AI4EOSC: a Federated Cloud Platform for Artificial Intelligence in Scientific Research

In this paper, we describe a federated compute platform dedicated to support Artificial Intelligence in scientific workloads. Putting the effort into reproducible deployments, it delivers consistent, transparent access to a federation of physically distributed e-Infrastructures. Through a comprehensive service catalogue, the platform is able to offer an integrated user experience covering the full Machine Learning lifecycle, including model development (with dedicated interactive development environments), training (with GPU resources, annotation tools, experiment tracking, and federated learning support) and deployment (covering a wide range of deployment options all along the Cloud Continuum). The platform also provides tools for traceability and reproducibility of AI models, integrates with different Artificial Intelligence model providers, datasets and storage resources, allowing users to interact with the broader Machine Learning ecosystem. Finally, it is easily customizable to lower the adoption barrier by external communities.

Large-Scale Plant Classification with Deep Neural Networks

This paper discusses the potential of applying deep learning techniques for plant classification and its usage for citizen science in large-scale biodiversity monitoring. We show that plant classification using near state-of-the-art convolutional network architectures like ResNet50 achieves significant improvements in accuracy compared to the most widespread plant classification application in test sets composed of thousands of different species labels. We find that the predictions can be confidently used as a baseline classification in citizen science communities like iNaturalist (or its Spanish fork, Natusfera) which in turn can share their data with biodiversity portals like GBIF.