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Lily Xu knew from a young age how much the environment and conservation mattered to her.

By 9 years old, shed already decided to eat vegetarian because, as she put it, I didnt want to hurt animals.

Xu grew up believing her passions would always be separate from her professional interest in computer science. Then she became a graduate student in Milind Tambes Teamcore Lab, and everything changed.

Xu is now doing award-winning research into using machine learning and artificial intelligence to help conservation and anti-poaching efforts around the world. Her recent paper, Learning, Optimization, and Planning Under Uncertainty for Wildlife Conservation, won the 2021 INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR Student Paper Competition.

From our earliest conversations, it was crystal clear that Lily was very passionate about sustainability, conservation, and the environment, said Tambe, the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). This was also the reason our wavelengths matched and I went out of my way to recruit her and ensure she joined my group.

In the Teamcore Lab, Xu helped develop Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS), an artificial intelligence system that interfaces with a database used by park rangers to record observations of illegal poaching and predict which areas are likely to be poaching hotspots. The system makes it easier for rangers to choose the best locations to patrol.

In 2019, Xu and the Teamcore Lab partnered with the Srepok Wildlife Sanctuary in Cambodia to test the efficacy of PAWS. At the time, the sanctuary only had 72 rangers to patrol an area slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island.

Our work with Cambodia was the most intensive collaboration with a park that weve had, said Xu. We had several months of meetings, and our interactions with them and the feedback they were giving us about the process really shaped the design of our algorithms.

Xu played a lead role in implementing field tests of the PAWS program. Through Tambe, Xu and her lab mates, Srepoks rangers greatly increased the number of poachers snares they removed throughout the sanctuary.

More here:

Computer Conservation - Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences