A Workshop in Ecology and Behaviour seminar hosted by the School of Biological Sciences
Machine vision and robotics have the potential to revolutionise the quantity and quality of data we can collect from wild and captive animals, whether that’s for monitoring endangered populations or for more detailed analysis of behaviour, all collected non-invasively. Tilo Burghardt, from Bristol’s own Computer Sciences department, is one of the pioneers of the field, with projects ranging from automated individual identification of, among other species, gorillas, chimpanzees, great white sharks and African penguins, to population monitoring of elephants and other large mammals from drones, to use of autonomous drones for farming and animal husbandry. In this talk, Tilo gives us a tour of the diverse projects he is working on, and what the technology can offer ecologists, conservationists, animal welfare researchers, palaeontologists, and any scientist where identification of objects is crucial, but traditionally labour and time intensive, and dependent upon experts.
Dr Tilo Burghardt is a computer science academic who researches animal biometrics and computer vision methods for the life sciences. His work focuses on using artificial intelligence and robotics to support biodiversity, sustainability, and animal welfare. His interdisciplinary research links computing with ecology, conservation, taxonomics, healthcare, animal husbandry, and sustainable farming. He contributed to establishing animal biometrics as an emerging cross-discipline routed in pattern recognition and computer vision.