Artificial Intelligence is Helping Scientists "See" the Diversity of Sound

In an exciting demonstration of the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and the diversity of species, a team composed of two programmers and an ornithologist (an expert on birds) created a map of visualized bird sounds. Coders Manny Tan and Kyle McDonald worked with ornithologist Jessie Barry to create this visually euphonious interactive map of bird sounds. Tan and McDonald used machine learning to organize thousands of bird sounds from a collection by Cornell University. They didn't supply their algorithm with tags or even names of the bird sounds. Instead, they wanted to see how it would learn to organize all the data by listening to the bird sounds.