Associate Professor, Faculty of Science (Information and Communication/Mathematical Informatics)

Diez Donoso Santiago

Recently, I have been interested in having computers mimic the way humans understand images. As an example, I am working on a joint project with the Faculty of Agriculture. In this project, we first use a drone to acquire images in a forest in the Tohoku region. Next, human experts are asked to annotate the images with information such as tree species and the presence or absence of disease. Then, using advanced artificial intelligence techniques, such as deep learning, we teach the computer to automatically recognize this information.

Although professors and students from Yamagata University are the main driving force behind this research, people from around the world are working on this project. We hope to measure forest biomass with practical goals in mind and to protect the fir trees that become the “snow monsters” of Zao.