About

I’m a researcher at the Humboldt Institute in Colombia and a collaborating researcher at the Mila-Quebec AI Institute. I work on machine learning for ecological problems, living between Audiomoths and Moths. Specifically, I work on ecoacoustics and bioacoustics in different groups such as amphibians, bats, birds, insects, and the soundscape. Recently, I started to work on computer vision for automated monitoring of insects. Previously, I was an undergraduate student at the National University of Colombia in the Mathematics Department working with Prof. Francisco Gómez where I worked on interpretability in healthcare and diverse problems in policy.

GitHub / LinkedIn / Twitter / Google Scholar

Journal Publications

• Cañas, J.S., Toro-Gomez, M.P., Sugai, L.S.M., et al. A dataset for benchmarking Neotropical anuran calls identification in passive acoustic monitoring. Sci. Data 10, 771 (2023). https://doi.org/10. 1038/s41597-023-02666-2 [Webpage]

Preprints

• Cañas, J.S., Gomez, F., Costilla-Reyes, O. Counterfactual Explanations and Predictive Models to Enhance Clinical Decision-Making in Schizophrenia using Digital Phenotyping. arXiv:2306.03980 (2023). https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.03980

Research Interest

Ecology and biodiversity monitoring have a symbiotic relationship with machine learning. On one hand, machine learning offers a set of novel methods to process, extract, and analyze ecological data. On the other hand, ecology could be seen as a playground for exploring the scientific foundations of machine learning. Ecological systems are unique in scale, complexity, and richness. These problems often involve multiple parties for combinatorial decisions in highly dynamic and uncertain environments. Hence, machine learning challenges arise such as domain shift, spatiotemporal correlations, fine-grained categories, learning across data modalities, self-supervised representation learning, human-machine collaboration, and long-tailed distributions. Finally, I’m also interested in how to work together with local communities to co-create conservation tools that have an impact on biodiversity conservation.

Media (in Spanish)

• Así utilizan la inteligencia artificial para la conservación de animales en Colombia. El Espectador
• Humboldt y FCDS monitorearán la biodiversidad en los proyectos de forestería comunitaria. FCDS

Other

• Hiking and Running. I endorse the philosophical manifesto by Murakami about running. I try to expand this in different landscapes. Sometimes, I track my running activity on Strava.
• Music. I’m a professional bug collector of playlists.
• Films and Literature. I found Cormac McCarthy’s tips for short tales very similar to Roberto Bolaño’s advice on how to write a great science paper.

Contact

jcanas (at) humboldt.org.co