Prof. Kapil Kaushik’s co-authored research paper entitled ‘Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Reduce Human-Animal Conflict in India’ has been published in the AIS eLibrary Communications of the Association for Information Systems journal. His co-authors are Prof. Atul Arun Pathak, Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Nagpur, India, and Abhishek Gawande, a Doctoral Scholar at the Indian Institute of Management Nagpur, India.
This case focuses on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Vision (CV) technologies to solve a socially complex issue of human-animal conflict in the geographical regions surrounding the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve (TATR) in Maharashtra state of India. Due to increasing tiger population in TATR, villages surrounding the TATR often encountered tigers that strayed outside the reserve. It leads to injuries or fatalities to the humans or the wild animals involved. Therefore, the technology company Valiance collaborated with the Forest Department and other local stakeholders to create a computer vision-based AI virtual wall system as a pilot project to monitor the location round the clock through practical technology usage. This article also emphasizes upon various socio-technical challenges faced by the Valiance in deploying this solution.