Santiago Saavedra Pineda is a professor at the Faculty of Economics of the Universidad del Rosario in Colombia and he recently received an award by Google for creating a model that detects areas where there is illegal mining in his country.
According to RCN Radio, Saavedra is passionate about environmental issues, which is why he felt motivated to create this model.
After he found out that 63% of the mines in Colombia were illegal and difficult to locate, a task that generally took up to two years for the government to do, he decided to work on a mathematical model to help this situation.
This is how Saavedra thought of a mathematical algorithm based on artificial intelligence to find a faster way to locate these mines. His model has a 79% accuracy when mapping the illegal mines throughout the country and with the money from the award Google gave him he expects to achieve 90% of accuracy.