This year's InsectAI COST Action annual meeting took place at the Science and Technology Park in Niš, Serbia, on 22nd-25th April. The conference opened with a very warm welcome from the conference organizers of InsectAI and the hosts at the Science and Technology Park. As a large university city in south Serbia, Niš has a particularly strong foothold in biology and computer science education and was a very good fit to host the meetup.
Science and Technology Park in Niš
First Day - presentations and poster session
The first part of the morning included summaries of working group activities and project presentations. It was followed by two tracks of presentations focusing on methodological advances as well as capacity, ethics, and lightning talks. After lunch, the first day continued with interactive sessions and concluded with a hardware showcase and poster session. For this session, SPOTTERON contributed a poster on Citizen Science and the IPM App for invasive species monitoring.
Poster - How does a Citizen Science App work (SPOTTERON Citizen Science App Platform)
IPM App - Citizen Science App for monitoring invasive species with ethical AI species recognition
Second Day - presentations, training session PyTorch (scalable and reproducible AI model training)
The second conference day followed a similar format, with presentations on three main topics: working with data, hardware, and ecological applications. The afternoon program featured three tracks of interactive sessions in parallel. SPOTTERON held a training session on the topic of PyTorch Lightning, a modern and high-performance machine learning framework for scalable and reproducible AI model training.
Programming example (SPOTTERON Citizen Science App Platform)
Third Day (Last Day) - Conference Dinner and Guided Tour Niš
The conference concluded with a wrap-up and farewell, and attendees could join the conference dinner in the evening to socialize and continue the conversations of the day. For those interested in the rich history of Niš, a guided tour on the day after offered visits to multiple historic landmarks, including excavations of a Roman 'suburban' villa in Mediana dating to the reign of Constantine the Great, with very rare and well-preserved large-scale specimens of ancient mosaics.
Stambol Gate of Nis Fortress
Archeological excavations of Roman villa at Mediana near Nis
The InsectAI conference
In summary, the conference provided insightful updates to the ongoing work at InsectAI, an opportunity to connect, and an exchange of knowledge and ideas on the important topics of biodiversity monitoring, camera trap hardware, and artificial intelligence methods and applications. It was also inspiring to see how technical and methodological advancements can have real-world impact on research and policymaking and how the exchange and consolidation of knowledge are supporting innovation and enabling wider applications in insect monitoring and conservation.
Are you interested in learning more about invasive species monitoring or AI technology in Citizen Science Apps? Get in touch; we are happy to schedule a call!