to The Ohio State University. Welcoming new members Namrata Banerji, Moniba Keymanesh, Tessa Cotron, Sebrina T Zeleke, Reshma Ramesh Babu, Craig Fouts.

Computational Ecology, Environment, and Conservation - CEEC Lab updated their info in the about section.

Computational Ecology, Environment, and Conservation - CEEC Lab updated their website address.

Computational Ecology, Environment, and Conservation - CEEC Lab updated their address.

Welcome the newest Computational Population Biology Lab member, the first one at Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University: Namrata Banerji is starting on her PhD adventure https://www.linkedin.com/in/namrata-banerji-a8bb6118b/

Namrata Banerji - Graduate Research Associate - The Ohio State University | LinkedIn View Namrata Banerji’s profile on LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional community. Namrata has 2 jobs listed on their profile. See the complete profile on LinkedIn and discover Namrata’s connections and jobs at similar companies.

Congratulations to Chai Amornbunchornvej on winning the dissertation award from the National Research Council of Thailand!

CompPopBio alum Brugere is part of the keynote presentation at Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing tomorrow, Sept 17: https://tapiaconference.cmd-it.org/attend/presentation/?id=pec105&sess=sess103

Presentation | ACM Richard Tapia Conference

The startup Wepo of Computational Population Biology Lab alumni Riccardo Pressiani and Matteo Foglio is doing a great job helping US .
University of Illinois Chicago UIC College of Engineering

Gathering data sources to coordinate census outreach activities A case study about how Wepo provided data science services for the 2020 Census

Congratulations, Dr Ivan Brugere! To the best of my knowledge, this is the first FB post using this title :) Ivan joins the highly exclusive group of Computational Population Biology Lab alumni as the 13th and the last PhD from UIC Department of Computer Science.

Thanks to the committee: Elena Zheleva, Lise Getoor, Chris Kanich, Brian Ziebart and Tanya Berger-Wolf

See Illinois for thesotyr about Wildbook

Earth Day Across America! 50 Earth-Saving Projects From Every State Good citizens in every state—from New York to Wyoming—are helping save the environment. In honor of Earth Day, we’re highlighting some of the best Earth Day activities across America. We’re inspired, and we hope you are too! Click launch gallery to see these amazing people and projects. Plus...

is a team effort at The Ohio State University, with leadership from OSU's Translational Data Analytics Institute, Infectious Diseases Institute and Sustainability Institute. "We’re putting in place collaborations and partnerships and frameworks that are going to outlast this crisis."
https://www.osu.edu/together-as-buckeyes/stories/tanya-berger-wolf.html

An assist for data modeling Ohio State faculty member Tanya Berger-Wolf helped rally institutional experts to help provide a timely assist to the Ohio Department of Health.

How AI could help in the fight against COVID-19 From developing drug treatments to predicting the next hotspot, artificial intelligence may help researchers, healthcare workers, and everyday people offset the impact of the coronavirus.

Variable-Lag Granger Causality for Time Series Analysis - IEEE Conference Publication Granger causality is a fundamental technique for causal inference in time series data, commonly used in the social and biological sciences. Typical operati

From the Ohio State University Office of Research: "I am pleased to announce that Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf has joined the university as faculty director for the Translational Data Analytics Institute (TDAI) and professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering with joint appointments in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology."

https://mailchi.mp/8075d4c0b4e2/faculty-director-named-for-the-chronic-brain-injury-program-466283

Ohio State Office of Research events and announcements I am pleased to announce that Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf has joined the university as faculty director for the Translational Data Analytics Institute (TDAI) and professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering with joint appointments in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineerin...

Congratulations to the new Computational Population Biology Lab alumni: Sri Phani Gorti (MS '19), Gabriele Aldeghi (MS '20), Mattia Di Fatta (MS '20) and Aynaz Taheri (PhD '19)

Dear friends and colleagues, Happy New Year and a new decade! May you have great beginnings, fruitful continuations and successful conclusions to your endeavors!
To remember a great New Year wish from Neil Gaiman:
I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.
So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.
Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.
Make your mistakes, next year and forever.

A very interesting paper that talks about potential privacy concerns of genetic services due to the particular structure of DNA data and the algorithms used to identify relatives from DNA:

Attacks on genetic privacy via uploads to genealogical databases
Michael D. Edge, Graham Coop

(1) Blog written by the authors, explaining some background: https://gcbias.org/2019/10/22/paper-faq-for-attacks-on-genetic-privacy-via-uploads-to-genealogical-databases/
(2) Bioarxiv preprint:https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/10/22/798272.full.pdf

This paper is about genetic privacy concerns related to a subset of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetics services. The largest DTC genetics companies are Ancestry and 23andMe, but our paper is not directly about them—it’s about services that allow users to upload their own genetic datasets.

Several DTC genetics services, including GEDmatch, MyHeritage, FamilyTreeDNA, and LivingDNA, allow people who have been genotyped by other services to upload their data to their databases. So, imagine that you’ve been genotyped by 23andMe but want to find genetic relatives who were genotyped by other services. One option is to be genotyped by more genetic genealogy companies, but another option—usually cheaper and sometimes free—is to download your 23andMe genetic data and upload it to some other services. This helps genealogy enthusiasts find more genetic relatives for less money, and it helps the smaller DTC services grow their databases as well.

The potential problem to which we want to draw attention is that allowing users to upload their own datasets can present serious concerns about genetic privacy. In the paper, we describe some ways that a motivated person (we’ll call this person an “adversary”) could compromise the privacy of people in a DTC genetics database by uploading several genetic datasets, either real or fake. Under some circumstances, an adversary could reveal most of the genetic information of most people in a DTC database by uploading a few hundred datasets and aggregating the information returned by the DTC service. Many genetic genealogy services return the full names of relative matches, and some include email addresses.Therefore, in some cases large amounts of identifiable genome-wide data may be obtainable by a motivated adversary. We also describe some actions that DTC services can take to limit these risks.

Paper FAQ for Attacks on genetic privacy via uploads to genealogical databases An FAQ written by Doc (Michael) Edge and Graham Coop on their paper about genetic genealogy & privacy (pdf link here). The preprint is scheduled to appear on Oct 22nd and should be available at…

Congratulations to Dr Aynaz Taheri on successfully defending her PhD today!
Thanks to the dissertation committee Drs Elena Zheleva, Kevin Gimpel, Xinhua Zhang, Brian Ziebart and TBW.

Congratulations to the University of Illinois at Chicago UIC College of Engineering sophomore Michelle Ramirez who presented at the Midwest Big Data Hub all hands meeting the work she and 14(!) UIC undergraduates and Chicago area highschool students did over the summer at the Computational Population Biology Lab on Crowdsourcing Wildlife Data from Social Media.
Michelle did a fantastic job! She got lots of interest and questions from the attendees and later was asked to present a summary of the working group on smart communities to the entire meeting. Well done!

With Saccha Agriel, Mahmooda Ali, Krishna Vamsi Chndu, Kyla Guru, Josephine Huss, Sourav Jayaprakash, Ellen Kidane, Viktor Kirillov, Shirley Li, Varun Mallampati, Jared Manusig, Hannah Mcdougall, Jason Obrycki, Michelle Ramirez, Zoe Wachtel, Tanya Berger-Wolf

https://today.uic.edu/university-scholar-tanya-berger-wolf

University Scholar Tanya Berger-Wolf | UIC Today The University Scholars Program, now in its 34th year, honors faculty members for superior research and teaching, along with great promise for future achievements. The award provides $15,000 a year for three years.

UIC Department of Computer Science PhD student Ashwini Naik-Khandelwal had a huge crowd at Society for Neuroscience 2019 conference at her poster on interactive visualization system for exploring neuronal activity in mouse brains. Congratulations!
Joint work with Robert Kenyon, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Baher Ibrahim, Daniel Llano

The Renewal Awards Discover the Renewal Awards, which aims to recognize local organizations driving positive change.

Celebrating women in science For the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, female researchers reflect on their experiences

Congratulations to CompPopBio alumni Riccardo, Matteo and Guido

For the second straight year, the winners of the BuiltWorlds Hackathon are from UIC Engineering and computer science! Congratulations to Riccardo Pressiani, Matteo Foglio, Guido Muscioni, Francesco Sgherzi, Chiara Gambacorta, and Giulia Soresini on their $10,000 grand prize. Watch our feed for a story soon.

Chai Amornbunchornvej presenting his work on variable lag Granger causality at IEEE DSAA. Joint work with Elena Zheleva and Tanya Berger-Wolf

Congratulations to lab alum Chai Amornbunchornvej on the publication of the paper about complex leadership dynamics (Tanya Berger-Wolf co-author)

Mining and modeling complex leadership–followership dynamics of movement data Leadership and followership are essential parts of collective decision and organization in social animals, including humans. In nature, relationships of leaders and followers are dynamic and vary...

Guest Speaker: Tanya Berger-Wolf
Incoming CSE faculty and OSU TDAI Director
September 24, 2019 at 4:00pm
Title: Computational Ecology and AI for Conservation

Computation has fundamentally changed the way we study nature. New data collection technology, such as GPS, high definition cameras, UAVs, genotyping, and crowdsourcing, are generating data about wild populations that are orders of magnitude richer than any previously collected. Unfortunately, in this domain as in many others, our ability to analyze data lags substantially behind our ability to collect it. In this talk I will show how computational approaches can be part of every stage of the scientific process of understanding animal sociality, from intelligent data collection (crowdsourcing photographs and identifying individual animals from photographs by stripes and spots - Wildbook.org) to hypothesis formulation (by designing a novel computational framework for analysis of dynamic social networks), and provide scientific insight into collective behavior of zebras, baboons, and other social animals.

https://cse.osu.edu/events/2019/09/guest-speaker-tanya-berger-wolf

Guest Speaker: Tanya Berger-Wolf Incoming CSE faculty and OSU TDAI Director

The AWESoME Team (Animal Wildlife Estimation using Social Media) meets in NYC!
Computational Population Biology Lab alumni Sreejith Menon (MS 2017), Matteo Foglio (MS 2018) Lorenzo Semeria (MS 2018) are meeting for the Data for Good Exchange, where Sreejith is an organizer and Lorenzo and Matteo are presenting their work!

CompPopBio at !

Machine learning salesman: Muscioni presenting his poster at

We're proud to have Director Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf organizing the and running today's KDD Earth Day workshop on Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence for Wildlife Conservation with Prof. Bistra Dilkina from USC !

Guido Muscioni presenting work on social animal behavior identification from sensors data at the workshop on and for at forest ever

Come to the workshop on and for at !
https://sites.google.com/usc.edu/kdd19-dmaic-workshop
Guido Muscioni presenting his work on behavior classification of wild animals, also presenting Matteo Foglio and Lorenzo Semeria's poster (who couldn't make it) on countering bias in population size estimates from social media photographs.
(Workshop organizers Tanya Berger-Wolf, Bistra Dilkina, Sunandan Chakraborty, Lucas Joppa)

Data Mining and AI for Conservation According the most recent WWF Living Planet Report, we are losing the planet's biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. There are numerous factors that contribute to the grim statistics, from the indirect effects of climate change to the direct results of wildlife crime. Conservation of natural resour...

Hey CompPopBios, let's have lunch at KDD on Aug 6!