Our esteemed colleague Dewan Fayzur, Data Scientist, recently won the Animal Behavior Challenge (ABC) 2018, a CodaLab competition organized by the Symposium on Systems Science of Bio-Navigation, and sponsored by Technosmart.

The goal of the challenge was to predict the gender of streaked shearwaters from their GPS trajectory using Machine Learning. The bird colony was located on the small island of Awashima, Japan, and consisted of approximately 84,000 specimens. Thanks to data loggers attached to the legs of 631 birds, it was possible to determine that males and females use different cues and trajectories, meaning it’s possible to predict their gender from the way they navigate.

You can read Fayzur’s winning submission at the Cornell University Library ArXiv to learn all the technicalities of the project. You can also find the project’s source code on Github.

As part of the award, Fayzur will be traveling to Kyoto and attending the Symposium on Systems Science of Bio-Navigation 2018, from 5-6 September. We wish him a well-deserved fantastic time!