How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED
Jul 03, 2026 16:24
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Imagine you're a doctor and you're trying to save the life of
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a patient, but you can only see a fifth of their body.
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How are you going to prescribe medicine?
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How are you going to do surgery?
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See,
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this is exactly the situation we're in with nature across the planet.
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We need to act now to protect ecosystems under threat.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
But there's so much we don't know about life on Earth.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
I'm an AI researcher and an ecologist.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
And as a professor at MIT,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
I lead a research group that develops methods to help us learn more
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about the natural world.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
And I see a future where AI can help exponentially increase
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our ecological knowledge across species and ecosystems.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
But to get there,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
we need to change how we use AI in ecology.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
We need methods that are flexible,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
methods that are interactive,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
methods that scientists can use to discover knowledge hidden in
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
our data.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Now,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
let me tell you why this is so important.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Scientists estimate there are 10 million species
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sharing the planet with us.
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But we have only ever observed 2 million
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of those.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
That means 8 million species.
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80 % of the diversity of life on Earth remains unknown.
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And we need to know much more than just a species
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exists to be able to protect it.
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Where does it live?
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What does it eat?
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Does it migrate?
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How far?
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
This deeper knowledge about species takes far more than
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a single observation,
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but it's necessary to understand what puts species at
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risk.
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So for an example,
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what if insect populations crash across
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North America?
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We know this is currently happening.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
What does that mean for birds that eat insects?
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Which birds are going to be most at risk,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
and which are going to be able to adapt to other food sources?
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What about predators further up the food chain that eat birds?
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Everything is interconnected,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
and a threat to one species or a group of species can ripple outward
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
and trigger the complete collapse of an ecosystem as we know it.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Unfortunately,
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species are under threat from every direction.
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Habitats are shrinking.
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Temperatures are rising.
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Food and water sources are disappearing.
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Natural disasters like fire are causing large
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-scale death and displacement.
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And invasive species are moving in and outcompeting
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native species for resources.
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As a result,
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extinction rates are now 100 to 1 ,000 times higher than what we would expect
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based on past data.
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Scientists,
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policymakers,
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and community members worldwide are racing to understand what
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is causing this,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
what are the factors that are most contributing to this loss,
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and what actions we can take to stop it.
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But unfortunately,
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it can feel like we're discovering species just in time to
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write their obituaries.
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Take the Tapanuli orangutan.
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We discovered this orangutan in 2017.
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It's one of only three species of orangutan on Earth,
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and it was critically endangered before we even knew it existed.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Traditional forms of data collection are just too
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slow to keep up with our current crisis.
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And this is where I finally have some good news,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
because we are sitting on vast databases of ecological
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knowledge, and we have barely scratched the surface.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Let's talk about just one of these databases,
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which is a platform called iNaturalist.
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300 million images have been uploaded to this platform by
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passionate volunteers.
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In every single image,
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the community has identified a species,
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and that level of species occurrence data has already been transformative
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for science.
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But there is a hidden treasure trove of knowledge that remains
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in the pixels.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
So let's look at just one of these images.
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In iNaturalist,
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this was labeled Grant's zebra.
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And it's clearly evidence that grant zebra were sighted in this place and
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time.
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But it shows us so much more than that.
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There are three grant zebra in this image.
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We can identify each of them to the individual level based on their unique
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stripe pattern.
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By identifying individuals,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
we can do things like monitoring how species move across the planet,
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looking at social networks of species,
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growth,
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health,
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even estimating the full population size.
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These zebra are also coexisting with a herd of wildebeest.
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And if we look closely,
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we can even see an oxpecker,
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a bird that eats ticks and helps reduce the spread of disease.
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We could look at the background of the image.
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and identify the type and coverage of vegetation.
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We can estimate biomass,
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use that to learn about locally stored carbon.
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We can look at what the animals are eating in the image and build a stronger
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knowledge of a local food chain.
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Take this much knowledge in one image and multiply it by 300 million
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images in iNaturalist.
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And then add in our other ecological databases.
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Millions of bioacoustic recordings in Xenocanto.
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Tens of millions of camera trap images in Wildlife Insights.
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Thousands of hours of deep -sea footage in FathomNet.
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We're sitting on an ecological gold mine.
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And the problem is accessing the knowledge efficiently.
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So,
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say you want to look through all this data.
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Assuming it takes you about a second to look at every image,
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you would need to work full -time for 40 years to look through all the images in
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iNaturalist alone.
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And this is where AI is transformative.
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It can just help us look through all the data quickly.
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So an ecologist today...
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say they're interested in bird diets,
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and they want to find examples of birds eating insects in the database,
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what they can do is they can train an AI model to help them.
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So to do this,
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they collect hundreds or even thousands of examples to teach the model what to
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look for.
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Now,
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once they've trained this model,
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it's an incredible tool.
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It can very,
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very quickly find new examples of birds eating insects in the database.
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But this process of collecting hundreds or thousands of examples every
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time we want to look for something new,
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it's still too slow.
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So let's reframe the question.
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Scientific discovery really begins
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with scientific curiosity,
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with asking questions about the world and how it works.
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Things like,
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how far can a grant zebra migrate?
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What plants grow back after a forest fire?
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Do birds eat insects during the winter?
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Wouldn't it be great if instead we could just directly ask questions to
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our databases and get answers back?
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This is what my team at MIT has been working towards.
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And we've developed a system that we call Inquire that helps ecologists
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find answers in the data without collecting any examples
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to teach an AI model or needing to write any lines of code.
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Now, under the hood,
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what we're doing is we're developing AI models that can learn and understand
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similarities between images and scientific language.
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And this is what allows us to just ask.
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So how does Inquire work?
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Well, first,
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an ecologist designs an experiment by taking a scientific question
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and breaking it down into a series of search terms that they can use to discover
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data that they'll analyze downstream.
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So one of those terms might be bird -eating insect.
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Now what happens is Inquire takes that search and
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it directly compares it to all 300 million images within seconds.
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It's engineered to do this both quickly and efficiently,
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which is important because it means the system is truly interactive,
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but it also requires far less computational power than a
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generative AI approach like ChatGPT.
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Now, once all of these images are sorted based on their relevance to the query,
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it's really easy for scientists to just focus their attention on
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the data that's most likely to be relevant to them and quickly verify the
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true matches.
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Now,
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you have human -verified examples of data that you can directly export and
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analyze.
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One of our collaborators used this system,
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and they found thousands of examples of birds eating insects,
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but also seeds,
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fruit, nuts,
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carrion,
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nectar, plants.
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And then they took that data that they discovered quickly,
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and they analyzed differences in species diets between summer
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and winter.
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Speaker 2 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Now,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
what they found was that,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
yeah, some birds do eat insects in the winter.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
American robins actually do,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
but far less than they do in the summer.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
And some species,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
like American tree sparrow,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
that are incredibly dependent on insects as a food source in the summer,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
don't eat them at all in the winter.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
This entire process,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
question to answer,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
took them about three hours.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Another team spent 1 ,560
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hours manually curating the data to do a similar study.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
And when you compare the results from Inquire to that study,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
you see an almost perfect match.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
I think this is so exciting,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
right?
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
It means that we can start quickly getting
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
access to all of this hidden knowledge.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
And really,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
I've been so inspired by the creativity
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
of the scientists using the system.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
All of the flexible ways that people have explored many,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
many different questions.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Things like...
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
looking at how forests regenerate after fire,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
or discovering differences in species mortality between
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urban and rural areas,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
or looking at how flowering events are changing in relation to a changing
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climate.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
The possibilities are truly endless.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
And the fact that it's open -ended means that any scientist
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
can ask the questions they're interested in.
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Speaker 2 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Now,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
this is also just the beginning,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
because we've shown that we can do this for images,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
but...
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
We can also imagine designing similar discovery -driven systems for
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
bioacoustic recordings,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
for aerial video,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
for satellite data,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
for GPS trajectories coming from animal collars,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
any ecological data type you can think of.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
And that brings up a whole new opportunity because all of these
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
types of data are innately interrelated.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
They're all looking at the same thing.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
They're capturing complementary but distinct perspectives of life on
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Earth.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
And I can imagine a future where we have systems that help scientists quickly discover
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
hidden connections between them all.
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Speaker 2 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Now,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
of course,
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this alone cannot solve our global nature crisis.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
But what it does do is it helps us maximize the value
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
of data that we've already collected.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
And that means that then in turn,
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we can carefully understand what knowledge gaps remain and strategically
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use our resources to collect new data to fill those.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Overall,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
this means we're reducing the time and the cost of driving information
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
that supports conservation actions.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Things like understanding how to ensure that food and
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
habitat resources are available to species when they need them most,
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when they're migrating through an area,
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when they're breeding or rearing young,
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or when they're recovering from natural disasters like fire.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
We stand at a unique point in history.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
We have both an unprecedented biodiversity crisis,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
but we also have unprecedented tools to address it.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
We have millions of people around the world eager to contribute to
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nature conservation and scientific discovery.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
And we have AI tools that enable scientists to find patterns
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in all of that data at scales impossible for humans alone.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
The future of conservation doesn't just lie in remote rainforests
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
or deep ocean trenches.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
The future of conservation is hiding in our ecological databases,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
both the ones we have now,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
but also the ones we have yet to collect.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
And that is where all of you come in,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
because everyone can contribute.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Everyone can collect data and upload it to platforms like iNaturalist.
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Every photo uploaded,
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every sound recorded,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
every observation shared is a piece of the puzzle.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
We know that we need to act now to save nature
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
under threat.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
And together,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
with scientific AI tools in our toolbox,
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
we can help by building the complete picture of life
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
on Earth.
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Speaker 1 (How AI Is Unearthing Hidden Scientific Knowledge - Sara Beery - TED)
Thank you.
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