Here she is on the TED stage.

So say you wanna look through all this data.

Assuming it takes you about a second to look at every image, you would need to work full-time for forty years to look through all the images in iNaturalist alone, and this is where AI is transformative.

It can just help us look through all the data quickly.

So an ecologist today, say they're interested in bird diets, and they want to find examples of birds eating insects in the database.

What they can do is they can train an AI model to help them.

So to do this, they collect hundreds or even thousands of examples to teach the model what to look for.

Mm-hmm

She says AI can become a powerful ally in understanding and saving the natural world.

Imagine you're a doctor and you're trying to save the life of a patient, but you can only see a fifth of their body.

How are you going to prescribe medicine? How are you going to do surgery? See, this is exactly the situation we're in with nature across the planet.

We need to act now to protect ecosystems under threat, but there's so much we don't know about life on Earth.

I'm an AI researcher and an ecologist, and as a professor at MIT, I lead a research group that develops methods to help us learn more about the natural world.

And I see a future where AI can help exponentially increase our ecological knowledge across species and ecosystems.

But to get there, we need to change how we use AI in ecology.

[gentle music] From filing cabinets to floppy disks, all tech becomes obsolete eventually, but maybe there's a longer term solution.