aMOBY
Acoustic Monitoring of Biodiversity

The aMOBY project will use results from mathematical harmonic analysis combined with machine learning to acoustically monitor biodiversity. Biodiversity refers to the variety and variability of life on Earth, a diversity that is severely endangered due to human-made threats like habitat destruction, introduction of invasive species, over-population and over-harvesting, and of course climate change resulting from pollution of the atmosphere. Biodiversity monitoring is the repeated observation or measurement of biological diversity to diagnose and quantify its status and changes. A great challenge for monitoring of biodiversity lies in the sheer amount of data which clearly requires a high degree of automation to work on a grand scale.

In the aMOBY project we will transfer results from an ongoing project on automatic semantic annotation of music to the bioacoustic domain. Building on a recently achieved first place in a bird detection challenge we will (i) extend our results from detection to classification and from bird to whale calls, (ii) build an online demonstrator to showcase our expanded expertise, (iii) actively address governmental and non-governmental organizations concerned with biodiversity monitoring as a new target group for future collaboration. The aMOBY project will allow both participating research groups (Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence - OFAI, Numerical Harmonic Analysis Group - NuHAG) to transfer their jointly acquired knowledge on automatic annotation of acoustic signals to a whole new field of application with potentially large societal and economic impact.

Publications

• Krenn, B., Gross, S., Dieber, B., Pichler, H., Meyer, K. (2021). A proxemics game between festival visitors and an industrial robot. Workshop on Exploring Applications for Autonomous Non-verbal Human-Robot Interaction at HRI 2021, Boulder, Co.
• Krenn, B., Reinboth, T., Gross, S., Busch, C., Mara, M., Meyer, K., Heiml, M., Layer-Wagner, T. (2021). It's your turn! - A collaborative human-robot pick-and-place scenario in a virtual industrial setting. Workshop on Exploring Applications for Autonomous Non-verbal Human-Robot Interaction at HRI 2021, Boulder, Co.

Press coverage

• "Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?", Der Standard, 26 June 2021
• "Why this is the best scientific project ever", The New York Times, 2 July 2021

Research staff

• Arthur Flexer
• Jan Schlüter

Partners

• Monika Dörfler, Numerical Harmonic Analysis Group, University of Vienna

Sponsor