If each animal could be photographed and uniquely identified many times each day, the science of ecology and population biology, together with the resource management, biodiversity, and conservation decisions that depend on this science, could be dramatically improved.

compbio.cs.uic.edu/IBEIS

IBEIS is a large autonomous computational system that starts from image collections and progresses all the way to answering ecological and conservation queries, such as population sizes, species distributions and interactions, and movement patterns. The images are taken by field scientists, tourists, and incidental photographers, and are gathered from camera traps and autonomous vehicles. IBEIS can detect various species of animals in those images and identify individual animals of most striped, spotted, wrinkled or notched species. It stores the information about who the animals are, where they are and when they are there in a database and provides query tools to that data for scientists and curious people to find out what those animals are doing and why they are doing it.

Saturday, July 19, 2014

The new face of IBEIS

Keep this between you and me, lest I get into some hot water here in IBEIS camp, but scientific academia is rife with terrible, lazy visuals. Poor communicative choices and obvious aesthetic missteps are usually dismissed with a hand-wave and the same tired excuse: "...but that's what scientists are used to seeing! Why change?"

Well, the "why" is simple: perception and understanding are inexorably linked to the presentation of information: what you say is affected by how you say it. To dismiss design as decorative is to pretend that rhetoric and oration are just flowery writing and a lot of hot air, and while good design shouldn't mask bad science, good science can certainly be hindered by bad design. To wit, if we didn't judge all those proverbial books by their covers, then a lot of very talented book designers would be out of work.

Thankfully, IBEIS is different. The lofty research- and conservation-oriented goals of the project require an enthusiastic and engaged public, and a public-facing project needs a consumer-quality identity. Enter yours truly.

As an illustrator and designer, I find I'm less concerned with any single particular execution than I am with the needs of a given project. Sometimes I get to draw, and sometimes I get to write code, but telling the right story is always paramount. By virtue of a certain non-work choice—my engagement to Dr. Blair A. Roberts, whom you've already met—my professional life has led me to some very interesting places. This isn't my first lengthy trip to Kenya, though my second stint in this beautiful country is slightly more work-oriented than last time.

The logo, the foundation of any project's visual identity, needed to allude to a few key components of IBEIS: it needed to refer to some of the species that comprise the IBEIS Lite test group; it needed to show some link to the analysis of digital images; and it needed to catch the eye and excite the public. I'm sure you won't begrudge my bias if I feel we hit the mark on all three counts with this:
With a new demand for team t-shirts and a few bold proclamations of future IBEIS tattoos (temporary, I think), I'm moving toward a revamped IBEIS website and a warm gin and tonic. Stay tuned.
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