Developing Conservation AI - UCL CS students work on Microsoft Project 15

Earth Day 2021 was celebrated widely. Microsoft sought to celebrate the day by honouring student projects that worked in line with Project 15; praising the hard work students had put in to save animals and preserve our ecosystems. They endorsed the efforts to include an open source software platform that aids non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to reduce their cost, complexity, and time to deployment. They do this by connecting scientific teams with the technology needed to solve environmental challenges.

Project 15 is a Microsoft led sustainability and conservation AI programme empowering students, technologists, and conservationists to help preserve endangered species and habitats. Each student involved in the project gained access to the Microsoft Cloud platform, created to take students 80% of the way. This was intended to avoid time consuming technicalities and the unnecessary need to create cloud architecture from scratch. Thus allowing students to achieve preservation goals much faster.

“The mission of Project 15 from Microsoft is to capture and analyze the data they need to preserve critical species and ecosystems. In an effort to do this, we developed the Project 15 Open Platform on GitHub (http://aka.ms/project15code) as a method to accelerate solutions by providing 80% of the Azure IoT infrastructure that is needed in solutioning.  Using the open platform as a foundation, the idea was to pair conservation focused organizations and companies to capstone projects at UCL.  The goal was to not only give the students a rich experience using Microsoft Cloud technologies to build a project that was impactful but to be able to help these organizations move their important projects forward.”
- Sarah Maston, Senior Technical Specialist & Solution Architect at Microsoft

On Thursday 16th April 2021, Farid El-Aouadi and Chak Koppula, two students from University College London (UCL) working on their UCL Industry Exchange Network (UCL IXN) final year dissertation projects, presented live on air to a Microsoft NET technology specialist and their advisor throughout the projects, Maxime Rouiller.

Farid El-Aouadi worked on Red Panda conservation, highlighting that the current system in use by the Red Panda Network revolved heavily around human labour.
(Maxime and Farid pictured below).

“From manually classifying and retrieving images to making in-field observations using pen and paper, it was clear that the workflow needed a flair of innovation to allow the organisation to work smarter and not harder.” - Farid El-Aouadi

The current system made use of camera traps that were out in the Himalayas, and trained locals used to collect data and record observations manually. After meeting with Sonam Tashi Lama, Program Coordinator for the Red Panda Network, Farid was able to gather intel on the requirements for the project. With the aid of Maxime Rouiller, his Microsoft advisor, “he transformed what was a time consuming process into a holistic solution”. 

Images captured would enter a new workflow that leveraged Azure Machine Learning to automate the processing of identifying if there was a panda or not.  Farid turned the use of a smart phone by the Forrest Guardians into what could be mobile camera traps by processing the location meta-data to place each image on a map automatically.

“Farid did an incredible work with Red Panda. He shown us repeatedly to be a fast learner that was dedicated to the success of Red Panda and on reaching the goals of Project 15. Farid is an excellent engineer, and it was a pleasure for me to help him in those conservation efforts.” - Maxime Rouiller, Microsoft NET technology specialist and advisor to Farid.

Throughout the interview, Farid explained how his new system allowed the Red Panda Network to tell a better story with their data and how he created a nice experience to interact and empathise with their data; a goal he had in sight from the beginning and successfully achieved.

Towards the end of the interview Farid spoke of his experience using the Cloud, describing it as a steep but rewarding learning curve. He concluded the interview with his experience with the IXN programme, “The stuff you learn at Uni, and the experience of doing something are two completely different things… Through experiencing you learn little intricacies and little quirks that you [would] never learn before.”. Farid, implored other students to, “get stuck in”, emphasising the value of the programme and its ability to help students learn.

Chak Koppula, also working with Project 15, focused his efforts towards conserving the elephant population, highlighting that the African elephant population had reduced by 20% due to poaching. With the current population of African elephants of just 415,000, Chak built a system to identify and track the movement of elephants, with the intention to prevent their numbers from further depletion, and to create tools that added value to the current system in place.

Throughout the project, Chak successfully created a script in 2-3 months, that takes data from the cloud storage index set, ultimately generating a tool that seamlessly integrates with the current system. Furthermore, Chak was able to increase the accuracy of the data by 76% via object detection modules. This allowed the data gathered to be more defined, gaining more information on the images such as how many elephants there are and where the elephants are in the picture.
(Maxime and Chak pictured below).

Throughout the interview, Chak explored the benefits of working on the project, how interesting it was to work within a team, and how tasks are carried out in such a working environment. He explored how his soft skills were broadened by the experience, and how broad a teams skill set is when working together to provide one large solution.

““Microsoft is committed to environmental sustainability and both Chak and Farid are engineers that made a big impact on us at Microsoft, and we can’t wait to see the kind of impact they will be having on the world.” - Maxime Rouiller

Earth day was a huge success, with the combined efforts of Chak and Farid, their mentor Maxime Rouiller and the teams they worked within for Project 15; there are new systems active, cultivated with the latest of technologies and set in motion with the innovation of two students who wish to  make a difference in the world.

Editorial by Selina Peerbux

Farid El-Aouadi and Chak Koppula, Final Year Computer Science undergraduate students, interviewed by Maxime Rouiller, from Microsoft.