David Klein and Matthew McKown | Period 1

David J. Klein has always been captivated by the interplay between nature and technology. As a boy exploring the creeks by his Florida home while reading science fiction; as an undergraduate at Georgia Tech studying animal communication and designing artificial eyes; and studying the brain as a computer as a pioneering Ph.D. neuroscientist and AI researcher at the University of Maryland and ETH Zürich. He led algorithms for Audience Inc., whose hearing-enhancement technology has been used by hundreds of millions of people. Currently as CTO of Conservation Metrics, his biodiversity monitoring AI is being used by conservation scientists to study and protect hundreds of endangered species around the world.

Matthew McKown is co-founder and CEO of Conservation Metrics, Inc. He received a PhD in Ecology from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where he focused on how environmental constraints have influenced the design of animal signals and communication behavior. Conservation Metrics was founded to apply new technologies to improve wildlife surveys and thereby provide more robust metrics of conservation outcomes. Specifically, CMI applies Deep Learning to analyze large datasets from sensor networks to - 1) find rare species, 2) track population trends, 3) measure conservation outcomes, and 4) quantify wildlife impacts in the built environment. Matthew was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of California Santa Cruz, Assistant Director of Citizen Science projects at the National Audubon Society, and a consultant with Environmental Resources Management in Southeast Asia.