Using AI to Help Restore the Natural World
Drawing from his own research David Dao demonstrates how Machine Learning can help accelerate Climate Action.
David Dao is the Founder of GainForest and researches AI for Sustainable Development at ETH Zurich.
Notable Responses
Holly Veselka, USA (BeFantastic Together Fellow ’21)
“This landscape reflects on soil as a carbon sink. What I found interesting is the my original photo is full of life (wildflowers, bison, etc.) and symbols of hope (a double rainbow.) The AI erased both the life and the hope in its initial translation of the photos. There is nothing I can do with any gene, child, or crossbreed to put life back into the image.”
Elly Cho, South Korea (BeFantastic Together Fellow ’21)
“In David Dao’s video I felt Georeserve – indigenous culture, significant conservation storytelling of the landscape and how we learn about the world, how we learn about ourselves through their restoration story. The data of forest restoration, cosmologies, surfacing data of water in mars were intriguing. Water is foundation of resources for life and I wanted to visualize which is associated with the deforestation.”
Melanie Conrad, Germany (BeFantastic Together Fellow ’21)
“The human species is long extinct. A specie from a different planet exploring horizons sends a machine to collect pictures from planet earth to see if it’s suitable for life and settlement. From the pictures, the planet seems very arid and inhospitable. They are from knowing that they are looking at what used to be the beautiful Lapland in Sweden, where bears wandered around forest and rivers and moose grazed in peace.”
Sayak Shome, India (BeFantastic Together Fellow ’21)
“Inspired by David Dao’s provocation, I took a photograph I had taken of mist covered trees in Arunachal Pradesh and an image of chopped down trees from an article on deforestation posted on University of California San Diego’s News Center. I fed it to the Nvidia gaugan, and a resulting image was produced, where the AI seemed to have cut down the trees and made a civillization in it. It reminded me of the film Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog.”
Vinko Vrsalovic , Spain (BeFantastic Together Fellow ’21)
“Based on the forest monitoring AI provocation and working with my portrait I came upon this idea, which is sort of a playful intersection of advertisements, trees and their importance in our lives. A second picture continuing the phrase might be great to continue to idea further.”
Edward Hutchins, Singapore (BeFantastic Together Fellow ’21)
“I was inspired by the provocation about deforestation, and how the feeling of loss is so powerful. We have all experienced loss, and we know how much it can hurt, and how often we don’t appreciate what we have till it’s gone. I wanted to write something simple that captured those feeling of loss in the a way that everyone can relate to.”
Tiny Domingos, Germany (BeFantastic Together Fellow ’21)
“Inspired by the challenge of David Dao, a landscape where water and land meet. I believe life began at this mineral interface with water. We need to reconnect with the mineral.”
Saransh Sugandh, India (BeFantastic Together Fellow ’21)
“I followed the provocation by David Dao and his talk on ‘Using AI to Help Restore the Natural World’. It is a known fact that forests help a great deal in carbon sequestration but governments and the tinder lobby continues to bluff itself and others into expanding the meaning of ‘green cover’. This doesn’t serve anyone at all and we keep missing the trees for the woods. Here I artificially create sounds that mimic a forest and at the same time use the literal words -‘Trees’ and ‘Woods’ for the machine to be able to distinguish between the two. But both the sounds are layered by background noise so the machine can some times tell the difference and at times not. But when faced with natural sounds, it usually knows off the bat where lies a forest. It is an exploration in both mimicking a forest (as done through fraudulent redefinition of green cover) as well as our own desire to connect to nature through the reality of a forest or its recreation through certain sounds.”
Rebecca Goh, Singapore (BeFantastic Together Fellow ’21)
“I’d synthesised an actual landscape of a large forest criss-crossed with gravel / mud roads and houses, and created an image where the patterns of dots in the centre resembles featureless faces in grey, contrasted against a green patch of land. I’ve placed fog along the edges of the image that seems to be engulfing the central island of colour – a sinister advancement that threatens its very existence.”
Cheyenne Alexandria Philips, Singapore (BeFantastic Together Fellow ’21)
“The word I choose for myself was ‘passionate’. I was inspired by the third provocation and the conversations about indigenous wisdom on the second day. Indigenous women often carry a lot of wisdom with them that can be ignored because 1) they are indigenous 2) they are women. This portrait is dedicated to all the strong passionate women fighting for survival in their respective communities.”
