Xoltar - Machine learning, drones, and whales: A great combination!

Last June, a simple question changed my life: "Hey Bryn, what do you know about whales?" Of course like most people, my answer was "Not much," but that marked the beginning of an important project to help track the health of whale populations by using machine learning to analyze video from drones. Parley for the Oceans introduced me and my colleagues Ted Willke and Javier Turek to Dr. Iain Kerr of Ocean Alliance, and we started talking about how machine learning could help make marine biologists' lives easier and help protect the whales, using the video from Dr. Kerr's SnotBot drones. Dr. Kerr started the SnotBot program because in the not-so-distant past, when people wanted to understand the health of a whale, or get its DNA, the only way to do this was to shoot it with a crossbow with a specially prepared bolt with a string on it, that would only go a couple of inches into the (remember, bus-size) body. The bolt would then be reeled in and the sample could be extracted from it.