2019-05-27

New course on Machine Learning in biodiversity science established

In May 2019, the University of Aarhus organized a workshop on 'Machine Learning for Biologists’, a three-day meeting designed to answer to the fast-growing demand for Machine Learning applications in Ecology and Biodiversity Informatics.


”Most early career scientists are today confronted with big data in their research projects and we feel that we need to provide some guidance about theory, methods and tools when dealing with such large data volumes”, says the workshop organiser Jesper Bladt. To this end we brought together a team of experts in data science and biodiversity research from Scandinavia and Estonia. We then designed computer exercises and build up a course program where students apply deep learning methods to newly emerging analytical problems in ecology, such as image processing and species distribution analyses. After three days, we had established a new course on an emerging hot topic, and it is likely that we will attract many students in the future with this program. The workshop was financed by the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC) and featured invited teachers from Aarhus University, the Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Center (GGBC), and the Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure (SBDI).