Guest Lecture: Prasenjit Mitra

Applications of data science to wildlife informatics

Speaker: Prasenjit Mitra, professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology and graduate faculty in the Social Data Analytics program at the Pennsylvania State University.

Abstract: This talk will focus on work in three applications of data science to the area of wildlife informatics. First, Mitra will show how his group has clustered and visualized elephant movements to better understand their movement patterns. Second, he will show how clustering and visualization can help the understanding of the spatiotemporal patterns in wildlife seizure and crime data. Third, Mitra will attempt the problem of automatically detecting tourist violation of distancing rules in national parks from social media posts. Specifically, he will show the technical difficulties that need to be overcome in order to detect whether the distancing rules are violated and some initial thoughts on tackling the problem. The successes, limitations, and potential for data science in this area will be discussed in order to spur more research in this area.

Bio: Prasenjit Mitra, Ph.D. is a professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology and a graduate faculty in the Social Data Analytics program at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. His research is in artificial intelligence and big data analytics in the areas of applied machine learning, natural language processing and text mining, information retrieval, and visual analytics. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation CAREER award and his publications have been awarded several best paper awards including the Test of Time Award by the IEEE International Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology, the premier publication venue in visual analytics in 2021.

Mitra was one of the co-founders and the inaugural director of the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence at the Pennsylvania State University. From 2018-2021, he served as the Associate Dean for Research for the College. His work has been highly cited (h-index 57, ~11,500 citations) and has authored over 200 articles at top conferences and journals. His previous Ph.D. and post-doctoral students hold leading positions in companies such as Google, Alibaba, IBM Research, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Trulia, Yahoo Research, LinkedIn Yahoo, Baidu. Others have successfully launched big data/AI startups and hold faculty positions at KAIST, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Kansas State University, and the University of North Texas. Mitra received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 2005, his master's from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994, and his bachelor's from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India in 1993. 

Host: Timothy X. Brown