What would you like us to know about you?
I am a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where I head the Computational Population Biology Lab. As a computational ecologist, my research is at the unique intersection of computer science, wildlife biology, and social sciences. I create computational solutions to address questions such as how environmental factors affect the behaviors of social animals (humans included). I am also a director and co-founder of the conservation software non-profit Wild Me, home of the Wildbook (wildbook.org) project, which recently enabled the first-of-its-kind complete species census of the endangered Grevy's zebra, using photographs taken by ordinary citizens in Kenya. As a legitimate part of my research I get to fly in a super-light airplane over a nature preserve in Kenya, taking a hyper-stereo video of zebra populations and learning how to identify each one of them by the unique stripe pattern.