Monday, November 14, 2011

Using Neural Networks for find fossils (or at least places where there's a much better chance of find them)

I Programmer - Neural Networks for Fossil Discovery

"Neural networks have proved their worth at finding patterns in many types of data from spam filtering to speech recognition. Palaeontologists are the latest to put them to work - to identify potentially productive localities from remotely sensed imagery.

There is so much satellite imagery that it is a wonder that anyone has to go anywhere to find things any more. Simply look at the satellite pictures until you find what you are looking for. The problem is, of course, that there are a lot of satellite pictures to look at and you might not know what you are searching for actually looks like in a multi-spectral image of the ground. One solution might be to crowd source the search, but that doesn't solve the problem of knowing what you are looking for. A much better idea is to use AI to learn what existing sites look like and then find new sites for you to go out and explore.

This is exactly what a team of fossil hunters have done.

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image..."

That's just kind of neat. And it's dinosaurs! (kind of... lol :)

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