The Caltech Effect: The Big Picture

Hear how animals, plants, and people like you stand to benefit from machine learning and computer vision research by Caltech students Grant Van Horn and Sara Beery and their adviser, Pietro Perona, Caltech’s Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering. Van Horn built machine learning and vision algorithms for two apps you can use to identify the plants and animals you see-and to tap into what other people know about them. (The apps are iNaturalist and Merlin Bird ID.) Beery is helping biologists quickly get important data from thousands of photos taken by cameras that they set out into the wild to monitor wildlife. These projects are part of a visionary effort by Perona’s lab and alumnus Serge Belongie (BS ’95), now at Cornell Tech. With their research groups, Professors Perona and Belongie are empowering computers to understand photos and other visual information as well as they parse text, a project they call Visipedia (visipedia.org). Ultimately, Visipedia will blend human expertise, computer vision, and machine learning to help anyone learn about anything-just by uploading a picture of it. The project epitomizes the scale of innovation in Caltech’s CS+X initiative (breakthrough.caltech.edu/camp..., which marries groundbreaking science with groundbreaking computing. See more stories behind Break Through at breakthrough.caltech.edu/calte....
Campus footage credit: Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech.
©2018 California Institute of Technology

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That is so interesting.