Over numerous articles written before from Artificial Intelligence Overview to Image Captioning with Azure Services, technical aspects of Machine Learning and Deep Learning have been discussed. This article shows the real-world impacts that have been made through the Project 15 initiative dedicated to conserving wildlife, the environment, and the climate.
Every 15 minutes, the earth loses one elephant. At this speed, within the next 10 years, elephants will either be an endangered species or be extinct in totality. These statistics are what initiated Project 15. Scientists are running out of time to protect the environment and our planet earth. From the national parks in Africa to conserve wild animals from poachers using Machine Learning and Deep Neural Network services in Azure with IoT to environmental sustainability goals to protect the climate, Project 15 has built a foundation to help support the conservation of the environment. Reimagining solutions to solve the world’s greatest problems, this initiation of Project 15 is worth having a glance at. Project 15 supports the growth and acceleration of environmental conservation and ecosystem sustainability with the Internet of Things (IoT).
Project 15 from Microsoft
Project 15 is an open platform for conservation and ecological sustainability solutions that provides easy to deploy (in 15 minutes or less) solutions based on technology that are applicable across a range of use cases and provides almost 80% of the code needed for most projects. It is totally free, open-source code and is available on Github. The data sets can be opened for training data and Azure ML usage thus supporting complex Machine Learning technology available at fingertips with ease.
Partnering for Scale with the Microsoft Capstone Program - Project 15 Challenge
Trail Guard AI – Anti Poaching
The Trail Guard AI is an anti-poaching initiative by RESOLVE in partnership with conservative technology and Intel which helps law enforcements locate the poachers before the wild animals are targeted and mitigate the illegal wildlife trade. The Trail Guard security system helps the enforcers and protectors of the national park to detect with the Artificial Intelligence with camera detecting humans in images and Livestream videos and thus stop them from attacking the animals and thus arrest the poachers in time. The system has also helped to keep surveillance and improve the intelligence on poaching and illegal trade networks. A similar project can be easily initiated and be applied with less than 20% of the work with the use of Project 15 now.
Red Panda Network
It is an animal conservation initiative established in 2007 to conserve the Red Pandas. Projects have been done with the implementation of Project 15 to protect the red panda range in Nepal.
Red Panda – Process Architecture
The camera traps were motion activated with the data stored on the camera sim card and Pandas are collared with GPS. The in-field human interaction would note down the observation of pandas with the environmental observation on paper while the Forest Guardian would do the data entry of observations manually and load images from the collected camera SIM Card. The Red Panda Headquarter manually tagged the camera trap images and integrated third-party collar data and performed the analysis of FG data entry. All of this, from collar to tracking to mapping visually were possible with Project 15.
Learn more about Project 15 from this video,
The GEF Small Grants Programme (SGP)
The GEF Small Grants Programme is a program by UNDP that helps communities and civil society organizations by providing financial and technical support to meet the mission of global benefits from the environment which is done with the initiatives involving the community. It is currently active in 127 countries. Check out GEF Small Grants Programme to learn more and solve problems that might help create a huge impact on the global environment.
Elephant Listening Project
The vision of the Elephant Listening Project is to conserve the tropical forest of Africa through acoustic monitoring, education, focusing on forest elephants, and sound science. It is a unique challenge and with Project 15, monumental steps for the ELP have been taken. The conservation of elephants, anti-poaching strategies to save the elephants is all part of the ELP. Moreover, the infrasound of elephants is analyzed which has given deeper insights into these animals, from researching over about them to learn their language and understand their process of communication.
Infrasound
Infrasound is the sound that is beyond the threshold of human hearing capabilities. Shown is the comparison of human frequencies for communication through speech and the infrasound produced by Elephants with their rumble. The human capabilities of hearing start from 20Hz, below which humans cannot notice. This frequency below 20Hz is beyond the capabilities of humans but the elephants rumble at that frequency and thus communicate. With Project 15, similar projects have been possible like eavesdropping on animals.
All of these applications can be designed with a few graph usages which can support building the interconnections.
Microsoft Graphs
Microsoft Graphs supports the data and intelligence with a unified programmability model which can access huge data available in Microsoft 365. This application combined with other technologies will enable us to develop real-world systems that can impact the world in a better way.
Social Graph
The social graphs illustrate the connection between people and groups at different levels which is widely used by Facebook and LinkedIn. A similar approach can help us design and build intelligent systems.
Azure Digital Twins
Azure Digital Twins is a platform for IoT which provides the capabilities for the creation of digital representation for the real-world scenario to connect people, businesses, processes, and places. This helps to build insight that can provide support to grow the products, optimize costs and operations which would help create majestic customer experiences.
With a number of these technologies in association with each other, complex systems like Trail Guard AI can be developed. This article gave us an insight into Project 15 and its huge applications to save and converse the environment. We thus learned a lot about various challenges projects done with Project 15 such as the Red Panda Project, other challenges we can take part in which can be checked from GEF Small Grants Programme, and impactful projects like Elephant Listening Project.
Join the conversation! Your thoughts help the community grow.