🌳🐘 Forest elephants are even harder to protect from 𝐢𝐯𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐩𝐨𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 than savannah elephants (where you could survey with drones) because the vegetation gives them & poachers cover. 🌿 

So what do you do when you can’t see? 🙈 You listen! 👂

▶ That's why FruitPunch AI is hosting the AI for Forest Elephants Challenge.

Together with 50+ engineers from all over the globe, we will apply AI to 𝐝𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐠𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐩𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐬 (their voices) on sound monitoring devices deep in the rainforest of Central Africa.

💪🏽 FruitPunch is working with the world’s authority on conservation bioacoustics at Cornell & Stanford to process the low tones (inaudible to human ears) that elephants use to communicate with each other to identify them - and of course to detect gunshots!

WHY is it important to better monitor these elephants? 🤔

1. Their crucial role in the ecosystem: Forest elephants are key ecosystem engineers in Central Africa’s tropical rainforests. Their poaching reduces the rainforest’s capability to sequester carbon!

2. Human-wildlife conflict prevention: Habitat loss and decreased food availability due to climate change increasingly compels elephants to raid villagers’ crops jeopardizing a peaceful co-existence between people and wildlife. 

📊 Participants will optimize elephant & gunshot detection models and implement on-edge

MLOps: The processing pipeline

• Implement a more efficient spectrogram extractor (STFT)

• Reduce model sizes (TensorRT)

• Make it easy to use/configure for the researchers

ML: Optimize models

• Find the best model architectures

• Train on more data

Edge-computing

• Implement on-edge

• Find the most energy efficient device that can support the pipeline live

• Create power-efficient implementation of the pipeline

✅ Join us in AI for Forest Elephants

READ more about this challenge and APPLY here 👇👇👇

Read "AI for Forest Elephants Challenge" on

AI for Forest Elephants Challenge

AI for Forest Elephants Challenge

Applications are open till 17 Feb 2023, early applications get preference.

 ❤️ Special thanks for the big help with the Challenge: Daniela Hedwig from the Elephant Listening Project at the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at Cornell University and Andreas Paepcke at Stanford University and all our other partners, including but not limited to: Bastiaan den Braber at Zambezi Partners, Martijn van der Linden at NXP Semiconductors, Bourhan Yassin from Rainforest Connection (RFCx)!