This AI birdwatcher lets you 'see' through the eyes of a machine

It can take years of birdwatching experience to tell one species from the next. But using an artificial intelligence technique called deep learning, Duke University researchers have trained a computer to identify up to 200 species of birds from just a photo. The real innovation, however, is that the A.I. tool also shows its thinking, in a way that even someone who doesn't know a penguin from a puffin can understand. The team trained their deep neural network -- algorithms based on the way the brain works -- by feeding it 11,788 photos of 200 bird species to learn from, ranging from swimming ducks to hovering hummingbirds. The researchers never told the network "this is a beak" or "these are wing feathers."