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Our pick for best value powered bookshelf speakers are on sale for Amazon Prime Big Deal Days

Popular Science

Amazon Prime Day is live. See the best deals HERE. Edifier's MR5 2.0 is a true crossover pick--musical enough for hi-fi listening, but neutral enough for creators who need an affordable entry point into production. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Edifier has a long-standing reputation for crafting powered speakers that deliver exceptional value for their price, and the MR5 2.0 is the latest addition to this lineage.


How billiard balls led to plastic everywhere

Popular Science

Amazon Prime Day is live. See the best deals HERE. The drive to save elephants had some unforeseen conservation consequences. Billiard balls were once made of ivory. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday.


Wildlife Product Trading in Online Social Networks: A Case Study on Ivory-Related Product Sales Promotion Posts

Mou, Guanyi, Yue, Yun, Lee, Kyumin, Zhang, Ziming

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Wildlife trafficking (WLT) has emerged as a global issue, with traffickers expanding their operations from offline to online platforms, utilizing e-commerce websites and social networks to enhance their illicit trade. This paper addresses the challenge of detecting and recognizing wildlife product sales promotion behaviors in online social networks, a crucial aspect in combating these environmentally harmful activities. To counter these environmentally damaging illegal operations, in this research, we focus on wildlife product sales promotion behaviors in online social networks. Specifically, 1) A scalable dataset related to wildlife product trading is collected using a network-based approach. This dataset is labeled through a human-in-the-loop machine learning process, distinguishing positive class samples containing wildlife product selling posts and hard-negatives representing normal posts misclassified as potential WLT posts, subsequently corrected by human annotators. 2) We benchmark the machine learning results on the proposed dataset and build a practical framework that automatically identifies suspicious wildlife selling posts and accounts, sufficiently leveraging the multi-modal nature of online social networks. 3) This research delves into an in-depth analysis of trading posts, shedding light on the systematic and organized selling behaviors prevalent in the current landscape. We provide detailed insights into the nature of these behaviors, contributing valuable information for understanding and countering illegal wildlife product trading.


New AI system can help conserve wildlife, prevent poaching in Africa: report

FOX News

Energetic bear cubs play with rehabilitation staff after arriving at a wildlife center. African conservationists are hoping that artificial intelligence (AI) powered cameras could help aid in the protection of endangered species, such as the forest and savannah elephants. "We must urgently put an end to poaching and ensure that sufficient suitable habitat for both forest and savanna elephants is conserved," Dr. Bruno Oberle, Director-General of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), said when discussing the potential new technology. The cameras, developed in collaboration between Dutch tech start-up Hack the Planet and British scientists at Stirling University, will be able to detect different animal species and humans in real time and provide live alerts to local villages and rangers, Stirling wrote in a press release. A pilot test of the tech, which works with satellites and a range of networks including Wi-Fi, long-rage radio and cellular coverage, immediately labeled images and sent out warnings calling for help.


How AI can give endangered elephants a fighting chance

#artificialintelligence

At present, more African elephants are dying than being born. Over the last century, the world's elephant population has declined 97% from trophy hunters, ruthless ivory mercenaries, and even terrorist groups. The Wildlife Conservation Society has pointed out that the global ivory trade leads to the death of up to 35,000 elephants a year in Africa. It's easy to point a finger at China as the biggest market for poached ivory in the world, yet only five years ago more than a ton of confiscated ivory was crushed in New York's Times Square by the Wildlife Conservation Society.


Future Friday: How will Artificial Intelligence be used in the future?

#artificialintelligence

Artificial intelligence- will it help or hinder humans? I have written about artificial intelligence several times, for example in Future Friday: Artificial Intelligence and the HR world and Future Friday: The future of work definitely involves Artificial Intelligence. So why am I writing about it again? The answer to that question is found in the more widespread coverage that AI is receiving. It is being written about on a wider basis and many people still fear they may lose their job as a result of AI.


dmlc/keras

@machinelearnbot

Keras is a high-level neural networks library, written in Python and capable of running on top of either TensorFlow or Theano. It was developed with a focus on enabling fast experimentation. Being able to go from idea to result with the least possible delay is key to doing good research. Keras is compatible with: Python 2.7-3.5. A model is understood as a sequence or a graph of standalone, fully-configurable modules that can be plugged together with as little restrictions as possible.


Piano player bot tickles the ivories in Taiwan

AITopics Original Links

If you dig old-school player pianos, how about a pair of robotic hands that plays keyboard? Visitors to the ongoing Taipei International Robot Show (TIROS) are getting an eyeful of a number of quirky robots, including a robot that uses 10 fingers to play tunes on a keyboard. The bot is the work of Taiwan's Hiwin Technologies and can play complex melodies with its multiple digits. Hiwin makes ball screws and components such as linear motors, which were used in the keyboard player. Hiwin reportedly said its player is the first to use 10 fingers to tickle the ivories. However, it seems to be less sophisticated than WABOT 2, a humanoid musician developed in Japan over a quarter-century ago.


Bach to the future: AI, meet classical music

#artificialintelligence

Are consciousness and emotion essential components for creating music? Johann Sebastian Bach never completed his 18th-century work "The Art of Fugue," but now a computer might do it for him. University of Washington researchers on Wednesday released MusicNet, a large-scale classical music dataset aimed at helping machines understand the basic structure of classical music -- and even predict the next notes in a recording. The publicly available dataset includes 330 classical music recordings, along with more than a million annotated markers, verified by trained musicians, that indicate the timing of each note, the instrument that plays it and the note's position in a composition's metrical structure. "At a high level, we're interested in what makes music appealing to the ears, how we can better understand composition, or the essence of what makes Bach sound like Bach," Sham Kakade, a UW associate professor of computer science, engineering and statistics, said in a statement.


Endangered Animals Are Being Poisoned In Zimbabwe. Drones Are Flying To The Rescue.

Huffington Post - Tech news and opinion

Instead of using guns to kill elephants and rhinoceroses, some poachers in Zimbabwe have begun poisoning the animals' water with cyanide? a practice some activists believe could be curbed by flying drones over parks in the African country. Although drone usage hasn't been proven to stop the killing of elephants, anti-poaching program Air Shepherd is prepared to use monitoring to help stop people from poisoning animals. The organization already flies drones over parks in three southern Africa countries at night to patrol for gun-toting poachers. The suspected cause of death, according to news reports, is cyanide, which has been used to kill hundreds of elephants in recent years. "The biggest problem that we have is that ivory is a business," said Otto Werdmuller Von Elgg, the CEO of UAV and Drone Solutions, a business partnering with the Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation to run the Air Shepherd program. "The poaching of the animals is the last thing that people want to solve.