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.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Just one day....

Here was our Wednesday:

. Photographing kudus up close before leaving MPala for Ol Pejeta.















. Testing and debugging the IBEIS image analysis software.
. Meeting a German television team interested in doing an IBEIS segment for a program aimed at 9-14 year olds.
. Intense debates about program semantics and the supporting graphical user interface during a fire-cooked lunch by the river.
. Starting up (successfully) a 20 processor 128 GB memory server - one that has been enroute from Chicago for three weeks - in a new room on the second floor of a (big) garage-like building whose stairway and hallways are cement and whose offices open to the outdoors.
. Visiting the Jane Goodall chimp enclosure and going face-to-face with our closest evolutionary relatives.
. Debating alternative approaches to data modeling for queries about ecology and animal population dynamics.
. Singing Happy Birthday (belated) to team-member Jon Crall.
. Stopping to watch and photograph a beautiful female lion on the way home.
















. Sipping wine and scotch over a three-course meal, including a salad made by Githae (the chef at Mpala Ranch) from the cook book Lou Ann sent with me.
.  Reviewing progress and strategizing for tomorrow.

What more can one ask of a day?
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