The Machine Learning Lab is kicking off a series of talks that highlight the diverse applications of machine learning this spring. ML+X seminars will host faculty from across UT Austin whose work intersects with machine learning and are held every other Friday during the semester from 3-4 pm. These talks will spark engaging conversation and collaboration.

For the inaugural session, we will be joined by Denne Reed, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Remote Sensing and AI Applications in Paleoanthropology
Speaker: Denne Reed, Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology, UT Austin

Friday, Feb. 12, 2021
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Virtual: Register for link

In the past 100 years paleoanthropology has seen remarkable growth and success in recovering fossil remains documenting our evolution and prehistory. These collections have largely targeted fossil sites in the East African Rift valley based on a combination of ground surveys, geological mapping and serendipity. More recently paleoanthropologists have expanded the toolkit for site discovery to include satellite imagery and other forms of remote sensing in conjunction with artificial neural networks (ANN) to identify potential new fossiliferous deposits. This capacity for this approach is expanding as more data become available on the precise spatial location of known fossil discoveries. This talk explores the potential for using artificial intelligence in conjunction with new sensor platforms to discover fossil localities and also to aid in the identification and classification of fossils once discovered.

About the Speaker: Denné Reed is a paleoanthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the influences of ecology and environment on human adaptation, and behavior. He has conducted paleontological and archaeological field research in East Africa, southern Africa, and Morocco including 12 years of paleoanthropological research in Ethiopia focusing on early human origins. As the director of the Paleo Core project, Dr. Reed is working to integrate paleoanthropological data in order to address broad-scale questions about human evolution and environmental change, and to make the archaeological and fossil records more accessible to researchers, students and the public.