Big Data Is For the Birds - Issue 27: Dark Matter
▻http://nautil.us/issue/27/dark-matter/big-data-is-for-the-birds
In Ithaca, New York, a virtual machine in a laboratory at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology sits in the night, humming. The machine’s name is Bubo, after the genus for horned owls. About every five minutes, Bubo grabs an image from Northeast weather radar stations, and feeds it through a pipeline of artificial-intelligence algorithms. What does this radar image show me? Bubo asks. Is it rain? Are these insects? Could it be pollen? Bubo doesn’t care about those things; all it wants to see are birds in flight. To find them, Bubo analyzes the velocity and direction of targets seen by the radar station. Bubo knows birds have a velocity different from wind and insects, and filters those out. Now Bubo sees only birds. But how dense are they? How fast are they going? How high in the sky are they (...)
