Hi, all! We're launching the new BirdCLEF+ competition presently - the 'plus' is because we've got multi-taxa data this year, including amphibians, insects, mammals, and, of course, birds. This has been a major annotation undertaking, led by Juan Sebastián Cañas of the University College London and Humboldt Institute in Colombia.
https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/birdclef-2025 I'm writing to you because you might have students who could be interested in participating! Here's a bunch of great things about the competition, especially for students: * We have $50k in total prize money! * People can submit 'working notes' for the CLEF competition, detailing their approaches. There's $5k in prize money for the best working note, and it's a great chance to get some practice with academic writing. The working notes are published in the proceedings of the CLEF conference, and the best ones do get more widely cited<https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=mario+lasseck+birdclef&btnG=>, as well. * Often, the best working note is not one of the top-scoring entries! We like to reward well-documented, creative approaches. * Kaggle is a great learning platform - students can get hands-on experience attacking a problem as part of a community which I find to be surprisingly helpful and kind. And a few of my favorite features of the competition itself: * We include a sizeable tranche of unlabeled in-domain data: this is a great test bed for domain-adaptation methods. * Each year, we work with a different organization to develop a new 'fully annotated' dataset, and we publish the test dataset after the competition is complete. This has steadily increased the number of regions where we have some high-quality groundtruth for bird species identification. In fact, the BirdSet benchmark<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.10380> is mostly an omnibus of past BirdClef test data sets. * We use a class-averaged ROC-AUC metric, which focuses on core classification quality, rather than thresholding methods. * And, as mentioned up top, this is an exciting year because we're moving to a multi-taxa task. So, if you've got students who might be interested in taking some time for a bioacoustics competition, do send them along! Cheers, Holger -- At the Yang Center, we work flexibly, and while it suits me to email now, I don’t anticipate a response outside your regular work hours. Thanks! -- Dr. Holger Klinck John W. Fitzpatrick Director K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University Faculty Fellow Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Cornell University Courtesy Professor Marine Mammal Institute Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences, Oregon State University Mailing address: 159 Sapsucker Woods Road Ithaca, NY 14850, USA Tel: +1.607.254.6250 Fax: +1.607.254.2460 Email: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Web: https://bioacoustics.cornell.edu<https://bioacoustics.cornell.edu/> How I say my name<https://www.name-coach.com/holger-klinck> Pronouns in use: He/Him/His
