Awarded a Villum Experiment grant on detecting sand mining using AI

The Danish Villum Foundation has awarded my project ‘Drawing a line in the sand: Mapping sand mining in Africa for future sustainable usage’. The goal of this ‘high risk high gain’ project is to develop a data-driven method using machine learning and remote sensing imagery to provide a complete map of sand mining activities in Africa.

This review proces for the Villum Experiment projects are rather unique in the Danish funding system. During the selection process, the applicants are anonymised for the assessment panel. The 21 international assessors do not have the opportunity to peek at the applicants’ CVs and academic credentials, and have therefore “judged the research ideas solely on the basis of whether they challenge the norm and have the potential to change the world and our knowledge of it”.

The high risk in the project lies in investigating whether recent advances in satellite remote sensing technology and promising techniques in the use of deep learning algorithms rooted in AI (artificial intelligence) can be used to analyze geomorphic landscape changes to automatically detect present day sand mining activities in Africa. The ultimate gain of the project will be to produce the first ever map of sand mining activities across the entire African continent. 

I will soon be looking for people to join the project!