How a group of data scientists are saving the whales with machine learning

Facial recognition for whales may sound like a terrible elevator pitch, but to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the data scientists at Deepsense.io, Piotr Niedzwiedz told the story of how marine biologist Christin Khan - whose day job is flying over the ocean taking pictures of endangered whales for NOAA - was taking a break one afternoon and logged into Facebook. Here she was asked to identify her friends in photos and thought: "Why couldn't she do something similar with whales?" So she set up a competition on the data science website Kaggle - called Right Whale Recognition - to help them catalogue and track the small remaining population of the endangered whale. Piotr Niedzwiedz was simply that: "Humans are completely incapable of remembering 500 whale faces. The key to recognising this breed of whale is the unique white callosity pattern surrounding the blow hole."