Photo identification is an important tool for estimating abundance and monitoring population trends over time. However, manually matching photographs to known individuals is time‐consuming. Motivated by recent developments in image recognition, we hosted a data science challenge on the crowdsourcing platform Kaggle to automate the identification of endangered North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis). The winning solution automatically identified individual whales with 87% accuracy with a series of convolutional neural networks to identify the region of interest on an image, rotate, crop, and create standardized photographs of uniform size and orientation and then identify the correct individual whale from these passport‐like photographs. Recent advances in deep learning coupled with this fully automated workflow have yielded impressive results and have the potential to revolutionize traditional methods for the collection of data on the abundance and distribution of wild populations. Presenting these results to a broad audience should further bridge the gap between the data science and conservation science communities.

Photo identification is an important tool in the conservation management of endangered species, and recent developments in artificial intelligence are revolutionizing existing workflows to identify individual animals. In 2015, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hosted a Kaggle data science competition to automate the identification of endangered North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis). The winning algorithms developed by Deepsense.ai were able to identify individuals with 87% accuracy using a series of convolutional neural networks to identify the region of interest, create standardized photographs of uniform size and orientation, and then identify the correct individual. Since that time, we have brought in many more collaborators as we moved from prototype to production. Leveraging the existing infrastructure by Wild Me, the developers of Flukebook, we have created a web-based platform that allows biologists with no machine learning expertise to utilize semi-automated photo identification of right whales. New models were generated on an updated dataset using the winning Deepsense.ai algorithms. Given the morphological similarity between the North Atlantic right whale and closely related southern right whale (Eubalaena australis), we expanded the system to incorporate the largest long-term photo identification catalogs around the world including the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, and New Zealand. The system is now fully operational with multi-feature matching for both North Atlantic right whales and southern right whales from aerial photos of their heads (Deepsense), lateral photos of their heads (Pose Invariant Embeddings), flukes (CurvRank v2), and peduncle scarring (HotSpotter). We hope to encourage researchers to embrace both broad data collaborations and artificial intelligence to increase our understanding of wild populations and aid conservation efforts.

Abstract-This document describes an approach to the problem of predicting dangerous seismic events in active coal mines up to 8 hours in advance. It was developed as a part of the AAIA'16 Data Mining Challenge: Predicting Dangerous Seismic Events in Active Coal Mines. The solutions presented consist of ensembles of various predictive models trained on different sets of features. The best one achieved a winning score of 0.939 AUC.

This paper considers explicit constructions of Auerbach bases in separable Banach spaces. Answering the question of A. Pe lczyński, we prove by construction the existence of Auerbach basis in arbitrary subspace of c 0 of finite codimension and in the space C(K) for K compact countable metric space.

This document describes an approach to the problem of predicting dangerous seismic events in active coal mines up to 8 hours in advance. It was developed as a part of the AAIA'16 Data Mining Challenge: Predicting Dangerous Seismic Events in Active Coal Mines. The solutions presented consist of ensembles of various predictive models trained on different sets of features. The best one achieved a winning score of 0.939 AUC.