An AI-powered tool is helping keep an eye on the world’s most remote forests.Named SPARROW, the biodiversity monitoring tool continuously gathers and analyzes images and audio from forests over a long time period without human intervention.Developed by Microsoft, it aims to make data gathering and analysis from remote forests easier for scientists and conservationists.SPARROW has been deployed in five continents and, according to Microsoft, tests on location show it can function for more than a year without interruption.
At a meeting with conservationists a couple of years back, Juan Lavista Ferres had a eureka moment.
As the director of Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, Lavista Ferres has extensively worked on projects that use artificial intelligence technology to process and analyze biodiversity data. At that particular meeting, however, he realized that a glaring gap persisted.
“It takes a huge amount of effort to collect data,” Lavista Ferres, who is also Microsoft’s chief data scientist, told Mongabay in a video interview. “We never realized how bad it was until we worked closely with them [the conservationists] to see the whole workflow.”
On returning to his lab, Lavista Ferres put together a team to find a solution. The result was Project SPARROW.
