Meet inside at the Donohoe Center at 7:00 p.m. Doors open 6:30 p.m.

Leader: Dale Matuza, dmmatuza@comcast.net, 724-327-0826

Directions:  Turn north onto Donohoe Road at the Route 30 traffic light near the overpass to the Westmoreland Mall in Greensburg.  Drive north on Donohoe 1.7 miles past WOW Outlets until you see the sign on the right for the Donohoe Center.  “The Barn” is in the back.

Description:  Guest Speaker Bill Powers

Topic--Using Machine Learning to Detect and Identify Avian Sounds

Many in our membership may remember Bill Powers for talks delivered in previous club meetings, or from his presence on the web through his PixController and PixCams websites.  Bill’s cameras have brought to us the intimate behaviors of nesting bald eagles, screech owls, bluebirds, and other species local to our area.  New to Bill’s many interests is bird identification through vocalizations using Artificial Neural Networks.

BirdNET-Pi is a real-time acoustic bird classification system running on a small computer called the Raspberry Pi.  This open-source software created by Patrick McGuire uses the AI-Powered bird sound recognition algorithm called BirdNET developed by The K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Chair of Media Informatics at Chemnitz University of Technology.  BirdNET is the bird identification algorithm used in the popular Cornell Merlin iPhone and Android App.

The presentation will cover the topic of real-time acoustic bird classification and how this technology works.  It will also cover locally installed BirdNET-Pi systems and what we have learned from the data collected from these systems.

We again will appreciate baked goods from the members and coffee/tea will be available.