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Hi, all!
We're launching the new BirdCLEF+ competition presently - the 'plus' is because we've got multi-taxa data this year, including amphibians, insects, mammals, and, of course, birds. This has been a major annotation undertaking, led by Juan Sebastián Cañas of
the University College London and Humboldt Institute in Colombia.
I'm writing to you because you might have students who could be interested in participating! Here's a bunch of great things about the competition, especially for students:
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We have $50k in total prize money!
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People can submit 'working notes' for the CLEF competition, detailing their approaches. There's $5k in prize money for the best working note, and it's a great chance to get some practice with academic writing. The working notes are published in the proceedings
of the CLEF conference, and the best ones do get more widely
cited, as well.
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Often, the best working note is not one of the top-scoring entries! We like to reward well-documented, creative approaches.
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Kaggle is a great learning platform - students can get hands-on experience attacking a problem as part of a community which I find to be surprisingly helpful and kind.
And a few of my favorite features of the competition itself:
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We include a sizeable tranche of unlabeled in-domain data: this is a great test bed for domain-adaptation methods.
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Each year, we work with a different organization to develop a new 'fully annotated' dataset, and we publish the test dataset after the competition is complete. This has steadily increased the number of regions where we have some high-quality groundtruth for
bird species identification. In fact, the
BirdSet benchmark is mostly an omnibus of past BirdClef test data sets.
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We use a class-averaged ROC-AUC metric, which focuses on core classification quality, rather than thresholding methods.
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And, as mentioned up top, this is an exciting year because we're moving to a multi-taxa task.
So, if you've got students who might be interested in taking some time for a bioacoustics competition, do send them along!
Cheers,
Holger
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At the Yang Center, we work flexibly, and while it suits me to email now, I don’t anticipate a response outside your regular work hours. Thanks!
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Dr. Holger Klinck
John W. Fitzpatrick Director
K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics
Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University
Faculty Fellow
Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Cornell University
Courtesy Professor
Marine Mammal Institute
Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences, Oregon State University
Mailing address:
159 Sapsucker Woods Road
Ithaca, NY 14850, USA
Tel: +1.607.254.6250
Fax: +1.607.254.2460
Email:
Web:
https://bioacoustics.cornell.edu
How I say my name
Pronouns in use: He/Him/His
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