About the Presenters:
Explore the abstracts and biographies of our lightning talk and poster presenters.
The third annual UW–Madison Sustainability Symposium took place on Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024 from 1:00-5:30pm at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. The event featured lightning talks, poster sessions, and a keynote by Dr. Sara Beery on AI and sustainability.
Hosted in partnership with the Data Science Institute, Facilities Planning & Management, the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University Lectures, and the UW Environmental Awareness Fund, the Symposium provides a space to share research on sustainability, generate ideas, and inspire collaboration. Questions? Please email Will Erikson.
- 1:00 pm – Introductions: Paul Robbins, Dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies; and Dr. Andrea Hicks, Director of Sustainability Education and Research
- 1:20 pm – Keynote on AI and Sustainability: Dr. Sara Beery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- 2:00 pm – Break: Refreshments and networking
- 2:15 pm – Lightning Talks
- 3:30 pm – Updates from the Sustainability Research Hub: Dr. Matt Ginder-Vogel, Associate Director of Sustainability Research and Innovation
- 4:00 pm – Closing Remarks: Dr. Matt Ginder-Vogel, Associate Director of Sustainability Research and Innovation
- 4:15 – 5:30 pm – Reception: Poster presentations, refreshments, and networking
The 2023 Sustainability Symposium brought together nearly 400 attendees, showcasing over 30 posters and 19 lightning talks. The full recap is available here. To stay informed on this year’s event, including how to register and submit proposals, subscribe to UW–Madison’s monthly sustainability newsletter.
The Sustainability Symposium will take place at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, located at 330 N Orchard St, Madison, WI 53715. Please consider walking, bicycling, or taking a bus to the gathering, as you are able. Bicycling information can be found here. Bus information can be found here and the following buses have stops near the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery: 28, 38, 65, 80, A, C, D, F, J, O, and R. We have also registered with Roundtrip to provide carpooling options to the event.
Keynote Address
Dr. Sara Beery
Homer A. Burnell Assistant Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dr. Sara Beery is the Homer A. Burnell Career Development Professor in the MIT Faculty of Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making. She was previously a visiting researcher at Google, working on large-scale urban forest monitoring as part of the Auto Arborist project. She received her PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech in 2022, where she was advised by Pietro Perona and awarded the Amori Doctoral Prize for her thesis. Her research focuses on building computer vision methods that enable global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring across data modalities, tackling real-world challenges including geospatial and temporal domain shift, learning from imperfect data, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions. She partners with industry, nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies to deploy her methods in the wild worldwide. She works toward increasing the diversity and accessibility of academic research in artificial intelligence through interdisciplinary capacity building and education, and has founded the AI for Conservation slack community, serves as the Biodiversity Community Lead for Climate Change AI, founded and directs the Workshop on Computer Vision Methods for Ecology, and co-leads the NSF Global Climate Center on AI and Biodiversity Change.
Natural world images collected by communities of enthusiast volunteers provide a vast and largely uncurated source of data. For instance, iNaturalist has over 200 million images tagged with species labels, already contributing immensely to research such as biodiversity monitoring and having been cited in over 4,000 scientific papers. Yet, these images are also known to contain a wealth of “secondary data” captured unintentionally or otherwise included in images and not properly reflected in image labels. Although this data contains crucial insights into interactions, animal social behavior, morphology, habitat, co-occurrence, and many more questions, the costly, time-consuming, or expert-dependent analysis needed to extract such information prevents breakthroughs. Advances in deep learning methods for language and computer vision have the potential to enable the efficient and automated processing techniques needed to unlock the “hidden treasure” in such datasets– being able to directly search large image collections for these concepts would enable richer analyses that span beyond species identification. We propose interactive, open-ended image retrieval as a mechanism to support scientific discovery in these collections, and introduce INQUIRE, a novel text-to-image retrieval benchmark built to provide a rigorous evaluation that challenges models to demonstrate advanced knowledge and visual reasoning on expert, scientifically impactful retrieval tasks.
"In the face of [climate change] you are not being resigned, or quiescent. You are finding ways to move forward and make a difference and to pull people together collaboratively to engage around these issues of sustainability. We need that, we need you, and we all need to figure out what we can do to help create a world that can sustain itself.”
Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin, Closing Remarks at the 2022 Sustainability Symposium