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  shark team one
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- Building Marine Wildlife Corridors for Sharks Using Artificial Intelligence -

Shark Team One’s project seeks to apply Microsoft Azure to automatically classify photos of severely injured sharks captured by researchers and citizen scientists on their expeditions off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula.
We are creating an efficient and impactful solution for cataloging shark damage and ship strikes in order to inform our Endangered Whale Shark Conservation Program. This project is creating positive outcomes for ecosystem management to protect endangered whale sharks and livelihoods of local stakeholders. We hope the project once completed can be used to help conservationists, scientists and technologists save whale sharks globally. Currently the project is being used even in its development to advise policy and train citizen scientists. 

We are finding new and innovative ways to track human impacts on whale shark populations in our study area and globally. Our output will help to create marine protected areas and our goals with marine wildlife corridors will help save endangered whale sharks from stressors such as ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement!
Training citizen scientists to capture whale shark photography that can be utilized for this project.
Severe fin damage evidence and mapping is being used to help save whale sharks.
Virtually tagging whale sharks.
Tagged photos imported to Azure Custom Vision to train the model.
Photos being tagged to train the model to recognize fin type and instances of fin damage occurrence.
This AI impact study and its outcomes will help save this population of endangered whale sharks and could also help researchers protect whale sharks in all of their global range.
We'd like to thank the amazing people at Microsoft's AI for Earth program for the support and for believing in us. Thank you to Jinnapat Indrapiromkul, the amazing mind behind all the programming, computer science and concept work, design and for her passion to help save whale sharks and bridge the gap between science and conservation. Thanks also to Angela's long-time friend, the talented Karl Sims, digital media artist and visual effects software development guru and his friends at MIT Media Lab for referrals and initial brainstorm support. Thanks to Angela for her vision and initial concept. We couldn't do it without the amazing minds, volunteer commitment and support that these talented people have brought to Shark Team One and our mission to save whale sharks! We are in development but are already finding ways to make collection of data more efficient and utilize the amazing power of AI with Microsoft's Azure technology. Whale sharks could be extinct within the next few decades, we need to do everything in our power to help save them before it's too late! 
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