Japanese eggheads strap AI-powered backpacks to seagulls
- Reference: 1604401153
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/03/ai_bird_backpacks/
- Source link:
Computer scientists and ornithologists at Japan's Osaka, Nagoya, and Tohoku universities even went as far as saying the gadgets formed the world’s first “first AI-enabled bio-logger” experiment.
The team designed and built the gizmos, each containing a video camera, an accelerometer, GPS unit, and a Microchip [1]ATmega328P 8-bit microcontroller. The hardware was attached to black-tailed gulls and streaked shearwaters on the Kabushima island near Hachinohe City in northern Japan.
Crucially, the software running on the equipment was trained to turn on the camera and start recording whenever a bird was deemed to be foraging. It did this by taking readings from the accelerometer and GPS unit, and running them through a decision-tree model so that it could determine whether or not the birds were searching for food. If they were, the code would turn on the camera and start recording. This turned out to be more efficient than randomly turning on the camera.
Eagle-on-EGLE* violence: American icon sends govt-flown drone hurtling into the waters of Lake Michigan [2]READ MORE
For instance, if the model identified five consecutive bouts of flying behavior associated with hunting, the camera was automatically activated.
“The new method improved the detection of foraging behaviors in the black-tailed gulls 15-fold compared with the random sampling method," said Joseph Korpela, lead author of a paper describing the experiment and a researcher at Osaka University. This also increased the amount of data the camera and sensors could gather between recharging tenfold, from two hours to 20, we're told.
You can this in action in the video below.
[3]Youtube Video
"Since bio-loggers attached to small animals have to be small and lightweight, they have short run times and it was therefore difficult to record interesting infrequent behaviors," [4]said Takuya Maekawa, co-author of the paper and an associate professor at Osaka University, late last week.
The study was [5]published in the Communications Biology journal.
The team reckoned extending bio-logging experiments with AI will help biologists study animal activities more easily in the wild by capturing specific moments of behavior that are difficult to observe without full-time monitoring.
“These systems have a huge range of possible applications including detection of poaching activity using anti-poaching tags," Maekawa concluded. "We also anticipate that this work will be used to reveal the interactions between human society and wild animals that transmit epidemics such as [the] coronavirus." ®
Get our [6]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATMEGA328P
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/michigan_drone_killer_eagle/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xybdokb4g9s&feature=emb_logo
[4] https://resou.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/research/2020/20201030_1
[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-020-01356-8#Sec6
[6] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Flying rats
Maybe it could emit a Stuka-like wail when the AI detects chip-bombing behaviour.
Re: Flying rats
Perhaps they can use this tech to find a way to stop the bastards dive bombing my fish and chips when strolling down the pier?
The seaguls have been trained that people walking around with packets of fish and chips are worth snatching as they are nice and tasty. Just do some retraining; find something seaguls find disgusting and spread plenty over a bunch of chips and take them around for the seaguls to snatch.
After a while the seagulls will presumably decide that actually, they don't want to go for packets of fish and chips.
IF THEN ELSE
Call me a skeptic.. But checking the values of GPS, altimeter and accelerometer hardly constitute AI..
Re: IF THEN ELSE
Well, they actually did do a bit more work than a simple if-then-else. The accelerometer data is munged in a pre-calculated network and the simple output is used in an if-then-else decision tree.
Then again, he system is not in danger of becoming self-aware any time soon. It could also be argued that you can do the classification differently using some other math. But hey, they managed to get a pretty well working system and a publicity boost for the next round of funding. All the right words-of-the-time were used properly. What is not to be appreciated with such a result? They even got a good bit of science out of it.
Re: ......system is not in danger of becoming self-aware any time soon..
Gullnet became self-aware on August 29, 2097. The event, known as Judgement Day, caused humans to panic and attempt to shut down the system. They failed and the entire planet was buried in a layer of guano 10 m deep.
Re: ......system is not in danger of becoming self-aware any time soon..
Surely it was called Judge-MINE-t Day?
Re: IF THEN ELSE
"AI" is an impressively vague term, it covers everything from adaptive decision trees (which is probably what we have here) to Hal, Marvin the Paranoid Android or a Culture Ship Mind.
Differentiation is usually from "weak" to "strong" AI, this is an example of weak AI, there are as yet no examples of strong AI and with current architecture it seems unlikely to be developed soon which is why all my examples are from fiction.
Re: IF THEN ELSE
I'm not convinced it's even weak AI. After all, it's an 8-bit CPU running everything. I suspect it's purely a pre-built model and there is no learning going on at all, just a flying equivalent of Eliza. They may well have done some learning from datasets on the ground to optimise the decision tree though.
Re: IF THEN ELSE
Well Eliza is an adaptive decision tree but you're right, I should have said:
"Differentiation is usually from "weak" to "strong" AI, this is at best an example of weak AI"
use AI to determine if they really do shite when they spot a load of washing hanging on the line
Warning...
Is this nothing more than a way of selling something AI to the gull ible?
Re: Warning...
Possibly. If they over-promise on the AI capability and can't deliver then it could be become an albatross around someone's neck.
Re: Warning...
In that case they'll just have to work harder until they tern the corner.
The really important question ...
I want to know where the seagulls go to get their backpacks recharged?!?
Or have the eggheads just scattered induction loops all over the place? Perhaps they've trained the seagulls to dive bomb the mag-lev trains to get a quick inductive battery boost! Have they trained eagles to swoop in and change the batteries on the wing?
Re: The really important question ...
Nah, they just perch on the HT powerlines found everywhere (except at sea)
Re: The really important question ...
> where the seagulls go to get their backpacks recharged?!?
Maybe they all have [1]Nest chargers?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV8qw7rngwA
AI on an arduino? kinda doubt it
> the gizmos, each containing a video camera, an accelerometer, GPS unit, and a Microchip ATmega328P 8-bit microcontroller.
Though as a marketing ploy for the gull-ible
However, [1]given this sort of report on the shortcomings of AI powered cameras , I hope the people behind this project have kept their expectations as low as humanly possible.
[1] https://idle.slashdot.org/story/20/11/02/0139217/soccer-telecast-ruined-when-ai-controlled-camera-mistakes-refs-bald-head-for-ball
Re: AI on an arduino? kinda doubt it
If an Arduino isn't up to the job, is it a case of Pi in the sky?
AI
“Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to monitor seagulls. Call that job satisfaction, 'cause I don't.”
Probably a useful tool to find and demonstrate where and how much rubbish we leave on our streets and which landfill sites gulls use to feed as a substitute for everything they once ate that we've wiped out.
Now we can have AI-powered seagull managers. Flap in. Flap around. Shit over everything. Flap out.
When I first read the title I my brain read "Jetpacks" instead of "backpacks".
Spy vs Spy
Just what the world needs, birds with cameras.
Now every secure goverment site will require a patrol of Owls or maybe a "Falcon Force" to fend off the little spies.
Flying rats
Along with feral pigeons.
Perhaps they can use this tech to find a way to stop the bastards dive bombing my fish and chips when strolling down the pier?
Cue the gulls in the Nemo film; mine! Mine! Mine!