1) We talked about what we had accomplished up through the regional tournament and each came up with "two stars and a wish" - that is, two things we thought we did well this season, and one thing we'd like to work on some more. Between now and the provincial tournament we're going to try to make more progress on the "wishes".
2) We learned how to make and edit 3D models using a program called Sculptris. Remember, if we're going to train a computer to recognize particular animals, we need to give it lots of examples to learn from. Those examples can't all be the same. They have to have enough variety that the computer can learn to tell the animal we're looking for from other animals and non-animals. We bought a bag of toy cows to train the computer on what cows look like, but the cows in the bag were all identical. That won't work because the computer will think all cows are exactly the same. So instead we got a 3D model of a wildebeest and each took turns putting it in different poses to get some variety. Since last week we printed out all the different animals on our 3D printer, as you can see below.
Ten Wildebeest designed by the Comet Warriors
With wildebeest models in a dozen different sizes and poses we can now do a better job teaching the computer what to expect.
3) Running the robot. At the tournament, Olivia (also le mot de la semaine), Lily, and Macy were responsible for running the robot. Last week they worked to teach others how to line up and run the robot, change attachments, switch missions, and so on. Hopefully, by the end of the season everyone will know how to do this.
4) Planned our next fundraiser. We plan to sell reindeer hot chocolate kits at the school Christmas party. This was very successful last year so we're going to try it again. We'll spend some time this week on putting the kits together.
Homework for this week:
1) Take a look at the Grevy's Zebra Website This site explains how the Grevy's Zebra Trust did a census of zebras in Kenya. It involved a lot of driving around with cameras. A group at Princeton then used computers to try to tell one zebra from another based on the pattern of stripes on their hip. The woman who runs the Grevy's Zebra Trust, Belinda Mackey, is one of the people we shared our research with. The video below is a talk she gave in San Francisco in October. It's half an hour long. It's worth watching, but if you don't have time for the whole thing watch at least the last six minutes - starting at 25:00. It gives great examples of how to get people involved in conservation. It's not as simple as showing up with a new technology.
Belinda Mackey's talk on Zebra Conservation
Lastly, some good news from one of our experts! When we had our yard sale in October, John Abrams stopped by and was interested in what we were doing. He has a friend, Tim Lillicrap, who works for Google Deep Mind in London, England. Well John put us in touch with Tim, and Tim has offered to come visit us on Dec. 22, the last meeting of the year. Tim works on some of the coolest machine learning stuff in the world (like teaching robots to dream) and is interested to see what we're up to. Maybe he can give us some ideas on how to make it better.
See you Thursday!
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