Jason R. Parham is a senior R&D engineer working remotely on Kitware’s Computer Vision Team. He applies modern deep learning techniques to Kitware’s computer vision projects, deploying scalable systems and other DevOps enhancements. His projects are predominately focused on wildlife conservation.

Jason participated in Kitware’s Open Source Software Technology Program, which allowed him to intern at Kitware and receive tuition reimbursement benefits while earning his Ph.D.

Prior to joining Kitware, Jason was a senior computer vision research engineer at Wild Me, a non-profit that builds open source software and AI for conservation research. He was responsible for writing papers, productizing the latest machine learning algorithms, and deploying open source software on hand-built computer hardware. Jason was also part of the Wildbook IA project for wildlife conservation, which has a machine learning API backend and a comprehensive suite of detection, classification, and segmentation algorithms to prepare images of animals for a re-identification pipeline. This system has been used for wildlife conservation projects worldwide (based on the Wildbook project) and is accessible as a pre-configured containerized instance with GPU acceleration.

Jason received his Ph.D. and master’s degree in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2021 and 2015, respectively. In 2012 received his bachelor’s degree in computer science/mathematics from Pepperdine University.

Invited Talks & Media

• Presenter, “Automating Wildlife Conservation for Cetaceans,” NeurIPS Expo, 2020

• Invited Speaker, “Wildbook – Photographic Censusing of Wildlife,” Oregon State University Department of EECS Colloquium, 2019

• Invited Speaker, “Fighting Extinction with AI – A Digital Transformation for Wildlife Conservation,” Portland CIO Forum, 2018

• Invited Speaker, “Computer Vision for Social Good – Animal Censusing in the Wild,” Pepperdine University’s Natural Science Department Lecture Series, 2017

• Presenter, “Unsupervised Deep Learning with KWCNN,” Kitware Summer 2016 Tech Talk Lunch Series, 2016

• Presenter, “Introducing the KitWare Convolutional Neural Network *KWCNN) Python Module with Live Demos,” Kitware Summer 2015 Tech Talk Lunch Series, 2015

Professional Associations & Service

• Member, The Computer Vision Foundation, 2017-present

• Member, The Computer Vision Foundation, 2017-present

• Member, The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2017-2019

• Workshop co-organizer, on animal re-ID, WACV, 2020