Turing and Darwin: Saving the environment by combining computation and human insight

April 26, 2011
Gareth Russell | New Jersey Institute of Technology

The fundamental discipline for protecting the environment is ecology, but while some areas of ecological theory are quite advanced, there are large gaps in our basic understanding. Some of these arise because it is very difficult to collect suitable data to develop and test hypotheses and models. Using a series of case studies, I will illustrate how different computational approaches, combined with parallel developments in hardware, can help fill in some of these gaps, focusing on measuring species’ distribution, abundance, and dispersal movements. I will also be building that case that computation is only truly powerful when it is guided by the large body of knowledge and insight that ecologists have built up over the last 150 years, and only useful if the results we obtain are, in turn, made available in a straightforward, digestible manner to those same ecologists so that they can take them and test them against the real world.

Speaker Details

Gareth Russell received his BA in Zoology from Oxford University, where he studied evolution with Richard Dawkins but eventually decided that ecology was more fun because it was more messy. He therefore flew to Knoxville, Tennessee to begin a PhD with Stuart Pimm, and a couple of days later found himself in the cloud forests of Hawai’i, trying to spot a Po’ouli, a small brownish bird that hadn’t been seen for a decade and is now most likely extinct. Back in Tennessee, he finished a PhD that examined various kinds of extinction patterns and assemblage dynamics in birds and, just once, mammals. Gareth also met his future wife, Kim, who was studying something similar, but with spiders. From there he moved to the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara for a couple of years, then back to Tennessee and up to New York City, where he became a lecturer in the new Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Columbia University. After a few more years he moved across the Hudson to his current, joint position at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University. Gareth’s research interests include figuring out why species go extinct, planning landscape restoration for maximum species benefit, and automated species identification systems. He enjoys playing with his kids, beating people at squash, and teaching mathematical and computational techniques to frightened ecology students.