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I'm your host, Elise Hugh.

What if we could map every living species on Earth and use that knowledge to protect the planet?

In her talk, ecologist and AI researchers,

Sarah Beery shares how she and her team at MIT are building tools that let scientists

ask questions directly to vast ecological databases, unlocking hidden insights from millions

of images and recordings. She says AI can become a powerful ally in

understanding and saving the natural world. Imagine you're a doctor and you're trying to save

the life of a patient, but you can only see a fifth of their body.

How are you going to prescribe medicine?

How are you going to do surgery?

See, this is exactly the situation we're in with nature across the planet.

We need to act now to protect ecosystems under threat,

but there's so much we don't know about life on Earth.

I'm an AI researcher and an ecologist,

and as a professor at MIT,

I lead a research group that develops methods

to help us learn more about the natural world,

and I see a future where AI can help exponentially increase our ecological knowledge across

species and ecosystems. But to get there, we need to change how we use AI in ecology. We need

methods that are flexible, methods that are interactive, methods that scientists can use to discover knowledge hidden in our data.

Now, let me tell you why this is so important.

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