"The machine–learning research we're doing is a little unique, because we don't just want to classify an object in a single image," says Szymanski.

America's solar farms have a bird problem. Utility companies have been finding bird carcasses littering the ground at their facilities for years, a strange and unexpected consequence of the national solar boom. No one was quite sure why this was happening, but it was clearly a problem for a type of energy that was billed as being environmentally friendly. So in 2013, a group of utilities, academics, and environmental organizations came together to form the Avian Solar Working Group to develop strategies to mitigate avian deaths at solar facilities around the US. "There was very little research about the impacts of solar on birds," says Misti Sporer, the lead environmental scientist at Duke Energy, an electric utility in North Carolina, and the coordinator of the working group.