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

The server

The server. The hardware hart of the project. The machine that makes IBEIS run. The storage for all the images, the power for the analysis, the connection for remote access and the cloud. Funded by Microsoft Research. Lovingly assembled and configured by Marco from individual parts (he enjoys it, we have not bought a computer for the lab off the shelf in the last 3 years). And then the trouble has started. It is UIC property so can only be loaned to an outside location, not permanently moved (took several emails and forms). Then export control (done). Then we get ready to ship. Got a quote from DHL global. Wrapped it up, padded, packaged, put it on a pallet. On June 25 it was picked up by DHL. Then… 218 emails later (those are just the saved ones) of communication with DHL global and DHL Kenya about shipping, payment, customs, duty, payment, inspection, payment… on July 15 it was finally delivered to Microsoft Nairobi. And then Marco and Jake (film crew from Microsoft Research Redmond) brought it to Ol’ Pej (in a rental Mitsubishi Gypsy). A group effort got it up a steep flight of stairs into an attic room prepared by Ol Pej. The most powerful machine in Kenya North of Nairobi, probably… If it works.

We turned it on yesterday. Drum roll please. Lights on. The tense few minutes of waiting for the Linux interface to come up: “Initializing:… 0%” And then the scroll of lines across the screen. The jet engine taking off sound of the cores starting. Success!

Now we have a server in our attic.

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)