Stephanie O'Donnell
- @StephODonnell
- | She / Her
WILDLABS
We asked twitter the question, 'can gaming help conservation?' and were delighted when Aaron Mase (University of Surrey) responded with an emphatic 'yes', tweeting us a link to his project - Wildsense. As Aaron is a member here on WILDLABS, I thought I'd take the opportunity to ask him about the project.
The Wildsense project aims to engage anyone with an interest in games or wildlife so they contribute to the identification of wildlife and improve world knowledge of animal behaviour. Their first project focuses on the wild tiger where we are counting, tracking and studying the behaviour of tigers around the world (see the image below). As I understand it, the app uses a combination of data mining and camera trap images to fuel the content in the app, which then shows users images of tigers to sort through and classify. This crowd sourced information is then fed into a machine learning algorithm to improve your analysis of images.
One of your main goals for the project is around citizen science and raising awareness of engangered animals. But the project has bigger aspirations than just awareness raising - 'This innovative software can assist in combating wildlife crime through building valuable profiles of animals at risk, facilitating a greater understanding of important contextual information, such as location and behaviour'. Would you tell us a bit more about how you are going to achieve this? I suspect it ties in with the machine learning aspect of your project, which is the part of your project I'm really curious about but haven't been able to find much information to explain what exactly it is your algorithms are going to do. So I'm really interested to hear more about what you're building towards and how you're going to achieve real impact.
28 December 2015 7:09pm
Hi Steph,
Thanks for your message. I would be delighted to answer your question about Wildsense.
You are correct that our aim is to do a lot more than raise awareness and engange citizens with our Wildsense Tigers game.
We are using images from a range of image sharing websites that have been uploaded by people online and publicly shared. Each photograph contains valuable information that often includes the time and location that the photograph is taken. If we can understand when a photo was taken, where it was taken, and the individual animal in the photograph, then we can start to build up a picture of the movement of individuals. We are benefiting from people power from the users that are both indirectly uploading photographs online and also directly interacting with our Wildsense game. We are combining this with computing power with our data analysis, computer vision and machine learning software.
We are doing this experiment on a large scale and we believe that "the wisdom of the crowd" will enable us to gather and analyse enough information so that we can build an accurate picture. We started with wild tigers and our plan is to create a platform that can be used for other species as well. We are working on other animals already behind the scenes.
I hope that answers your question.
Best wishes,
Aaron Mason
11 January 2016 6:33pm
Hi Barbara,
You are right in that cyberpoaching is becoming an increasing risk. I have seen various cases where information posted on social media has provided too much information and then ended up in the wrong hands (e.g. http://www.army.mil/article/75165/Geotagging_poses_security_risks/).
We need to be careful about the accuracy of information that is disclosed. Providing an approximate time and location seems to be the most popular adopted approach.
Hacking is another issue. For example, I have seen research demonstrating the potential to gain unauthrised access to GPS collar data.
Our main focus has been the Bengal Tiger but we want to see how much we can learn about other tigers as well. Our end goal is to support a range of animal species.
P.S. I am pleased that you are aware of http://www.tigernation.org - I co-founded it :)
Aaron Mason