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ARIA Opportunity Space: Scoping Our Planet
AI for Virtual Habitats
Despite growing 3D environmental datasets, there is no intuitive way to search and analyze these “digital twins” in plain English, leaving their ecological insights locked away. Encode fellow Ben Williams is working with Professor Andrew Davison at Imperial College London to build a system combining 3D vision-language models and natural language interfaces for querying high-resolution 3D spatial twins of natural habitats such as coral reefs. This research could revolutionise how scientists, conservationists, and policymakers interact with complex ecosystems, accelerating biodiversity monitoring, restoration, and climate resilience worldwide.
Ben holds a PhD in Marine Sciences from UCL, and has extensive field experience, having completed 300 scientific dives and over 18 months spent on expedition. Ben has won numerous awards, been showcased in several magazines and articles, and given a TEDx Talk on "How AI is helping transform coral reef conservation."
Andrew Davison
Professor of Robot Vision at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London
Andrew Davison holds the position of Professor of Robot Vision at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, and leads the Dyson Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College, working on vision and AI technology for next generation home robotics. He also lead the Robot Vision Research Group.
