CE#1: Revolutionizing Methods to Track Dolphins

In an article published by The New York Times titled, " Tracking Dolphins with Algorithms you Might Find on Facebook, Steph Yin tells the story of Kait Fraiser and her new way of tracking dolphins. This was a big deal because beforehand it was extremely tedious and expensive to track dolphins. Many different factors effects whether a dolphin will be at a specific place in time and using echolocation was even worse. The amount of data collected would cause even the greatest minds to have a headache. However, Fraiser created a machine learning program that is similar to the one used by Facebook to recommend new friends in order to help this dilemma. With the new program huge amounts of data can be analyzed and identified in a short amount of time compared to if it was completed by humans. In fact, the program(algorithm) was able to analyze 52 million dolphin clicks and identify distinct groups of sounds. Also the algorithm was ale to analyze two years worth of data in four days while it took three weeks for Fraiser to analyze only  a years worth of data.
This may be a very exciting innovation, but it still in the development stage. The algorithm has yet to be programmed to recognize any particular category or in other words it didn't have a specific task, nor has the program been tested in the real field yet. Nevertheless, this innovation is revolutionary to aid scientist track dolphins and possible other animals.

Although I am not the biggest dolphin fanatic, this news is quite intriguing because this program could be used in other fields of studies. Also it was amazing to know that the algorithm was taking from an algorithm used by Facebook because the functions were completely different. Doesn't it make you wonder what other things are malleable enough to be used outside of its original purpose? Technology has almost infinite boundaries because it can aid in different fields of studies and be used for completely different purposes. For me this just further expands the different careers I can pursue. Even though I am interested in technology, it pertains to so many jobs and fields that I can also be a part of the medical field or engineering field. Technology truly holds no boundaries.


Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/science/dolphins-machine-learning-algorithm.html

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