Notes from Nature - How Weird is That?

Connect with the research team on Talk to learn more about this project!

How Weird is That? is training machines to recognize the language that researchers use to describe anomalies in the natural world (e.g., “in my experience it’s odd to see this species so far north”) and differentiate it from less alarming word uses (e.g., “the population consistently had an odd-number of segments”). You will differentiate between these two cases and describe the abnormal feature as falling into one of several categories (e.g., the first example is a distributional anomaly). Your work will enable earlier flagging of biological outliers to get the information to the right stakeholders faster. These oddities can mark the early stages of transformative change (e.g., an invasive species’ arrival), so faster information hand-offs are way better! The lead researcher on this project is an undergraduate student finishing her Honors Thesis in Computational Biology.