Technology
AI can use tourist photos to help track Antarctica’s penguins
Adélie penguins in Antarctica
Prof. Heather Lynch
Artificial intelligence can help accurately map and track penguin colonies in Antarctica by analysing tourist photos.
“Right now, everyone has a camera in their pocket, and so the sheer volume of data being collected around the world is incredible,” says Heather Lynch at Stony Brook University in New York.
Haoyu Wu at Stony Brook University and his colleagues, including Lynch, used an AI tool developed by Meta to highlight Adélie penguins in photographs taken by tourists or scientists on the ground. With guidance from a human expert, the AI tool was able to automatically identify and outline entire colonies in photos. This semi-automated method is much faster than doing everything manually because the AI tool takes just 5 to 10 seconds per image, compared with a person taking 1 to 2 minutes, says Wu.
The team also created a 3D digital model of the Antarctic landscape using satellite imagery and terrain elevation data. By identifying landscape details in the tourist pictures, the researchers could place the photographer, then the penguin colony, accurately within the 3D model.
This transformation of ground photos into a bird’s-eye view allows researchers to track how penguin colonies change in location and population size over time – which could prove especially helpful in remote regions of the world where aerial drone or aircraft surveys are done infrequently. Such tracking is important because Adélie penguins are considered a sentinel species, meaning shifts in their populations are an indicator of climate change. The AI-assisted technique can also harness historical imagery to track phenomena such as glacier changes that “occur very slowly and may only be evident by looking across decades of time”, says Lynch.
“Tracking of penguin colony population sizes and locations is important,” says Annie Schmidt at Point Blue Conservation Science, a nonprofit based in California. But it is just a “first step” towards a better understanding of the reasons for those population changes, she adds.
“This could be useful, especially as many penguin colonies are only rarely assessed by the research community,” says Peter Fretwell at the British Antarctic Survey. But researchers remain divided over the impacts of Antarctic tourism – the two large Adélie penguin groups evaluated by the researchers are often visited by tour ships on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula.
“Some scientists are worried that, by encouraging tourists to do citizen science, we are justifying their trips – which will be used by the cruise companies to sell more berths, fuelling the expansion,” says Fretwell. “Others think that there is very little on-the-ground impact from the industry, as it is well regulated.”
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In a surprising move this week, Apple exorcised its Mac lineup of devices with 8GB of memory, including in the MacBook Air.
Waymo has indicated it will use Google Gemini AI for its self-driving “robotaxis”. The company seems to be developing a new training model for its autonomous vehicles, which will draw data from Google’s Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) Gemini.
Waymo releases new research paper about MLLMs helping robotaxis
Waymo LLC was formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project. It is an American autonomous driving technology company. Waymo has been gradually building hardware and software for robotaxis to safely ferry passengers on busy roads.
Waymo released a new research paper, reported The Verge. Titled “End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving” or EMMA, the research paper refers to a new MLLM that’s dedicated to autonomous vehicles.
This new end-to-end training model would process sensor data and generate “future trajectories for autonomous vehicles.”. Needless to say, this would help Waymo’s driverless vehicles make smart decisions on the road. The Waymo robotaxis could confidently predict where to go and how to avoid obstacles.
How will Google Gemini help Waymo?
For several years, algorithms for driverless vehicles have adopted compartmentalized solutions or modules to address each critical function. In other words, tech companies attempted to address aspects such as perception, mapping, prediction, and planning, independently of each other.
Such an approach has helped solve problems for autonomous vehicles. However, with this approach, companies have faced trouble while scaling their solutions. This is because of, “accumulated errors among modules and limited inter-module communication,” mentioned Waymo in the research paper.
Moreover, “pre-defined” parameters caused such solutions to falter in responding to “novel environments” as they struggled to “adapt”. Google’s Gemini is a Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI). It is a “generalist” AI that the search giant has trained on vast sets of scraped data from the internet.
Secondly, Gen AI platforms have proven to demonstrate “superior” reasoning capabilities through techniques like “chain-of-thought reasoning,” suggested Waymo. Simply put, Gemini can mimic human reasoning, and hence, the LLM could “think” like a driver.
Although Google Gemini could help Waymo, the EMMA AI would still need to play nice with new data, something that autonomous vehicles need to do constantly. Specifically speaking, EMMA has faced problems incorporating 3D sensor inputs from lidar or radar, admitted Waymo.
Last month at Meta Connect, Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta AI was “on track” to become the most-used generative AI assistant in the world. The company has now passed a significant milestone toward that goal, with Meta AI passing the 500 million user mark, Zuckerberg revealed during the company’s latest earnings call.
The half billion user mark comes just barely a year after the social network first launched its AI assistant last fall. Zuckerberg said the company still expects to become the “most-used” assistant by the end of 2024, though he’s never specified how the company is measuring that metric.
Meta’s assistant isn’t the only AI tool that’s boosting the company’s business. Zuckerberg said that AI improvements in its feed and video recommendations have led to an 8 percent increase in time spent on Facebook and a 5 percent increase for Instagram this year. Advertisers are also taking advantage of the company’s AI tools, he said, with more than 15 million ads created with generative AI in the last month alone. “We believe that there’s a lot more upside here,” Zuckerberg said.
Outside of AI, Meta’s Threads app also continues to surge. The service now has “almost 275 million” monthly users, according to Zuckerberg. “It’s been growing more than a million sign ups per day,” Zuckerberg said, adding that “engagement is growing too.”
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 had its biggest three-day opening sales in the 20-plus year history of the franchise, Microsoft announced in its earnings call today.Read More
Over the last three days, 20 startups participated in the incredibly competitive Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt. These 20 companies were selected as the best of the Startup Battlefield 200 and competed for a chance to take home the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000. After three days of intense pitching, we have a winner.
The startups taking part in the Startup Battlefield had all been hand-picked to participate in our startup competition. All the companies presented a live demo in front of multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders serving as judges for a chance to win $100,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup.
After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists: Gecko Materials, Luna, MabLab, Salva Health, and Stitch3D.
These startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which included Navin Chaddha (Mayfield), Chris Farmer (SignalFire), Dayna Grayson (Construct Capital), Ann Miura-Ko (Floodgate), and Hans Tung (Notable Capital).
We’re now ready to announce that the winner of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 2024 is . . .
Winner: Salva Health
Six years ago, while researching for a college entrepreneurship competition, Valentina Agudelo identified a troubling gap in breast cancer survival rates between Latin America and the developed world, with women in her native Colombia and the rest of the continent dying at higher rates due to late detection. She realized that breast cancer is highly treatable when diagnosed early, yet many Latin American countries have large rural populations lacking access to mammograms and other diagnostic tools. So Agudelo and her two best friends decided to create Salva Health, a theoretical portable device that would detect breast cancer early.
Read more about Salva Health in our separate post.
Runner-up: Gecko Materials
It looks fake, or at least like a good illusion: There’s Gecko Materials founder Capella Kerst dangling a full wine bottle from her pinky finger, the only thing keeping it from smashing to pieces being the super-strong dry-adhesive her startup has brought to market. But it’s no trick. It’s the result of years of academic research that Kerst built on by inventing a method to mass-manufacture the adhesive. Inspired by the way real-life geckos’ feet grip surfaces, the adhesive is like a new Velcro — except it only needs one side, leaves no residue, and can detach as quickly as it attaches. It can do this at least 120,000 times and, as Kerst noted in a recent interview with TechCrunch, can stay attached for seconds, minutes, or even years.
Read more about Gecko Materials in our separate post.
These two companies follow in the footsteps of Startup Battlefield legends like Dropbox, Discord, Cloudflare and Mint on the Disrupt stage. With over 1,500 alumni having participated in the program, Startup Battlefield Alumni have collectively raised over $29 billion in funding with more than 200 successful exits.
While we all wait for the reveal of Nintendo’s next console, the company has once again announced something very different. This time, it’s a mobile app called Nintendo Music, which lets users listen to classic gaming tunes from Nintendo games spanning the last few decades, including Splatoon, Animal Crossing, and The Legend of Zelda. It’s only available to Switch Online subscribers, and it’s launching today on both iOS and Android.
The app features curated playlists themed around games, moments, moods, or characters, though you can also build your own. It also supports streaming as well as downloading tracks for offline listening. Curiously, it includes a spoiler feature that lets you filter out tracks that, somehow, might spoil a game you haven’t played or finished yet. And if you just want some Hyrule white noise, the app also lets you “loop songs or extend select tracks to 15, 30, or 60 minutes for uninterrupted listening.”
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