Assistant Professor Yiqun Xie received an award from Google’s AI for Social Good program for the project titled “Greener Amazon: Combating Illegal Deforestation at Scale with Novel AI and Satellite Imagery.”

In this project, Dr. Xie will collaborate with Imazon (Amazon Institute of People and the Environment), a leading Brazilian research institution in monitoring as well as promoting conservation and sustainable development in the Amazon Forest.

Specifically, Dr. Xie will work with Dr. Carlos Souza and his team to develop new large-scale deep learning algorithms for the deforestation alert system using high-resolution satellite imagery. The technologies will build on Xie’s team’s expertise on heterogeneity-aware learning and self-supervised learning for remote sensing data.

The new information from the alert system will address important societal challenges facing local governments in combating illegal deforestation, and mitigate the accelerated climate change trends and biodiversity losses.