A.I. birder does what a human never could -- study

An immense frustration ecologists encounter is prompted by the attempt to keep track of individual animals in a study. This task only becomes more difficult when trying to pinpoint small, mobile animals like songbirds. While intelligent computer algorithms can help scientists better complete this task, training these systems to recognize different species -- let alone individuals in a species -- can take thousands of data points, time, and money. However, French and Portuguese researchers recently devised a way to streamline this process. They designed a deep-learning network that can identify individual birds with up to 92 percent accuracy in three different species. This tech can not only save scientists resources but can help them collect important data about the lives of birds -- and better understand what may be leading to their decline in North America.