For such tiny creatures, these have one of the biggest
jobs in the world.
Hi, I'm Katarina and I'm Frederick, and we're using machine
learning to better understand how nature works.
And we're doing that by observing bees.
Bees have a symbiotic relationship with nature.
Plants depend on the pollination of bees, including the fruits
and vegetables we eat every day.
Bees and other insects are dying around the world and
we do not know why.
We don't want the lack of knowledge to be the
reason bees continue to disappear.
I thought we have to do something about it.
So we built the height monitor that uses a camera
to track the bees as they come and go.
These always return to their queen.
If we observe 500 leaving the hive and only 200
returning, we can assume that there's a problem in the
local ecosystem.
We trained a model using Tensorflow, Google's open source machine
learning framework, that examines the video from each hive.
But what do we do with all this data we
collect?
We share it with experts so they can make more
informed decisions on things like when to mow lawns and
where to plant trees and flowers so bees can continue
to power our ecosystem.
This tech is only the first step, as humans will
have to take it from there.