Living with Lions Webinar: Improving Mountain Lion Deterrents with Machine Learning

Improving Mountain Lion Deterrent Tools with Machine Learning

Wednesday, January 15 at 12pm PT via Zoom

Aditya Viswanathan (center back) is one of eight members of the Pajarito Environmental Education Center (PEEC) Nature Youth Group in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This group of incredible sophomore high school students developed PumaGuard, a machine learning application that detects and identifies, with 99% accuracy, mountain lions on trail cameras. When a puma is detected on camera, PumaGuard automatically triggers multiple deterrent methods to keep both livestock and lion safe. PumaGuard won the team a prestigious prize for their innovative and socially impactful Artificial Intelligence project in the high school track of NeurIPS, the world-renowned AI conference.

In October, Aditya was featured as a speaker at the International Wildlife Coexistence Conference. In December, he is traveling to Vancouver, Canada to present PumaGuard and receive the NeurIPS award for his team. We are lucky to have him as our January Living with Lions Webinar guest to talk about how he, his team, and his fellow young adults are creatively and proactively protecting wildlife for their generation and beyond.