Justin Kay

My background is in computer science and machine learning, and I am excited about the ways that these fields can support ecological science and conservation. In 2019 I co-founded Ai.Fish LLC, an artificial intelligence company focused on computer vision applications in marine conservation and sustainability, where I currently serve as the CTO. In this role I have led computer vision projects in the marine space in collaboration with several incredible NGOs including the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the Environmental Defense Fund. I have additionally collaborated with The Nature Conservancy on their open source fisheries dataset fishnet.ai, and presented that dataset to the computer vision research community through a workshop publication at last year's CVPR conference. I also work part-time as a researcher in the Computational Vision Lab at Caltech, where we are developing computer vision methods for monitoring migrating salmon.

These experiences have taught me that (i) emerging AI technologies can have a significant positive impact toward scaling ecological monitoring projects around the globe, and (ii) that impactful research in AI is often driven by high-quality benchmarks and datasets that encourage other researchers to help push the state of the art. I am very excited for the opportunity to collaborate with Seal Watch to help develop methods to understand seals and encourage other computer vision researchers to do the same.

January 2022