How AI could help save the humble sea cow

Artificial-intelligence tech has been moving out of academic circles into real-world applications like screening out spam or making it look like Van Gogh painted your photo. But now it's also tapping our weakness for cute sea creatures threatened by extinction. The large marine animal is really hard to keep track of. Researchers are using drones to take aerial photos of the ocean, but detecting them in those photos is a challenging task...for humans. That's where Google's TensorFlow neural network software project comes in, developer advocate Josh Gordon explained in a story posted Wednesday to Google's machine learning blog.