How AI Can Help Keep Our Islands Clean: Teaching Computers to See Marine Debris with Prof. Tahiya Chowdhury

Approximately 75 to 199 million tonnes of plastic are currently found in the world’s oceans, causing severe environmental, social, economic, and health consequences. In this talk, Prof. Tahiya Chowdury (Computer Science and DavisAI) will discuss how her research group at Colby is exploring ways artificial intelligence tools can help solve the marine debris problem along the coasts of Maine.

By combining aerial imagery collected by drones and AI object detection models, Prof. Chowdury and her team have developed an automated framework that can detect, classify, and map the distribution of ocean debris. This framework was tested with real-world marine debris images on Allen Island with very promising results suggesting this system can be a sustainable solution for current marine debris clean-up initiatives while reducing the human efforts involved in it.

Date: Friday, April 10, 2026

Time: Noon–1:15 p.m.

Where: Zoom

A webinar link will be shared in the registration confirmation email.

For questions, please contact Advancement Events at [email protected] or 207-859-4311.

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