By Francesco Ungaro/Unsplash
Google is offering web users a new experience via its Arts & Culture portal. As well as being an amusing pastime, the project actually aims to help safeguard the world's coral reefs.
Google is offering web users a new experience via its Arts & Culture portal. As well as being an amusing pastime, the project actually aims to help safeguard the world's coral reefs.
The objective is to identify the presence or absence of fish in certain areas in order to help biologists to repopulate them if necessary and thus to maintain these environments, which are, by definition, highly fragile. Indeed, this ecosystem of marine life is essential to their survival.
The aim of the "Calling in our Corals" initiative is for users to help train artificial intelligence by reporting the presence or absence of fish in various audio recordings made available to them. Google's teams have placed hydrophones in various reefs, off the coast of French Polynesia, Australia, the Maldives, Sweden, Canada, Florida and the Philippines.
As a training exercise, Google first makes users listen to sounds coming from a marine protected area and then from a reef that is subject to intensive overfishing. Once their ears have been well-trained, they can move on to the next step.
Once that's complete, users can listen to high-quality audio recordings of coral reef environments, which will then be used to train the AI. These clips are filled with incredibly detailed sounds, such as different species of fish, crabs or even shrimp making particular noises. The user is then invited to simply click each time they hear a sound, and to do so on as many audio clips as they like. In this way, the user participates in training artificial intelligence that will later be tasked with analyzing much longer recordings.
