On this International Day of Women in Science, we would like to introduce you to graduate student Negar Sadrzadeh. Negar joined the Animal Welfare Program at UBC in February 2021, travelling from Iran to become a master’s student. Learn about how Negar uses her experiences with animals and computer science to improve the welfare of dairy cows!
Negar comes to the Animal Welfare program (AWP) with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a master’s degree in Decision Science and Knowledge Engineering from the University of Tehran. She has always been passionate about animals, but her interest in horses is what drove her to move her professional path towards animal welfare. Horses have been a part of her life since childhood, as a rider and later riding instructor, and as a veterinary assistant. These experiences developed through her time spent in equestrian stables and competitions have exposed her to many animal welfare issues. She noticed that many welfare and health issues that were diagnosed late were not necessarily due to human factors, but because of system limitations.
As a computer science student, she saw the opportunity to address some of these issues through automated monitoring systems. In her masters program at the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Lab at the University of Tehran, she began using the data tools she was learning at school to address the challenges she was dealing with every day in the stable. She completed her master’s thesis “Using Machine Learning for Automated Pain Recognition in Horses” under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Haratizadeh. The objective of the research was to develop a system that could recognize pain in horses by processing the image taken from their face. Working on this project engaged her interests in computer science, animal welfare, their intersection, and the challenges associated with this type of research, including access high-quality data.
These interests led her to contact leading researchers in the animal welfare field, Dr. Daniel Weary and Dr. Marina (Nina) von Keyserlingk, whose research areas include exploring how technology can be used to improve animal welfare. With Negar’s unique background in both animal welfare and computer and data science, she was a great fit for ongoing animal welfare research focused on dairy cows at the UBC Dairy Education and Research Center. She is part of a research team that is investigating automated monitoring of dairy cattle. The objective is to use technology to expand our ability to observe and understand dairy cows and assess their health and welfare. Additionally, the team is developing new tools for facilitating automated monitoring of animals; Negar is working on our “Barcode” project, where cameras and fiducial markers are used to track individual cows on the farm. Data on cow location and behaviour may serve as an early indicator of problems with cow health.
We asked Negar about her experience one year into her Master’s degree:“I’ve always been interested in how computer science and Artificial Intelligence can change and improve animal welfare. During the last year, the UBC Animal Welfare Program helped me learn more and progress in my area of interest. I’m so grateful for all that I have learned this past year in the AWP and the ongoing suppport, and I can’t wait to learn more and have more adventures with the program in the upcoming years.” Check out our People Section to see many more Women in Science!