To the untrained eye, zebras in Kenya probably all look alike. But each animals black and white markings are like a fingerprint, distinct and invaluable for scientists who need to track the animals and information about them, including their births, deaths, health and migration patterns.
Traditionally, getting this kind of information has been an invasive and labor-intensive process. But breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) and crowdsourcing of photos of individual animals are beginning to change the conservation game.
Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit Wild Me has developed AI to pick out identifying markers the stripes on a zebra, the spots on a giraffe, the contours of a sperm whales fin and catalog animals much faster than a human can. Photo surveys are increasingly used as the backbone for population estimates, and Wild Mes Wildbooks, which catalog various species, are giving conservation groups, governments and citizen scientists a faster way to monitor animals around the world.
We can use this information to track diseases and poaching threats, look at manifestations of diseases, said Michael Brown, a conservation science fellow at the Giraffe Conservation Foundation and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, who has been working with Wild Me for the past few years. It lets us piece together an understanding of how these threats to giraffes are spatially situated (and) how the giraffes are utilizing different landscapes over time.
Founder Jason Holmberg launched the first iteration of Wild Me in 2003 after swimming with whale sharks off the coast of Djibouti. He wanted to find a different way to track the animals other than invasive tagging, so he teamed up with a biologist and a NASA astronomer, adapting the algorithm for the Hubble telescope to match the sharks spot patterns.
For years, Holmbergs endeavors were a side project he didnt leave his full-time job in tech until recently. Wild Mes work gradually expanded, then it really kicked into gear with a 2018 grant from Microsofts AI for Earth. Today, Wild Me has a team of six full-time staffers, with plans to add more soon.
Wild Mes process of creating and training algorithms takes serious time. Thousands of photos of the species must be manually annotated so that the algorithm learns what a given animal is, what the distinguishing characteristics are and whats just background noise.
The model relies largely on photographs taken by scientists or everyday people who upload their photos to the corresponding Wildbook. It uses AI to find things in the picture and then hand it to algorithms or machine learning to suggest IDs which whale, which giraffe, etc., Holmberg said.
Christin Khan conducts aerial surveys of North Atlantic right whales for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and had sought an AI-based solution for years. She said she watched Facebook implement facial recognition and wanted to use similar technology to help identify whales within the endangered species (there are only about 400 North Atlantic right whales left).
We needed a really simple, user-friendly web-based interface where a biologist who knows nothing about AI could upload a photograph and get a result back, she said. Eventually we realized the developers at Wild Me had already done a lot of what we needed, and it wouldnt require us to reinvent the wheel.
The Wildbook for whales, called Flukebook, encourages collaboration, which is particularly useful for whales that travel long distances because it can be difficult for one research group to effectively monitor one area.
The more people on the water, the more photos, the more its decentralized, (the better), said Shane Gero, who founded and runs the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. By doing the matching themselves, by contributing their own data, not only do they get to know the animals, but it creates a locally motivated community of people that can react when conservation actions come up.
Before the introduction of AI, Gero said it would take about a month to process a months worth of photos.
(Now), we have our numbers of individuals sighted and population estimates faster, so we can report (almost) in real time, he said.
That means his group is able to provide the government of Dominica with more up-to-date information and offer better advice on how to shape conservation efforts.
One of Wild Mes more recent innovations is an AI-driven feature that datamines YouTube videos of whale sharks and sea turtles, using user-generated videos (often taken by tourists) to get a better sense of the populations. This has been a great way to increase the amount of photos coming in and provide researchers with more data. But it also creates even more work for people on the ground, who have to manually check the AIs suggestions and accept the results.
Were flooding the whale shark community with more data than it can handle, said Holmberg.
So Wild Me is now building the capacity to automate the identification process and scaling the tech that combs social media for relevant videos.
The nonprofit recently received a two-year grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the new algorithm that will make the animal IDs on its own.
Its focusing the initial work on zebras because it already has an incredibly rich dataset. Every two years since 2016, the Great Grvys Rally in Kenya has used hundreds of citizen scientists spread out over thousands of kilometers to photograph Grvys zebras over two days. Wild Mes AI analyzes the zebra markings on all the photos to come up with a total population, which the Kenyan government treats as the official census for Grvys zebras.
This type of work is a huge upgrade from the traditional capture-mark-recapture process, which is both invasive and time consuming, with studies done every five to 10 years.
You can only make very coarse-grained conservation decisions, Holmberg said. The point of going to a fully automated system is to shorten that cycle so we can take all of the data over the past week or two weeks and have a continuous prediction of population size. Its fine-grained, which helps researchers understand and lobby for better conservation activities.
For Khan, meanwhile, the existing technology is still in its early days. The algorithm for North Atlantic right whales became operational in November 2019, and she said theyre still working out the kinks and figuring out how best to use it. But, she said, she sees the incredible potential that it holds.
My dream is that we get to the point where the worlds oceans will be trolled by satellite photos and we can understand the worlds whale population, she said. Combining AI with satellite imagery and drones we have the potential to exponentially understand the worlds oceans thats just not possible with manned aircraft.
Excerpt from:
- Classic reasoning systems like Loom and PowerLoom vs. more modern systems based on probalistic networks - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using Amazon's cloud service for computationally expensive calculations - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software environments for working on AI projects - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of my NLP toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Semantic Web: through the back door with HTML and CSS - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Java FastTag part of speech tagger is now released under the LGPL - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Defining AI and Knowledge Engineering - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Great Overview of Knowledge Representation - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Something like Google page rank for semantic web URIs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My experiences writing AI software for vehicle control in games and virtual reality systems - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The URL for this blog has changed - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- I have a new page on Knowledge Management - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- N-GRAM analysis using Ruby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Good video: Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using the PowerLoom reasoning system with JRuby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Machines Like Us - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- RapidMiner machine learning, data mining, and visualization tool - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- texai.org - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My OpenCalais Ruby client library - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ruby API for accessing Freebase/Metaweb structured data - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Protégé OWL Ontology Editor - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of Numenta software is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Very nice: Elsevier IJCAI AI Journal articles now available for free as PDFs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Verison 2.0 of OpenCyc is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What’s Your Biggest Question about Artificial Intelligence? [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Minimax Search [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Tree [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- More AI Content & Format Preference Poll [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New Planners Solve Rescue Missions [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Learns to Bluff at Poker [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pushing the Limits of Game AI Technology [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mining Data for the Netflix Prize [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Interview with Peter Denning on the Principles of Computing [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Making for Medical Support [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Creates Music CD [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- jKilavuz - a guide in the polygon soup [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Apply AI 2007 Roundtable Report [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What Would You do With 80 Cores? [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software Finds Learning Language Child's Play [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence in Games [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence Resources - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Alan Turing: Mathematical Biologist? - April 25th, 2012 [April 25th, 2012]
- BBC Horizon: The Hunt for AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Can computers have true artificial intelligence" Masonic handshake" 3rd-April-2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Kevin B. Korb - Interview - Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity p3 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence - 6 Month Anniversary - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Science Breakthroughs - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Hitman: Blood Money - Part 49 - Stupid Artificial Intelligence! - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Research Members Turned Off By HAARP Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence Lecture No. 5 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Charlie Rose - Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Expert on artificial intelligence to speak at EPIIC Nights dinner - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Filipino software engineers complete and best thousands on Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Course - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Vodafone xone™ Hackathon Challenges Developers and Entrepreneurs to Build a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence ... - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Packages Up CPG Booster - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- 2 Filipinos finishes among top in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- Why Your Brain Isn't A Computer - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- 2 Pinoy software engineers complete Stanford's AI course - May 7th, 2012 [May 7th, 2012]
- Percipio Media, LLC Proudly Accepts Partnership With MIT's Prestigious Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence ... - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Google Driverless Car Ok'd by Nevada - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel and Forrester Research Announce Free Webinar - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Wins 2012 San Francisco Business Times Tech & Innovation Award - May 13th, 2012 [May 13th, 2012]
- Internet Week 2012: Rocket Fuel to Speak at OMMA RTB - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- How to Get the Most Out of Your Facebook Ads -- Rocket Fuel's VP of Products, Eshwar Belani, to Lead MarketingProfs ... - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- The Digital Disruptor To Banking Has Just Gone International - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel Announce Free Webinar Featuring an Independent Research Firm - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- MASA Showcases Latest Version of MASA SWORD for Homeland Security Markets - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Bluesky Launches Drones for Aerial Surveying - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence: What happened to the hunt for thinking machines? - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- Bubble Robots Move Using Lasers [VIDEO] - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- UHV assistant professors receive $10,000 summer research grants - May 27th, 2012 [May 27th, 2012]
- Artificial intelligence: science fiction or simply science? - May 28th, 2012 [May 28th, 2012]
- Exetel taps artificial intelligence - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- Software offers brain on the rain - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- New Dean of Science has high hopes for his faculty - May 30th, 2012 [May 30th, 2012]
- Cognitive Code Announces "Silvia For Android" App - May 31st, 2012 [May 31st, 2012]
- A Rat is Smarter Than Google - June 5th, 2012 [June 5th, 2012]