Listening for illegal logging chainsaws using TensorFlow
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Hey Topher! Are you guys cross checking this with daily satellite imagery? I met with a guy who's company gets a full HD shot of the earth every 24 hours and they'd be happy to give you guys access to the visual data (they also train algorithms on it to detect all sorts of activity).
Anyhow, I'll shoot you an email.
We are not doing that at the moment but would love to hear more about it.
Purchasing a before and after image of a specific logging site isn't cheap once you've factored in minimum order sizes, but it isn't unaffordable. Purchasing images to look at deforestation on a national scale (if you're looking at individual trees, not woods; open data will give you the latter) is millions of dollars per annum, but worked very well where tried to prevent illegal vegetation clearing in Australia.
I'm asking because Sea Shepherd could not continue an anti-whaling campaign because they were technologically overmatched: http://www.themercury.com.au/news/politics/sea-shepherd-anno...
I recall seeing it on mark robers "is nasa a waste of money" video here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lARpY0nIQx0&vl=en
Does planet.com use that data or the company you have in mind use it?
(Asking as a ML/Software Engineer who's pleasantly surprised and yearning to contribute to something like this!)
Also, I recall hearing about how some people or villages opt in to deforestation because they are offered a significant amount of money which can be used to feed their kids and provide an education which may help their communities eventually escape the poverty trap. Do you know anything about this, and if true, do you know of any groups trying to help?
As an experiment - my neighborhood in India has a problem with loud motorbikes that are illegally modified. Hypothetically if I wanted to use this approach (there are probably simpler ones in this specific case), where do I start?
Do I just start recording gigabytes of audio data every day and start doing some kind of FFT on the data and manually tagging cases of loud bikes?
After that I suspect I can use one of those ML cheat sheets to figure out what is the best model for this kind of thing and then I just send it data via the TensorFlow library?
On the surface of it it feels like I'd be spending hours of processing time converting the audio data and hours of manual tagging before I get anywhere close to a solution. Is there a quicker or smarter way to go about this?
There is value in quantifying just how noisy the bikers are and for just how long they disturb the neighbourhood, but you'll probably need the perpetrators to be people the police are able and willing to stop to get anywhere.
I could theoretically leave a camera running or simply trigger on high enough volume but for assuming I wanted to do it this way I'm curious about the best approach.
no way TensorFlow is going to be alive in 5 years!
Love what you are doing and I would love to see a technical blog post about how you work with audio!
Like with drug labs in the jungle, all this cool technology is great for detection but ends up hitting a brick wall of corruption when it comes to actually solving the problem.
Excited to see how these systems are integrated into prevention / intervention and other applications for these systems beyond detecting illegal logging.
EDIT: Seems that another commenter is aware of a company doing something like this: http://www.shotspotter.com/company
Logging
Either that or it’s already one of their consultant up-sells, for professional service add-ons, before they GA something standard.
Hopefully it works better for logging, which is to mean: at all.
Question, how is the electrical PV power budget vs load budget calculated for these? Having implemented PV projects ranging in size from 300W to 30kW, I'm very interested to know what their predicted Wh per day generated from the solar cell is vs. what the load will consume (what's the actual load of the cellphone, how often does it wake up every day, etc).
I'm assuming that for cost reasons and economies of scale that you're using some sort of standard off the shelf PV module that can be acquired in bulk, at low cost, such as a 156mm poly x 54-cell module. Or maybe something a bit smaller than that.
1.5W load x 24 hours x 31 days = 1116 Wh per month
For a typical node what is your calculated PV production in Wh per month? Taking the 40Wh per day figure mentioned above, that's 40 * 31 = 1240Wh per month production goal from the PV. Will of course vary with mounting location and shading, but I'm sure you have a floor figure that you don't want to go below, or batteries will reach a LVD threshold overnight and everything will shut off.
I'm also making an assumption that per-node cost is somewhat of a concern in general. For very small PV setups a decent charge controller (that can handle up to the max of one medium sized panel) is not very expensive. Are you using an off-the-shelf $65-75 chinese small MPPT PV charge controller with voltage levels set up to match your LiFePo4 battery setup, or something you've designed yourselves? something like this? https://www.amazon.com/DROK-Controller-Converter-Regulator-C...
In fact, the forest is a very loud place and yet we are still able to detect the sound signature of a chainsaw.
You can hear it for yourself here:
iOS App http://bit.ly/RFCx-iOS
Android App http://bit.ly/RFCx-Android
I was thinking and wondering how reasonable as a "next step" in protecting forests to potentially require GPS tracking on all or certain types of chainsaws - it feels like an absurd thought on its own, though it potentially helps solve the problem.
This could then extend tracking to imagery via satellite - via geographic and density changes being detected, knowing where the GPS-tracked and legal work was being done, being able to then eliminate those areas from as high of scrutiny. Perhaps the GPS tracking is then not necessary if you can accurately compare before/after imagery, though could be a useful tool anyway for management to know how efficiently equipment is being used, if it's at where it should be and such.
This reminded me of a story my father once told me. I assume he heard it because his father was part of the Ministry of Forest in Canada a long time ago: I believe it was during a world war (not sure which one) when I could imagine lumber would have been in constant demand. There was a bit of a trick and literal loop-hole that truckers would use. Before being discovered there apparently was a long route where truckers would go through without actually dropping off their lumber - after having gone to the weigh-in point to get paid. They'd continue to drive through the back to return another day with the same load to get paid again; a long drive apparently but still was a money maker..
Until of course they’re using decent newer phones that can do edge inference
Making the world a better place increases shareholder value and is therefore compatible with their mission ;-)
I think most people dramatically underestimate the amount of resources Google invests in all sorts of programs (including R&D, charitable donations, education, partnerships and so much more) because 1) they don't use it as a negotiating tactic, and 2) the cash cow of the ads business provides an enormously long leash for experimentation and.
Even with Apple, which has more than double the cash (and cash flow), doesn't have this flexibility because of its business model. As a hardware company, volumes, revenue & margin are predictable and anticipated, baked into the stock price with an assumption of -- for the last few years -- dividends. Amazon is at the other extreme. Until very recently, as a result of AWS' runaway success, Amazon had posted negative-to-zero profits for its entire history, reinvesting nearly 100% of free cash flow into business expansion.
No matter what you might think of Google, among the huge tech companies they're unique in their ability to spend enormous sums on things that absolutely do not directly increase shareholder value. The belief within the company, and within the investment community, that some of these moonshots & experiments will eventually stimulate stepwise returns are why they continue to run this way. It's cultural, and ultimately, one of the foundations of "googleyness".
First of all: no jail. This is civil law, not criminal.
Second: it's pretty hard not to have an excuse to do anything you want if you're the board + management. Google, and most other companies, give to charitable organisations, for example. "Now", you'll say, "they're just doing this for PR".
Maybe... But using the PR argument actually works perfectly fine for anything altruistic a company may do.
Unless management explicitly states that they're harming investors for the public good, it's almost impossible to run afoul of the law. Sick pay that exceeds the law? Important for employee retention (and PR). Match your employees' donation to any certified charity? Important to create a community (and PR).
Sick pay is easier to do because it's related to retaining good employees.
But generally, as Milton Friedman famously wrote, "the social responsibility of corporations is to increase their profits".
(just search for [<company> donates], and you'll find examples of charitable donations for every single Fortune 500 company)
I'm not going to argue with the rest of your post because your belief that a company might be doing "anything altruistic" is just sad for me, perhaps laughable for others.
I realize that the audio is probably analyzed for the sound of chainsaws, and then thrown away, but there's still the potential that such a system could be misused. So just wondering what people think about the ethical issues related to this technology.
Our system is as real-time as it gets. In fact you can download our app right now and listen live to the sounds of the forests:
iOS App http://bit.ly/RFCx-iOS
Android App http://bit.ly/RFCx-Android
If you want almost-true-realtime satellite imagery for land-use law enforcement purposes, you're looking at a project that required the financial resources of a nation-stage IMINT apparatus (US NRO) for example, with dozens of polar-orbit, LEO satellites. The best you're going to get from commercial sources is a couple of days old, up to a few weeks old.
-All the GridCure folks
“Is this about GDPR?”
“... chainsaws”
“Oh.”
All ICOs are all designed to be the same Ponzi-Pyramid scheme, as how they're incentivized - which is what makes Bitcoin, Ethereum's Ether et al in the same boat.
They can sort of imply: hey, what did Google search, Gmail, maps, Android ever do to you? Microsoft and Apple are in a similar boat. It'd be sort of comical, if Google ends up benefiting from failing so spectacularly at social media.
Amazon has a problem of terrorizing other competitors at the moment, that's primarily who is upset with them (spurring endless media stories about Amazon's growing power). Consumers mostly love them.
Heaven knows it's only driving me more paranoid.
Any violent act, no matter the size or whether it looks like or is a so-called legitimate reaction/response should be a signal/flag for response. All of these systems can be used for good or bad, they can excel at either - the broken piece will always be a lack of trust and relationships with community. This is the fight between good and bad/evil, between light and dark. The nervousness caused by bad/evil should be used and funnelled into strengthening oneself, one's resolve.
There may always be people trying to take advantage of these systems throughout history (perhaps at no fault of their own, we're born into the environment we're born into), however we can design systems for the environment and people to be healthy - health including being attached to empathy properly and to develop a practice of non-violence within society, and while educating to help people understand the value of these surveillance systems like tracking illegal activity in the management of Earth's resources - whether forestry, fishing, pollution; we're all fucked if we don't manage these. Not being a responsible being wanting to work together to manage these resources is very short-sighted and shallow thinking (primarily because of people stuck on scarcity/survival thinking), because we literally could all die if we don't manage these system. With economies of scale and automation we can do this - we can succeed. We can give an increasing higher quality of life to everyone than anyone on Earth has likely lived thus far. This isn't fiction, this is truth.
Stephen Hawking before passing was worried capitalism will get the best of us though -- that is his rally call for us to stand together, to align, and manage the negative impacts that a capitalistic-transactional system requires; http://www.businessinsider.com/stephen-hawking-final-reddit-... - the way we can honour this contributions to society is to, for those of us who are able, to stand and fight together. His passing on Pi day, the day Einstein's birthday, was no mistake - it's a bright beacon of light, the rallying call. Pay attention, stand guard.
https://www.blog.google/topics/google-cloud/extending-gcp-se...
If they want people to stop chopping down forests they need to provide them with a differnt, viable source of income. If I was living in deep poverty and there was a forest near me I'd chop it down, no question about it.
This money should be invested into fusion or solar research - if energy is cheap- somebody will find a vay to convert it into fast vat grown rainforrest- and voila-> Unemployed drunks protesting before the automatic growthlab and sawmill.
Its very hard to prevent behaviour thats economical. Its way easier to subvert the economics behind that.
If you want to save nature- compress agriculture into vats. If you want to compress agriculture into vats and buildings, you need cheap energy.
Solving at source, instead of gimick-gasms.
Or politicized unemployed people chopping your head off because you took their jobs and gave nothing back. It goes both ways.
I don't think you understook what I meant.
By giving them an alternative source of income, I meant the workers, not the corporations.
But my point still stands, if growning local and fast in vats- rainforrest wood would be no more economical viable.
No pressure on any fusion researchers- but you could really save the planet right about now.
https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3018/whatever-happ...