With ever more data becoming available, there has been a recent drive to develop modelling tools for heterogeneous data sets such as electronic healthcare records. Therein appears both Bayesian non-parametric latent feature models, as well as methods for automatically determining the statistical data type (e.g. ordinal or categorical) of the attributes present in the data. We present a model which combines both of these attractive features in an end-to-end framework. By jointly learning the model complexity and statistical type of the data, we demonstrate that redundant information can be discarded while higher accuracy statistical type estimates are produced on real experimental data.

Many real-world time series analysis problems are characterized by low signal-to-noise ratios and compounded by scarce data. Solutions to these types of problems often rely on handcrafted features extracted in the time or frequency domain. Recent high-profile advances in deep learning have improved performance across many application domains; however, they typically rely on large data sets that may not always be available. This paper presents an application of deep learning for acoustic event detection in a challenging, data-scarce, real-world problem. We show that convolutional neural networks (CNNs), operating on wavelet transformations of audio recordings, demonstrate superior performance over conventional classifiers that utilize handcrafted features. Our key result is that wavelet transformations offer a clear benefit over the more commonly used short-time Fourier transform. Furthermore, we show that features, handcrafted for a particular dataset, do not generalize well to other datasets. Conversely, CNNs trained on generic features are able to achieve comparable results across multiple datasets, along with outperforming human labellers. We present our results on the application of both detecting the presence of mosquitoes and the classification of bird species.

Our natural environment is complex and sensitive, and is home to a number of species on the verge of extinction. Surveying is one approach to their preservation, and can be supported by technology. This paper presents the deployment of a smartphone-based citizen science biodiversity application. Our findings from interviews with members of the biodiversity community revealed a tension between the technology and their established working practices. From our experience, we present a series of general guidelines for those designing citizen science apps.

In recent years, the field of computational sustainability has striven to apply artificial intelligence techniques to solve ecological and environmental problems. In ecology, a key issue for the safeguarding of our planet is the monitoring of biodiversity. Automated acoustic recognition of species aims to provide a cost-effective method for biodiversity monitoring. This is particularly appealing for detecting endangered animals with a distinctive call, such as the New Forest cicada. To this end, we pursue a crowdsourcing approach, whereby the millions of visitors to the New Forest, where this insect was historically found, will help to monitor its presence by means of a smartphone app that can detect its mating call. Existing research in the field of acoustic insect detection has typically focused upon the classification of recordings collected from fixed field microphones. Such approaches segment a lengthy audio recording into individual segments of insect activity, which are independently classified using cepstral coefficients extracted from the recording as features. This paper reports on a contrasting approach, whereby we use crowdsourcing to collect recordings via a smartphone app, and present an immediate feedback to the users as to whether an insect has been found. Our classification approach does not remove silent parts of the recording via segmentation, but instead uses the temporal patterns throughout each recording to classify the insects present. We show that our approach can successfully discriminate between the call of the New Forest cicada and similar insects found in the New Forest, and is robust to common types of environment noise. A large scale trial deployment of our smartphone app collected over 6000 reports of insect activity from over 1000 users. Despite the cicada not having been rediscovered in the New Forest, the effectiveness of this approach was confirmed for both the detection algorithm, which successfully identified the same cicada through the app in countries where the same species is still present, and of the crowdsourcing methodology, which collected a vast number of recordings and involved thousands of contributors.