FruitPunch AI Publications

AI for Good reads, videos and news share space. Get some useful information to build a better world with the help of AI!

Featured articles

August 25, 2023

Flying High with AI: Counting Pelican Breeding Pairs in the Danube Delta

Imagine flying in a small airplane over the vast wetlands of the Danube Delta on the shores of the Black Sea in Romania looking for patches of small white dots: great white pelicans (Pelecanus onocrotalus). While flying over the colonies researchers like Sebastian Bugariu from the Romanian Ornithological Society (ROS) take photos which will be used to count the number of breeding birds when back in the office. The number of breeding pairs has grown from ~5,000 pairs 15 years ago to recently ~18,000 pairs. Keeping good records of the breeding numbers is important but not an easy task. Back at the office, it can take weeks to go through the images and manually count the pelicans. Wouldn’t it be great if this process could be automated, freeing up time that could be dedicated to other important conservation? This is where the AI for Pelican challenge started.

August 10, 2023

Solving automated wildlife taxonomy with AI

In the wild landscapes of Europe, camera traps have become essential tools for ecologists and wildlife researchers, sharing glimpses into the lives of the continent's diverse and fascinating animals. These devices have revolutionized our understanding of European wildlife, but their use comes with a challenge - the sheer volume of data they generate. To tackle this issue, a team of dedicated FruitPunchers recently developed an AI solution for the European Wildlife Challenge.

July 27, 2023

Listening to the Giants: Protecting Forest Elephants Through Audio Monitoring

In the dense rainforests of Central Africa, a captivating endeavor is underway, driven by researchers from Cornell University. Their mission? To track and protect elephants through the power of audio monitoring. These majestic creatures emit resounding rumbles at an incredibly low frequency, nearly imperceptible to the human ear. These deep calls, traversing vast distances, serve as a concealed communication network for elephants, veiled from our understanding for centuries.

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Newest articles

August 25, 2023

Understanding seals with AI

On 6th December 2022, the FruitPunchAI community joined forces with researchers from Colgate University to build a facial recognition model that enables the non-invasive study and monitoring of harbor seals and other marine mammals. The team’s goal was to build upon the existing SealNet model developed by Colgate University to improve its accuracy, generalizability across sea species and mammals, and increase development velocity across data processing and model development workflows.

February 10, 2023

How we detect oil spills on open sea and support response teams

“Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill” might ring a bell for most of you. But did you know that there are numerous oil spills caused by small accidents and deliberate discharges, which do not make the headlines? Did you also know that these smaller incidents actually contribute to the bulk of oil pollution, and are just as, if not more threatening than a single major oil spill?

November 24, 2022

Can AI track reforestation projects using drone and satellite data?

Satellite and drone data was used to monitor tree coverage of Justdiggit re-greening projects in Tanzania and Kenya to measure the efficiency of carbon capture! To help fight climate change by improving carbon capture efficiency, three teams of AI engineers came together to build and implement machine learning models.

November 22, 2022

The Most Important AI for Good Trends of 2022 + Some Dangers

The rise of open research communities usher in a power distribution in AI research and accessibility, AI safety is slowly being taken seriously and AI assists fundamental breakthroughs in various natural sciences! This article describes the most important AI for Good trends of 2022 and what they mean to you.

October 31, 2022

‘I just took the plunge and left my pharmacy job.’: Aisha Kala on how she became a self-taught data scientist

AI for Good engineer Aisha Kala talks about her journey of switching to a career in tech and learning statistics, coding and computer science online. A love letter to data and people in AI communities trying to make the world a better place.

October 14, 2022

How to use vehicle sensors to make cities more sustainable

A case study on making cities greener by vegetation monitoring and detecting traffic density; differentiating between heavy vehicles, buses and private transport.

October 3, 2022

Can AI detect the risk of heart failure from ECGs?

Electrocardiogram data was subjected to a sweeping array of machine learning and deep learning models. Is it as good a predictor of heart failure risk as blood tests?

September 21, 2022

The pains of classifying flooded forests in satellite data

About a tricky detection use case - from weeks of data pre-processing to training 2 CNNs; and why the answer might be in infrared band data.

September 14, 2022

AI-based early warning system for river floods

Forecasting flash floods with LSTM, ARIMA and Prophet using time series data from hydrological sensors monitoring French rivers.

September 6, 2022

How we applied AI to prevent sepsis in preterm babies

A case study on using XGBoost for time series forecasting to predict the onset of sepsis in preterm infants within a 12-hour prediction horizon.

August 29, 2022

AI-powered Wildlife Conservation in Africa

An account of 10-week teamwork developing multiple machine learning and hardware pipelines to bring production-ready AI to edge hardware on flying rangers.

August 28, 2022

Model Optimization and Pruning of Poacher-detecting YOLOv5

Optimizing a YOLOv5 model for NVIDIA Jetson Nano to increase the inference speed and reduce memory footprint, focusing on inference speed not the absolute mAP.

August 27, 2022

User-friendly, Wilderness-proof MLOps

Developing a CI/CD pipeline that automatically retrains the existing poacher-detecting model, which can be deployed to the drone with improved performance.