This device will create an objective measure of the Cacophony (noise) of bird song – hence why it is called a Cacophonometer. We use a modified cell phone to run an app and gather this data. The app allows you to set up sound sampling and sends the data to the cloud.

Firstly, we love the government’s new announcement of the target to be predator free by 2050. Bold, ballsy and just the sort of thing New Zealand should do.
How can we get there as fast as possible? We don't think any one team will do it. We have set up The Cacophony Project as a totally open source non-profit project to allow anyone to contribute and help us get the cacophony back as soon as possible.

Any approaches using computers and data are likely to fall in price and increase in effectiveness over time. Things that sound ridiculous today will possibly be viable much sooner than you may think. Knowing this trend influences our technology development strategy.

Trapping, poison, hunting, and fences have all been turned against pests to help prevent the ongoing slaughter of New Zealand birds. However, we know that current trapping methods aren’t cutting it. As part of our experimenting we have had video trail cameras pointing at existing (traditional) traps to measure how well different digital lures work. What has completely surprised us is that as little as 1% of the time that a possum turned up on camera a trap was activated.

Our goal was to test the different camera set ups to see how well the different technologies worked. One camera is an off-the-shelf tracking camera. The other two are Raspberry Pis - one with a IR camera, light and motion sensor the other with a thermal camera that is taking a picture every 2 seconds.

The aim of this project was to see if the latest Machine Learning (Artificial Intelligence) tools could correctly identify the difference between rats, stoats, possums and others from videos collected from the field.

Over the past few months we have continued our field testing of the device, with our core focus to complete all Version One features.

The Cacophony Project Coordinator, Grant Ryan, recently sat down with RNZ presenter, Jesse Mulligan, on his weekday program to talk about creating a healthier New Zealand ecosystem.

We have started testing digital lures with a camera to observe the different rates of animal interactions. These tests are aimed at possums for the simple reason that our property is infested with them.

Machine learning (a branch of Artificial Intelligence) is the general term for how computers learn to recognise patterns. Machine Learning has become very powerful with the advent of inexpensive computer processing and the explosion in available data enabled by the internet and cloud computing. Capitalising on all this data, deep neural networks have recently shown order-of-magnitude improvements in tasks such as automatic speech recognition and computer vision.

In New Zealand bird volume is the “canary in the mine”. Lots of birdsong is healthier than no birdsong, which indicates a rat/stoat/possum infested dead zone. When Captain Cook landed he described hearing a “cacophony” of bird song, hence our project name.

The Cacophony Project has been founded on the idea that some problems are too big, too complex (and too important) for any one commercial entity to solve. For a really huge problem like restoring NZ's native ecosystems, innovation is needed from all over the place. We recognise that a few experts can contribute what they know at low cost to themselves but at high value to the rest of us.

This week, The Cacophony Project was featured on the TV3 news station Newshub.

We start our first blog with what sounds like an outrageously bold claim; that it is possible to make eradication of predators in New Zealand 80,000 times more efficient. Technology could make it possible.