Episode 05 - Scanning the Skies

Over the years, the protection of India’s biodiversity and the conservation of nature has been hit by a severe lack of funding and personnel, not to mention the sheer scale of the challenges they have to encounter - from man-made threats to climate change. There is a promise that artificial intelligence and machine learning offers though and this includes scanning our surroundings to identify the species that need to be protected and setting up social networks but for birds.

Credits:

Narration: Harsha Bhogle
Executive Producer: Gaurav Vaz
Producer: Archana Nathan
Research, Interviews and Script: Vinay Aravind
Narrative overview: Charu Sharma and Shriram Parthasarathy
Title track, sound design and background score: Nikhil Rao, Avyay Gujral and Abhijit Nath.

All clips and voices used in this podcast are owned by the original creators

We thank wholeheartedly all our guests who appeared on this episode

• Ashwin Viswanathan, a research associate at the Nature Conservation Foundation
• Tom Auer, a GIS Developer at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
• Drew Weber, the Merlin Project Co-ordinator at the Cornell Lab
• Jason Holmberg, the founder of WildMe

Links to clips used in the episode and citations:

1. India’s species diversity - India Biodiversity Awards, 2018 | UNDP in India
2. India’s threatened species - India has lost 90 per cent of the area under its biodiversity hotspots, says CSE’s new statistical analysis (cseindia.org)
3. The ebird project - About eBird - eBird
4. Merlin - The Story – Merlin Bird ID – Free, instant bird identification help and guide for thousands of birds (allaboutbirds.org)
5. WildMe - What we do | Wild Me
6. Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Machines - Virtual Machines (VMs) for Linux and Windows | Microsoft Azure
7. ATREE’s biodiversity Atlas project - ATREE_India_Bio_AI4E Grantee Profile.pdf (windows.net)

To learn how Microsoft is working to empower every developer to innovate, every organization to transform industries and every individual to transform society through its differentiated Microsoft AI & Innovation vision, please visit microsoft.com/ai