Identifying Northern Right Whales

Identifying Northern Right Whales with Kaggle

Pattern recognition is one of the lesser know areas of Big Data Analysis. A recent competition in Kaggle: NOAA Right Whale Recognition was to help identify Northern Right Whales from photographs. There are thought to be only about 500 Northern Right Whales (or North Atlantic Right Whale) left in the world and tracking them is difficult, expensive, time consuming and needs expert Marine Biologists. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) challenged Kaggle analysts to improve the pattern algorithms that are currently used in their software. This involves being able to identify individual Whales from aerial photographs (see below).    

First place in the competition was won by a company called Deepsense.IO and you can read more about the winning entry and their approach here.

North Atlantic Right Whales

Kaggle

Kaggle

A great site for learning about data science is Kaggle. Kaggle acts as a meeting point between data scientists and uses competitions supplied by 3rd parties such as companies, public bodies and so on. Some competitions have prizes, some are serious and some are just for fun. It's a great way of trying some data science coding techniques while having fun and doing good at the same time. Current competitions include: classifying photos for Yelp, finding network disruptions for Telstra in Australia and discovering what is going on in Hilary Clinton's emails!