Welcome to the VISION Lab at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)

We are the VISION Lab at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute led by Dr. Charles V Stewart in Troy, New York. Our aim is to design Computer Vision applications for Ecological Conservation. More details to follow.

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We are a dynamic VISION: Visually Intelligent Solutions for Integrated Observation and Nature Conservation research group at RPI consisting of a Research Scientist, two PhD students and a Masters/Co-term student led by Dr Charles V Stewart as our advisor. Our aim is to explore and apply computational methods for ecological conservation. We are very grateful for our lab’s funding by two NSF institutes, namely ICICLE and Imageomics.

“Led by The Ohio State University, the National Science Foundation funded AI institute for Intelligent Cyberinfrastructure with Computational Learning in the Environment (ICICLE) will build the next generation of Cyberinfrastructure to render Artificial Intelligence (AI) more accessible to everyone and drive its further democratization in the larger society”, as noted on the website here.

The vision of the Imageomics institute as noted on its website, “To establish a new scientific field called imageomics that harnesses revolutions in data science and computing, as well as the rapidly expanding collections of biological image data, in order to accelerate biological understanding of phenotypic traits extracted from images of organisms. The Imageomics Institute will make the study of the interrelationships, associations, and dynamics of traits computable by using the existing structured biological knowledge to inform the computational methods. It will develop integrated, interdisciplinary approaches to advance the state of the art in knowledge-guided machine learning while rapidly accelerating biological discovery and public engagement in science, forming a virtuous cycle.”

Dr Chuck Stewart is also an advisor at Wild Me, which is a project supported by Microsoft’s AI for Earth initiative. It develops open-source platforms for identifying and tracking wildlife, combining the strengths of AI and citizen scientists to fight extinction. The project uses computer vision and deep learning algorithms to create a platform called Wildbook. Wildbook scans millions of crowdsourced wildlife images at scale, identifies the species as well as the individual animal, and allows the public to follow the movements of their favorite animals.

We (check out our team) want to be able to build and democratize computational tools that could help us answer pressing conservational challenges faced by humanity. (see Research).

Currently, we are located at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), close to its 200-year annniversary. RPI is home to the most powerful supercomputer at a private university, and also the first university in the world to host IBM Quantum Sysytem One on its campus.

We will update when we are looking for passionate new PhD students, Postdocs, and Master students to join the team (more info) !