Merlin (AI) and eBird

I try to leave the paying job out of this blog as much as I can.  Usually any mention is that it is a necessary evil to fund the photography hobby or that the hours required have prevented me from attending some photo related activity.  And not that the following will shower praises on the paying job, just an interesting intersection of job and hobby.

I've spent the past few weeks taking classes, taking tests and earning certifications in the web world for both IBM and AWS.  The track I'm on is for administration, not programing.  Fascinating stuff.  Because of my relationship with IBM, I am very familiar with Watson and the technology.  Watson gained fame by competing on the Jeopardy game show - against a human.  Enter into the world of deep learning.  Artificial Intelligence.  AI.  With massive amounts of data available, you have AI to sift though the data to get the answers of the world.  And if IBM has it, so do AWS, Google, Microsoft and the rest.

For the faint of heart in privacy concerns, you may not like the following.  If you didn't know this already, facial recognition software is available to the masses.  With the stroke of a pen on a check, you to have the ability to run any kind of recognition application.  Yep, even facial.

The world of AI encompasses more than just facial.  And that's where work crosses with hobby.  It appears that many in the birding community also have a hobby of photography.  So there has to be millions of  bird photos floating around the web and other databases.  And most are probably correctly identified.  And this is where deep learning, AI and your phone all come together.  The best parts of the web, coming together.

Cornell Labs, part of the Cornell university in NY, has created a network that birders can use to log species seen plus information such as date and location.  In return, Cornell Labs has an unpaid data stream to its databases.  And eBird is born.  And that's all well and good, and here's the really good part.  Another way into the eBird database is an app called Merlin.  When I hear Merlin, I think of Wizards and Aircraft engines.  Closer to the Wizard part, this app will help you identify what flying critter you just saw.  And if you happen to have a photo of said flying critter, even easier.  All on your phone.  Easy peazy.

So I'm now a member of the eBird community.  And frequent user of Merlin.