Research meetup 10 – Learning and Planning Under Uncertainty for Wildlife Conservation

28-09-2022 17:00 – 18:00 CET

Wildlife poaching fuels the multi-billion dollar illegal wildlife trade and pushes countless species to the brink of extinction. To aid rangers in preventing poaching in protected areas around the world, we have developed PAWS, the Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security. We present technical advances in multi-armed bandits and robust sequential decision-making using reinforcement learning, with research questions that emerged from on-the-ground challenges. We also discuss bridging the gap between research and practice, presenting results from field tests in Cambodia and large-scale deployment through integration with SMART, the leading software system for protected area management used by over 1,000 wildlife parks worldwide.