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17 October 2024

ECC Seminar: Anil Madhavapeddy

We live in a crowded world, where balancing the growing demands of food, fuel, and fiber for human populations against the urgent need to protect wildlife is increasingly challenging. How can technology help us strike this delicate balance?

Join us on Thursday 17th October, 6pm, at the S2 Room, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, as Anil Madhavapeddy (University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory) shares cutting-edge research on planetary computing and its potential to transform conservation efforts. Using satellite sensing and computational models, Anil will explore how we can measure biodiversity, track the impact of human activities, and even assess how global food choices influence natural ecosystems.

Abstract:

The world is a really crowded place these days; we are trying to balance the food, fuel and fibre needs of a growing human population with the need to spare land for natural wildlife that are facing an extinction crisis. In this talk, Anil will discuss our ongoing work on building comprehensive maps of the world that measure important aspects of nature by leverage satellite sensing and computation pipelines. These models can measure things like tropical forest carbon, but also be composed to build the first globally comparable measure of biodiversity (through a species persistence approach), and also help measure the country-level impacts of human food choices to natural biodiversity. He’ll discuss some of the implications of this global monitoring approach: is this an opportunity to equalise the data landscape to the global south, or will it just reinforce existing data inequality?

Anil Madhavapeddy

Anil Madhavapeddy

Professor of Planetary Computing, University of Cambridge

Anil Madhavapeddy is the Director of the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits. He is Professor of Planetary Computing at the Department of Computer Science and Technology in the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. He has worked in industry (NetApp, Citrix, Intel), academia (Cambridge, Imperial, UCLA) and startups (XenSource, Unikernel Systems, Docker) over the past two decades. At Cambridge, he is a member of the Environment and Energy Group at the Computer Laboratory, where he works on large-scale computation and sensing for environmental conservation. He is a long-time maintainer on open-source projects such as OpenBSD, OCaml, Xen, and Docker, and a seasoned entrepreneur who advises companies on technology strategy (currently Zededa, Tezos Foundation, Tarides, and others).