Computer Vision and Intelligent Agents for Wildlife Conservation with Jason Holmberg

In this episode, I’m joined by Jason Holmberg, Executive Director and Director of Engineering at WildMe.

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Wildme’s Wildbook and Whaleshark.org are both open source computer vision based conservation projects, that have been compared to a facebook for wildlife. Jason kicks us off with the interesting story of how wildbook came to be, and the eventual expansion of the project from a focus on whale sharks to include Giant Manta Rays, Humpback Whales, Zebras and Giraffes. Jason and I explore the evolution of these projects’ use of computer vision and deep learning, the unique characteristics of the models they’re building, and how they’re ultimately enabling a new kind of citizen science. Finally, we take a look at a cool new “intelligent agent” project that Jason is working on, which mines YouTube for wildlife sightings and automatically engages with the relevant individuals and scientists on Wildbook’s behalf.

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About Jason

• Jason on Linkedin
• Jason on Twitter
• Jason at WildMe

Mentioned in the Interview

• WildMe
• WhaleShark.org
• NASA Spinoff: Star-Mapping Tools Enable Tracking of Endangered Animals
• Brad Norman
• Tanya Berger-Wolf
• Chuck Stewart
• Dan Rubenstein
• Microsoft AI for Earth
• Sarasota Dolphin Research Project
• Cascadia Research Collective
• Paper: Integral Curvature Representation and Matching Algorithms for Identification of Dolphins and Whales
• White Shark Fin Identification
• WEKA Repository
• Amanda Ellis
• TWiML Presents: Series page
• TWiML Events Page
• TWiML Meetup
• TWiML Newsletter

“More On That Later” by Lee Rosevere licensed under CC By 4.0

Photo courtesy of Simon J. Pierce