2025-08-10 –, Cassiopeia
Language: English
Birdsong is all around us, but is there a deeper meaning? Can computer analysis help us decipher these hidden patterns in our own backyards? This talk charts my journey exploring the world of open source projects for bird (and bat!) audio identification, some of the systems I've operated, and the data art pieces I've created from the results. From the science of migration, to machine learning models and data visualization, to bioethics, there's something for every hacker to be inspired by.
- Why birds sing, hormones and territory
- Neural networks for identifying animal sounds
- Feature pre-processing for sound ID
- Open source projects you can build yourself
- Pointing microphones at the sky: nocturnal flight calls and migration
- Data art and visualizations
- Wait, is this surveillance?
- The psychology of shifting baselines and why the data matters
I'm Logan, a technologist, journalist, birdwatcher and data artist from Oregon via Amsterdam. I like to look closely at nature, and in my art practice I explore the ways that technology mediates and augments human observation. I am also the Technology Officer for Bellingcat, a non-profit journalism NGO that develops open source methods for investigative journalism. There, I build tools for journalists to investigate and document war crimes, endangered species trafficking, and online extremism. Also ask me about: ecological data sources, computational photography, sonification, bird migration, D3.js, mothing, and what happens when you leave a Raspberry Pi in a creek for a year.