LACCIR Projects

LiveANDES: A Software Platform to Share and Analyze Information for Wildlife Conservation
LiveANDES (Advanced Network for Distribution of Endangered Species) provides a software platform where users can upload, visualize, and share wildlife data, helping to create a global conservation community in the Americas. Currently, LiveANDES covers all terrestrial vertebrates of Chile, displaying a database searchable by ecological, administrative, and protected areas. It empowers citizen scientists, enabling them to share data that helps map the presence and distribution of endangered species-information that is vital to assessing their conservation status.

In this talk, we cover the technological underpinnings of LiveANDES, including its web solution based on Microsoft .NET technologies and its mobile implementations for Windows Phone and Android devices. We also cover our plans to migrate the platform to the cloud by using Windows Azure, thereby creating a mobile, cloud-shared space for wildlife conservation, and our goal of adding Bolivian and North American libraries and regions for data-sharing and mapping.

Using Sensor Networks to Classify Frogs Based on Their Calls
Anurans (frogs and toads) are commonly used by biologists as bioindicators of the early stages of ecological stress. Unfortunately, most current monitoring methods are intrusive and error prone. By using sensor networks, we can automatically classify anuran calls and determine the species in a target site, thereby acquiring relevant and accurate data about the environment in a less intrusive way. Our research aims at using signal processing and machine-learning techniques to classify anuran calls as a tool to continuously monitor the environment, allowing us to find correlations between destabilizing events, such as fire, flooding, and deforestation, and the anuran population in a given observation site.

Speaker Details

Cristián Bonacic is an associate professor in the School of Agriculture and Forestry, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, and has led a wildlife conservation research group for more than 10 years in Chile. His research interests include automatic and remote systems for wildlife surveillance, citizen science, IT applied to wildlife conservation, and networking of biodiversity conservation scientists. He earned a D.Phil. in zoology at Britain’s Oxford University.

Ignacio Casas is professor of information technologies in the Department of Computer Science (DCS), School of Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC Chile). His main research interests are business-driven technologies and technology-enhanced learning (TEL) environments and tools. Ignacio has been a leading figure in Chile’s information and communication technology (ICT) development, co-founding DCS-PUC Chile (1981) and serving as its head (1988–1992); co-founding and serving as president (1989–1990) of the Chilean Computer Science Society; and serving as chief technology officer at PUC Chile (1995–2005). He is responsible for introducing TEL systems, Wi-Fi, and e-learning services in his university. Ignacio is the co-founder and co-director of the 15-year-old RELATED network, which advocates the development and use of TEL in Latin America, and the executive director of the LACCIR, which works to advance ICT applied research in the region. He is a member of IEEE and Colegio de Ingenieros de Chile and serves on the board of directors of several technology development enterprises. He earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Toronto.

Eduardo Nakamura is a researcher and professor at the Research and Technological Innovation Center, Brazil, and at the Federal University of Amazonas, Brazil. His research interests include data fusion, distributed algorithms, localization algorithms, wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks, and mobile and pervasive computing. He has served as a TCP member for numerous international conferences and as an associate editor of international journals, including IEEE Sensors and the International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks. He received the Latin America Region Young Professional Award, granted by the IEEE LA ComSoc, for his “contribution to the area of wireless sensor networks”; he also received the Brazilian Ministry of Education’s Best PhD Thesis Award in the category of Engineering and Exact and Earth Sciences for his thesis, “Information Fusion for Wireless Sensor Networks.” He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Date:
Speakers:
Cristián Bonacic, Eduardo Freire Nakamura, and Ignacio Casas
Affiliation:
Catholic University of Chile (PUC-Chile), LACCIR, Research and Technological Innovation Center (FUCAPI)