Hello world and welcome to Microsoft Unboxed. I'm one of your hosts Colleen
O'Brien and this is my friend and co-host Sonia Dara.
And every week we're telling stories of Microsoft technology, as well as the
people behind that technology. The topic for this week's episode is
- drumroll please - Animal Tech.
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Thursday at 9:00 a.m. Pacific. Okay, back to Animal Tech, which is a term that we
made up so yeah! What's the cutest animal? Oooo this might get contested. There's puppies
and kittens and all like the favorites. I'm a big fan of baby goats and like
pygmy goats. They're just hopping everywhere and have you ever seen the
video of Buttercup and she like jumps on another goat and like parkours off of
them and backflips and they're like very acrobatic baby goats.
I follow this Instagram handle called Round Boys. Its photos of animals that are very round.
What? Yeah, a baby bird that's like very round or
like a tiny mouse or a dog that has been groomed into, you know, a spherical fur
baby. Yeah thanks. But nothing is as good as like our
producers dogs channel, Detective Stabler Golden. Yeah Detective Stabler Golden.
Great follow, highly recommend. I think we can agree that there is huge opportunity
for artificial intelligence in the world. People have been following our series,
it's a motif. Everyday AI, becaue it's everywhere. It's obviously benefiting us, it's infused
into the products that we're using every day how are we extending the power of AI
to the Wild Kingdom? I don't know you tell me Colleen. I will. How snow
leopards selfies and AI can help save the species
from extinction. That's awesome! we're talking snow leopard selfies today. Koustubh Sharma
is what you would call a cat scientist with a daunting task. As a
wildlife biologist studying one of the world's most magnificent, fluffy tailed
and elusive big cats, snow leopards. So cuddly, they're vicious - but they're
cuddly. Snow leopards are incredibly elusive. Koustubh has been following them
for many years and he's only had two confirmed sightings of these cats. What?
Yes! Wow, I didn't realize they're that rare. What a dedicated man.
They're wearing their invisibility cloaks on the mountain. But the estimated population of
snow leopards has dwindled from 6,000 to 4,000, but because they're so elusive we
have no idea what the exact number is. There's this great interest in studying
them to figure out how we can preserve the snow leopard population. One of the
ways that we've figured out how to do this is by embedding cameras with heat
and motion sensors into the habitat of these snow leopards. When animals,
hopefully the snow leopards, are walking by the cameras we can get a shot of them.
But as you can imagine there are a lot of misfires on these selfies. They're
also taking photos of other animals, like goats. Mountain goats! I was just saying
there must be goats everywhere. Yeah, so you're trying to get these majestic Snow
Leopard photos and then all of a sudden a goat is all up in frame. Hey, I'll take those selfies, it's fine. Another
problem is, because they're on the mountains, a lot of them are getting just
covered by avalanches, but when the cameras do go off we're getting a lot of
photos. 30 to 60 cameras could generate between 200 and 300 thousand images so
if you think of all of those misfires, all of the rogue goats that are getting
into the shot, there's a lot of data to process there. So Koustubh and the Snow
Leopard Trust are using the power of AI to sort through and categorize all of
these images and pull out the ones that are actually getting the snow leopard in the shot.
Are they able to recognize different snow leopards at
this point? That is the next step. So we spoke a little bit about that in our AI
for Earth episode. Wild book is doing a lot of photo aggregation and leveraging
AI and machine learning to identify individual animals within a species like
Frank the hammerhead shark. Sorry! Sorry for that. Haaaammerhead shark.
Yeah but we're not there with the snow leopard yet. That's coming soon. I'm
really excited to start identifying those individual snow leopards. I'm going
to be talking about a different species called purple martins.
They migrate 6,000 miles between the Amazon forests in Brazil to Walt Disney
World. Really? Yeah every year. Every year and of
all places, they have a pretty big set of nests in Animal Kingdom. They're taking
their annual family trip to Disney Land. They're frequent fliers, they have an annual
pass. So Microsoft is pairing up with Disney's Emerging Technologies team, as
well as Disney's animal science and environment team. And they're trying to
understand more about purple martins. Their populations are also declining.
It's fallen 40% since 1966, similar to the snow leopards, they have little cave
dwellings. So it's really hard to kind of look in and see, they would see birds fly
in with a giant dragonfly, and they're like, do they feed that to one of their
chicks or all of them, not really understanding what
makes a good purple Martin parent, right? and what can we do to help create better
environments for them to parent. We're investing in the parenting skills of
purple martins. Yeah . we're like "good job parents, here's what you can do more."
Microsoft and Disney are creating smart birdhouses now. Created these man-made
essentially, gourd shaped homes with cameras inside, temperature sensors,
humidity sensors, pressure sensors. Purple martins are awesome, they're like yeah
help us out, we'll help you out. It's cool.
So they have all these call poles mounted all around the different resorts,
including the animal kingdom and they've created a bird resort. So
like I mentioned HD cameras, they have all these sensors that are linked up to
the cloud. You have these like intelligent cloud, intelligent gourds, right.
The edge, kind of is in the gourd. They've also created like
noiseless fans in there to keep it cool and regulated. And they run
temperature checks, it's very cozy. It's like a five-star resort for these birds.
They're living large now they're live March. I would love a cribs episode.
Right, come on in. Check out my gourd. Just really cool to
see us partnering up with Walt Disney to study these birds, but also just creating a
better habitat and environment for them using our technologies.
Pretty cool. So whether it's capturing selfies of snow leopards or
investigating the living situation of purple martins, technology can be used to
give us a better point of view, better perspective, on our animal friends.
I know this isn't quite a gourd, but we do have a box! And that takes us to our next
segment, Outside the Box. Weak transition, let's go! If you wrote a book
what would it be called? My book would be called, 'Waiting For Your Next Meal, the
Colleen O'Brien Story.' Are you always thinking about your next meal? I plan my
life around meals. like when can I have my next taco? I love exploring cultures through
food, I love trying new dishes. Meals are really tentpoles in my day, and
everything else is just waiting for the next one.
Sonia, what did you name your first car? It's pretty nerdy I had a Nissan Maxima.
Transformers had just come out and I was a big fan of it and so I called it
Maximus prime. Did you always refer to it as that like when you got close to it?
No. Im like this is my car, I have one. Yeah I actually wrote it in my Georgia Tech
application. You wrote about your car? I wrote about transformers and my
car. Yeah okay give me the face. It's fine. That's gonna wrap it up for 'Outside the
Box,' but if you'd like to submit a question for next time, please email the
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