Platform downtime scheduled on Wednesday November 20.
The Zooniverse platform will be offline for scheduled maintenance on Wednesday, November 20 from 4pm-10pm US Central Standard Time (2024-11-20 22:00 UTC to 2024-11-21 4:00 UTC). During this period, all projects and platform services will be inaccessible. We apologize for the inconvenience; this maintenance is necessary to make updates to platform infrastructure and improve long-term reliability and uptime. Please visit status.zooniverse.org for updates before and during the downtime period. For any additional questions, please email contact@zooniverse.org.
We encourage you to register on the Ripples portal prior to classifying elephants to ensure you receive participation credit
The Team
Ana Uribe
Ana is a masters student in the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. She is interested in using computer science as a tool to aid in conservation and climate-related problems. Ana has worked to create this Zooniverse project to help generate an elephant database for Elephants for Africa.
Dr. Kate Evans
Dr. Kate Evans is the Founder, CEO & Principle Researcher of Elephants for Africa. Her interest in male elephants has expanded to focus on the social and ecological requirements of male elephants in the context of a human landscape.
Kate is a member of the Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre, a member of the IUCN African Elephant Specialist Group and the Elephant Specialist Advisory Group.
Dr. Sarah Huebner
Dr. Sarah Huebner is a Researcher with the University of Minnesota and Zooniverse. Her research focuses on the practical aspects of conserving and restoring wild mammal populations, including long-term continuous monitoring to safeguard biodiversity and assess trends in wildlife demographics and distributions in response to anthropogenic disturbances.
She created and manages ‘Snapshot Safari’, a multinational distributed network of ecologists, wildlife managers, data scientists, citizen scientists, and local community members working together to protect and restore African mammals. Snapshot Safari has deployed camera trap grids at >50 sites in Botswana, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe using standardized data collection protocols to allow for cross-site comparisons of wildlife populations and conservation programs.
Dr. Lucy Fortson
Dr. Lucy Fortson is a Professor in the School of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Minnesota and a co-founder of the Zooniverse platform. At night, she’s a gamma-ray astrophysicist studying active galactic nuclei. Her day job is pushing our understanding of how to best combine human and machine intelligence on the Zooniverse platform - we can’t tackle the challenges of big data in any domain without both. One of her favorite things about working with the Zooniverse is the opportunity to learn about so many different areas of science - she’s excited to be part of this project because she gets learn a lot about elephants and what it takes to help with conservation efforts!
Dr. Sara Beery
Sara Beery is an assistant professor at MIT. She recently worked at Google on large-scale urban forest monitoring as part of the Auto Arborist project. Her research focuses on building computer vision methods that enable global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring across data modalities, tackling real-world challenges including geospatial and temporal domain shift, learning from imperfect data, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions. She partners with industry, nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies to deploy her methods in the wild worldwide.
Dr. Chuck Stewart
Chuck is a professor and head of the Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. His research is in computer vision, with applications in ecology and environmental conservation. He leads much of the research in computer vision and machine learning of the Wildbook project (earlier referred to as "IBEIS" (Image-Based Ecological Information System).
He is also Founder and Chief Scientist of DualAlign, LLC. Check our line of photomosaicking, image montaging, and single-modal and mulit-modal image registration software.
Dr. Kameswara Bharadwaj Mantha
Kameswara is an Extragalactic Astrophysicist, working on his postdoctoral research at Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics, University of Minnesota (UMN), in collaboration with the UMN Zooniverse team. He works on implementing novel machine learning approaches along with synergy between citizen science to better identify anomalous and scientifically interesting subjects across several domains spanning astronomy to medicine.
Dr. Ramanakumar Sankar
Ramanakumar is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities working on human-computer optimization problems using neural networks on the Zooniverse citizen science platform. He is also working on using JunoCam images to classify cloud features in the jovian atmosphere using the Zooniverse platform coupled with a neural network.
Peter Kulits
Peter is a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems co-advised by Michael Black and Silvia Zuffi. His research focuses on estimating wild animal shape and behavior in the wild.
He received his bachelor of science degree from Caltech in Dec. 2021 and spent the first six months of 2022 at the Mara Elephant Project in Kenya as a research fellow.
