Interview Questions for Adam Szymanski, a Software Engineer at Argonne National Laboratory
In the first year of a three-year program, the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) is developing an AI camera monitoring system to better comprehend the intricate relationships between birds and solar power plants. The goal is to provide cost-effective continuous monitoring, increasing the amount, quality, and variety of data collected.
The project builds on previous work that trained computers to detect drones, now shifting the focus to birds. The models being developed need to perform well in various environments due to the wide variety of background scenery observed. This versatility is crucial as the system's on-board GPU processor allows for computing "at the edge," reducing the burden on solar facilities for high-performance computing or large network bandwidth.
The wide range in the estimated mortality rate of birds at solar facilities is due to limited data available, focusing mainly on concentrating solar power and photovoltaic technologies. An Argonne study published in 2016 estimated that solar facilities kill between 37,800 and 138,600 birds each year. The data collected by the new system can help detect patterns and answer questions about bird interactions with solar infrastructure and potential impacts on specific bird populations.
Federal and state agencies responsible for wildlife protection, researchers, and non-governmental organizations focusing on wildlife and avian conservation are the target end users for this system. Building partnerships with solar facilities and maintaining stakeholder communication are crucial for the project's success.
Detecting birds around solar panels is more challenging than detecting drones due to the difficulty in differentiating moving objects from static background and the need to capture and analyze a sequence of images for activity classification. Despite challenges, the project has recorded several hundred hours of video data so far, even amidst the COVID-19 crisis.
The solar energy industry could potentially install the monitoring system developed by the project, providing a valuable tool for understanding and mitigating the impact of solar infrastructure on bird populations. The project aims to collect a large volume of accurate data on avian-solar interactions, contributing to a more sustainable future for both renewable energy and wildlife conservation.
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