British scientists have unveiled plans to create a digital library of all life on Earth. They say that the Digital Automated Identification System (Daisy), which harnesses the latest advances in artificial intelligence and computer vision, will have an enormous impact on research into biodiversity and evolution.
Daisy will also give amateur naturalists unprecedented access to the world's taxonomic expertise: Send Daisy a camera-phone picture of a plant or animal and, within seconds, you will get detailed information about what you are looking at.
At the Natural History Museum in London, Norman MacLeod, keeper of palaeontology, has spent several years developing the new technology.
PHOTO: AP
He said that Daisy will make the identification of plants and animals more objective and directly comparable. "Right now, taxonomy is as much of an art form as it is a science,'' MacLeod said. He would present his vision for Daisy to an international meeting of taxonomists at the museum yesterday.
Taxonomists normally identify specimens through a painstaking process in which the features of an unknown plant or animal are compared with identified specimens in the museum's collections. If it is sufficiently different, the unknown specimen is confirmed as a new species.
However, there is plenty of room for error -- the museum's collection might be incomplete or the person making the identification could make a mistake.
If scientists did not have to make routine identifications and teach others how to do it, MacLeod argues, they could get on with the business of learning more about biodiversity and evolution.
"Say you saw a butterfly, you might take a digital image of it, connect up to the World Wide Web and access a Daisy Internet portal," MacLeod said. "The portal would accept the picture and farm it out to the servers in individual institutions, such as the Natural History Museum."
Using pattern-recognition software, Daisy would try to match the picture with images in its archives. "The portal would route the answer back as a Web page that had the confidence level of the identification and the institution that made the identification,'' MacLeod said.
Daisy can also identify sounds and scans of DNA barcodes.
"New developments in artificial intelligence and computer algorithms have taken neural nets to where they act more like human intelligence," he said. "When we see something new, we don't have to re-compute our understanding of everything else we've ever seen, we just add it to the mix. That's pretty much what we're doing with Daisy."
"Now there's a tool that we can use to justify making the investment in getting these collections of images together and building the software structures that are necessary to make the neural net able to access the images, then there's a reason to do it," he said.
There is also a role for amateur naturalists in improving the library. "One of the neat things about Daisy is that, if you submit an image and it's identified with a high level of certainty, that can then be added to the library of images, which makes Daisy more powerful," MacLeod said.
"That information can keep growing," he said.
"The more people that use [the system], the better it gets," he said.
He said that the first images and sounds have already been used to test that everything works. But filling Daisy with data from all the museums will take several years. The Natural History Museum has 70 million specimens that would need to be entered into the database.
Daisy is part of a series of projects set up by the museum to identify and catalogue life on Earth.
In February, the museum announced plans to record the genetic fingerprints for the species, to begin the process of providing a kind of biometric identity card for millions of species by 2010.
PAST TACTICS: In what some see as a return to hardline strategies, the new Afghan rulers hanged the body of an alleged kidnapper from a crane as warning to criminals The Taliban hanged a dead body from a crane parked in a city square in Afghanistan on Saturday in a gruesome display that signaled the hardline movement’s return to some of its brutal tactics of the past. Taliban officials initially brought four bodies to the central square in the western city of Herat, then moved three of them to other parts of the city for public display, said Wazir Ahmad Seddiqi, who runs a pharmacy on the edge of the square. Taliban officials announced that the four were caught taking part in a kidnapping earlier on Saturday and were killed by police,
Kim Yo-jong, the influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, reached out to South Korea for a second time in recent days, saying Pyongyang would consider taking part in another inter-Korean summit and declaring an end to the war if Seoul adopts a less hostile policy. “I felt that the atmosphere of the South Korean public desiring to recover the inter-Korean relations from a deadlock and achieve peaceful stability as soon as possible is irresistibly strong,” Kim Yo-jong said in a statement issued by the official Korean Central News Agency. “We, too, have the same desire.” Kim’s statement follows one she
‘SMOKESCREEN’: An agreement to declare an end to the Korean War would be ‘of no help at all’ and used to cover up ‘US hostile policy,’ a North Korean official said The influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un yesterday said it was “admirable” of South Korea to propose a formal end to the Korean War, but demanded Seoul first drop its “hostile policies” towards Pyongyang. Kim Yo-jong’s remarks, carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency, were in response to South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s recent calls for declaring an official end to the 1950-1953 conflict that ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, leaving the two sides technically at war for more than half a century. In a speech at the UN General Assembly earlier this week, Moon proposed
A potential lurch to the left in Germany’s election on Sunday is scaring millionaires into moving assets into Switzerland, bankers and tax lawyers say. If the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), hard-left Linke and environmentalist Greens come to power, the reintroduction of a wealth tax and a tightening of inheritance tax could be on the political agenda. “For the super-rich, this is red hot,” said a German-based tax lawyer with extensive Swiss operations. “Entrepreneurial families are highly alarmed.” The move shows how many rich people still see Switzerland as an attractive place to park wealth, despite its efforts to abolish its image as a
RSS