Webinar: iNat Scalable Download and ML Insect ID App 20221118

iNaturalist is a popular, citizen-science platform that contains an image database of 70+ million research-grade, labeled, open source images of living organisms, an incredibly rich resource for natural historians and scientists, from amateurs to professionals. To enable researchers to access this rich image database, collaborators Zi Deng of the University of Arizona and Shivani Chiranjeevi of Iowa State University will demonstrate iNaturalist Scalable Download, a python tool they've built to allow researchers, especially those training Machine Learning models, to easily query and download subsets of images from the iNaturalist Open Dataset. Zi and Shivani will demonstrate a typical use case for their tool, then present an insect classification model that uses Self-Supervised (SSL) techniques that they are working on as collaborators in the AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture (AIIRA, based at Iowa State University) that utilizes data from the tool.

Aimed at researchers, this webinar will showcase an app that is primarily built for people interested in acquiring more data for their machine learning model but anyone interested in image datasets of living organisms will benefit from learning about iNaturalist Scalable Download. And if you're a farmer or researcher or just buggy for insects, join us for a demonstration of a mobile app they've created that helps identify various insect-pest species on the field.