Corrado opened by highlighting the ecological and societal value of Ireland’s peatlands: they store several hundred billion tonnes of carbon, harbour specialised flora&fauna, and act as natural filter for drinking water, reducing the treatment costs and related health implications.
Corrado then introduced AI2Peat, a joint initiative led by CeADAR, iCRAG and the National Parks & Wildlife Service. The project aims at contributing to peatland condition monitoring at national scale by leveraging Earth Observation data (Europan Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 multispectral imagery), ground truth data, and machine-learning – especially artificial neural networks.
To explain how artificial neural networks work in a fun and intuitive way, he turned the lecture hall into a giant “biological” neural network by having people (neurons) standing up and down and shouting plant names based on “input simuli”. The experiment was successful and the audience had good fun!
Thank you to Explorium for hosting Corrado, and for helping to bring projects like AI2Peat to a wider audience.
To learn more about AI2Peat, visit their website – https://ai2peat.ie.
To learn more about a selection of other CeADAR projects, visit out project page using the button below