Cnr Pisa, Gaia Pavoni awarded for monitoring coral reefs
Gaia Pavoni, researcher at the Institute of Information Science and Technologies of the National Research Council of Pisa (Cnr-Isti), won the European “Vrvis Visual Computing Award 2023” for her innovative research on the use of intelligence artificial in the monitoring of coral reefs. The award is established by the Viennese research center “Vrvis Zentrum für Virtual Reality und Visualisierung”, and aims to enhance the visual computing solutions that contribute to the achievement of the 17 sustainable development goals promoted by the United Nations.
With the group of the Visual Computing Lab of the Cnr-Isti, Pavoni has designed and implemented an open-source annotation tool based on artificial intelligence, called “TagLab”, which greatly simplifies the work of marine ecologists in the analysis of underwater images. By reducing the time required for ecological interpretation, ‘TagLab’ allows researchers to process larger volumes of data, offering a better chance of understanding the health of coral reefs and predicting their future changes.
To date, “TagLab” has been heralded in coral reef monitoring and restocking activities by many leading marine science research institutes, such as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (University of California, San Diego), the Australian Institute of Marine Science (Objectives) and the Elizabeth Moore International Center For Coral Reef Restoration (Florida, United States). As open source software, TagLab also helps to mitigate the technological disparities between different laboratories in different countries.
Source: Press Office