Wildlife conservation is an enormous challenge. Wild Me, a non-profit organization, is leveraging the photos and videos of citizen scientists and the cloud, artificial intelligence, and computer vision to help track individual animals and to inform wildlife conservation efforts. Learn more about this extraordinary collaboration between man and machine.

1. The Amazing Ways Wild
Me Uses Artificial
Intelligence And Citizen
Scientists To Help With
Conservation

2. © 2020 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Title
Text
Introduction
Introduction
Wildlife conservation is an enormous challenge. Wild Me, a non-profit organization, is
leveraging the photos and videos of citizen scientists and the cloud, artificial intelligence,
and computer vision to help track individual animals and to inform wildlife conservation
efforts. Learn more about this extraordinary collaboration between man and machine.
Did you know that scientists have identified only 1.5 million species out of the 10 million
estimated on Earth? And many of those species are vulnerable to extinction. Thanks to
the efforts of the non-profit organization Wild Me, the gargantuan task of wildlife
preservation is getting a much-needed assist from citizen scientists who photograph
and video wildlife when traveling the world, plus high-tech solutions such as cloud
computing, artificial intelligence, and machine vision.
The Amazing Ways Wild Me Uses Artificial
Intelligence And Citizen Scientists To Help With
Conservation

3. © 2020 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Creating Collaborative Data Sets
To make the progress on wildlife conservation that’s necessary, it’s going to take pulling
data out of proprietary data sets and joining them into collaborative data sets. This is
precisely what Wild Me and its Wildbook platform can do for the effort. The human effort
it would take to sort through and classify images and videos of each animal is prohibitively
time-consuming. With cloud computing and artificial intelligence, not only does the
accuracy improve, but it reduces the time of identifying individual animals from hours
when humans do it down to seconds when machines are on the job.
Once the specific animal is identified by the machine analyzing its unique markings,
including stripes, spots, and other defining physical features such as scars, the location,
time, and date of the image is recorded. Over time, the records for each animal continue
to grow as more citizen scientists and researchers add to the image catalog. The data
that's collected about each animal can be used by wildlife experts to track the health,
migration, and other important facts about a species. Scientists can use this species info
along with climate, geographic, behavioral, and environmental data to better understand
the ecological and conservation issues they are facing.

4. © 2020 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Creating Collaborative Data Sets
Wild Me started off by tracking whale sharks, a project that launched in 2003 after Jason
Holmberg, director of engineering for Wild Me and chief information architect of
Wildbook, went scuba diving and saw his first whale shark. After that first encounter, he
joined a research expedition and learned how whale sharks were being tracked at the time
by using plastic tags. Unfortunately, these plastic tags were rarely re-sighted, therefore
making the ability to collect sufficient data on each individual animal nearly impossible.
Holmberg believed there was a more effective way to track animals by using computer
vision. He set out to develop the algorithm and the platform to do just that. Wild Me and
Wildbook are the result.
Today, Wild Me uses computer vision algorithms to identify whale sharks based on their
unique markings from the photos taken around the world by tour operators, tourists, and
researchers. They have tagged more than 8,100 whale sharks since the project began,
thanks to the contributions of citizen scientists. The success of this database has prompted
many other researchers to realize the potential of the citizen-scientist model for their
conservation efforts, including projects focused on zebras, humpback whales, ragged-
tooth sharks, polar bears, and more. Wild Me made its Wildbook platform open source to
allow others to use this non-invasive tracking of species.

5. © 2020 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Creating Collaborative Data Sets
To make the Wildbook platform better equipped to scale and handle many more
endangered species, Wild Me is working with Microsoft and its AI for Earth program. Now
that Wild Me and Microsoft are collaborating, they have grand ambitions that could
include expanding the artificial intelligence tools to many more species as well as
launching a tweet bot. Already an intelligent agent tags "whale shark" on YouTube videos
nightly by using machine learning and natural language processing to read the video
description to determine if the video's description includes info about the animal.
By 2100, 38 percent of all species will be extinct without action and intervention. Insights
from data and the processing power that comes with the cloud and artificial intelligence
can be instrumental in understanding the issue and how extinction could be prevented.
These efforts are most certainly time-sensitive, so any technology that can speed the
efforts are necessary. The beauty of Wild Me and its efforts is the combination of citizen
scientists participating to submit the data, images, and videos required for the machines
to yield insights about wildlife conservation. The public also has the ability to follow their
favorite animals and to contribute to the global conservation effort.

6. © 2020 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Creating Collaborative Data Sets
There’s no doubt Wild Me’s innovations have revolutionized animal identification. It’s a
spectacular example of what can result when humans and machines combine efforts for
the greater good.

7. Bernard Marr is an internationally best-selling author, popular keynote speaker, futurist, and a
strategic business & technology advisor to governments and companies. He helps
organisations improve their business performance, use data more intelligently, and
understand the implications of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data,
blockchains, and the Internet of Things.
LinkedIn has ranked Bernard as one of the world’s top 5 business influencers. He is a frequent
contributor to the World Economic Forum and writes a regular column for Forbes. Every day
Bernard actively engages his 1.5 million social media followers and shares content that
reaches millions of readers.
Visit The
Website
© 2020 Bernard Marr , Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
© 2017 Bernard Marr , Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
© 2020 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Bernard Marr is an internationally best-selling author, popular keynote speaker, futurist, and a
strategic business & technology advisor to governments and companies. He helps
organisations improve their business performance, use data more intelligently, and
understand the implications of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data,
blockchains, and the Internet of Things.
LinkedIn has ranked Bernard as one of the world’s top 5 business influencers. He is a frequent
contributor to the World Economic Forum and writes a regular column for Forbes. Every day
Bernard actively engages his 1.5 million social media followers and shares content that
reaches millions of readers.
Visit The
Website

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