Rendered.ai participates in #dataforwildlife challenge to tackle wildlife crime online
The Rendered.ai team would like to highlight the contribution of our very own Chris Andrews, Samruddhi Kulkarni, and Daniel Hedges with a special shoutout to Neel Jog in the #dataforwildlife challenge this weekend hosted by our partner, Bright Tide. We’d like to give a special thanks to Harry Wright, Meredith Gore, and Patricia Raxter, Ph.D. for organizing this event with a stellar panel of experts and teams.
We are happy to support a great cause — tackling wildlife crime online: the algorithmic amplification of wildlife crime via social media platforms is a serious concern for organizations combating the global biodiversity extinction crisis. The challenge the Rendered.ai team tackled in this hackathon was attempting to create a benchmark dataset to be used by analysts to differentiate online wildlife crime from unproblematic depictions of wildlife.
Ultimately, efforts like the Bright Tide hackathon hope to slow species decline by both creating and validating techniques to detect criminal activity in partnership with Hitech companies. Also, these efforts raise awareness of the additional pressure that social platforms have inadvertently caused by enabling easy access to information and transaction tools for traffickers and consumers.
The challenge was a great opportunity to put the participants in the mindset of real-world information analysts for whom acquiring real sensor data to train machine learning detection tools can be overwhelmingly difficult. As a platform for synthetic data generation, Rendered.ai has already shown that synthetic data can be an achievable and significant solution to data scarcity in many cases.
