Team BirdCast was the recipient of the Best Paper Award for the Computational Sustainability Track of AAAI-2013 (The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), a recognition that is sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) of the Computing Research Association (CRA) and was presented at the annual meeting in Seattle, Washington. The paper, entitled “Approximate Bayesian Inference for Reconstructing Velocities of Migrating Birds from Weather Radar” by Daniel Sheldon, Andrew Farnsworth, Jed Irvine, Benjamin Van Doren, Kevin Webb, Thomas G. Dietterich, and Steve Kelling, is one of the first steps toward automating the analysis of radar data for the BirdCast project. The abstract follows:
Archived data from the WSR-88D network of weather radars in the US hold detailed information about the continent-scale migratory movements of birds over the last 20 years. However, significant technical challenges must be overcome to understand this information and harness its potential for science and conservation. We present an approximate Bayesian inference algorithm to reconstruct the velocity fields of birds migrating in the vicinity of a radar station. This is part of a larger project to quantify bird migration at large scales using weather radar data.
The photo below, of several of the authors holding their awards, was taken on 18 July 2013 while celebrating our accomplishment! From the left, Jed Irvine, Andrew Farnsworth, Steve Kelling, and Dan Sheldon.
