Drones and AI Take On Killer Sharks Down Under

Whether or not shark attacks are a major problem in Australia (spoiler alert: they're not), the Australian government has devoted an enormous amount of resources into trying to mitigate the risk of sharks near popular beaches. They've tried nets to keep the sharks out, they've tried electronic gadgets to dissuade them, and they've tried lots of different ways of killing them, without much in the way of evidence that any of it is particularly effective. After six months of trials, the latest and most robot-y idea is about to be implemented: drones will start patrolling some Australian beaches next month, using cameras and some AI-backed image analysis software to spot lurking sharks much better than humans can. We can manage a 20-30 percent accuracy rate, which means both identifying other things as sharks (kinda bad) and misidentifying sharks as other things (way worse). As with many tasks of this kind, a machine learning system does much better: once it's been trained on labeled aerial videos of sharks, whales, dolphins, surfers, swimmers, boats, and whatever else, the software is 90 percent accurate at telling humans to panic because there's a shark somewhere.