We're pleased to announce a new data challenge: "Few-shot Bioacoustic Event Detection", a new task within the "DCASE 2021" data challenge event.

We challenge YOU to create a system to detect the calls of birds, hyenas, meerkats and more.

This is a "few shot" task, meaning we only ever have a small number of examples of the sound to be detected. This is a great challenge for machine-learning students and researchers: it is not yet solved, and it is great practical utility for scientists and conservationists monitoring animals in the wild.

We are able to launch this task thanks to a great collaboration of people who contributed data from their own projects. These newly-curated datasets are contributed from projects recorded in Germany, USA, Kenya and Poland.

The training and validation datasets are available now to download. You can use them to develop new recognition systems. In June, the test sets will be made available, and participants will submit the results from their systems for official scoring.

Much more information on the Few-shot Bioacoustic Event Detection DCASE 2021 page.

Within TDWG Audubon Core, we are considering what is a good standard to label information in sub-regions of sound recordings, images, etc. For example, I can draw a rectangular box in an image or a spectrogram, and give it a species label. This happens a lot! How can we exchange these "boxes" between software and databases reliably?

The question is: should we use the w3c’s "Media Fragments" syntax? In particular, I’m looking at section 4.2 about selecting temporal and spatial sub-regions.

Temporal region examples:

    t=10,20   # => results in the time interval [10,20)
    t=,20     # => results in the time interval [0,20)
    t=10      # => results in the time interval [10,end)

Spatial region examples:

    xywh=160,120,320,240        # => results in a 320x240 box at x=160 and y=120
    xywh=pixel:160,120,320,240  # => results in a 320x240 box at x=160 and y=120
    xywh=percent:25,25,50,50    # => results in a 50%x50% box at x=25% and y=25%

My perspective:

The definitions for the content of the values are good, and we should directly follow their example. (For time, the values are Normal Play Time (npt) RFC 2326 which can be purely in seconds or in hh:mm:ss.*, and other formats such as ISO 8601 datetime can be used as "advanced" use. For space, values are in pixels or percentages, with pixels as the default, and x=y=0 the top-left of the image.)

The structure of the selectors, however, I think could lead to problems for annotating biodiversity multimedia:

• Comma-separated formats for fields are likely to lead to errors when used in CSV data.
• There are existing use-cases which refer to single points in time/space rather than regions. (This could however be handled as regions of zero extent: t=10,10 or xywh=160,120,0,0.)
• The format "t=10" for a time interval [10,end) risks user error since it could be interpreted as, or used as, a representation of temporal points. (In retrospect it would have been better to define the format as "t=10,")
• We wish to provide for a frequency axis, with similar region-selection characteristics as the temporal and spatial. (See freqLow and freqHigh recently added to Audubon Core.)
• We would like to allow for 3D spatial extents (xyzwhd?).

So, as one possibility: we could use the w3c’s approach to defining the values, by explicitly referring across to their use of RFC 2326 etc; but instead of simply recommending to use Media Fragments, we do NOT recommend the t or xywh selectors but instead recommend separate fields for timeStart, timeEnd, freqLow, freqHigh, and so forth.

I should say that my background is with audio data, and so for selecting image regions there may be existing good practice/recommendations that I haven't spotted.

My blog doesn't have a "comments" function, but I'd like to read your comments! You can reach me using twitter or email dstowell (attt) tilburguniversity.edu

A storecupboard dhal with hints of southern India, inspired loosely by more authentic sources such as this one.

Serves 2, takes about 70 minutes but with a big gap in the middle where you can get on with other things.

• 100g mung dhal
• 1 small cinnamon stick
• 4 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp chilli seeds
• 1/2 tsp asafoetida
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 handful methi (fenugreek leaves), or a handful of spinach, kale or other green leaf
• 1.5 handfuls dessicated coconut

For the tarka:

• 1 tbsp coconut oil (or some veg oil)
• 1/4 an onion
• 1 tsp mustard seeds (optional)
• 2--4 curry leaves (optional)
• 1 red chilli (optional)

Take a large frying pan, warmed to medium hot, and toast (dry-fry) the mung dhal in it for about 5 minutes until they smell toasty and turn slightly pink/orange in colour. Keep shuffling them so they don't burn. Then pour them into a sieve (make sure you don't melt it if it's plastic), and rinse and soak them in cold water briefly.

Take a deeper pan with a lid, and warm it up medium hot, with the cinnamon stick in the dry pan. When that's had a minute or so, add the mung beans as well as about 400 ml of water. It needs plenty of water. Also add the turmeric, chilli seeds, asafoetida and salt. Bring this to the boil and then simmer it for about 45 minutes, part-covered with the lid. Make sure it doesn't boil over, but that aside you don't need to worry about it too much.

After 45 minutes the mung dhal should be soft and swollen and the chalky texture should be just about gone. Turn off the heat, and stir in the methi and 1 handful of the dessicated coconut. You can leave this to sit for a while, to absorb -- you can just do the rest whenever you're ready to eat.

When you're almost ready to eat:

If you have a hand blender, use that to blend about a quarter of the mixture in the pan. This gives some thickness without mushing everything. You can also use a potato masher or suchlike. Then, put the dhal back on a very low heat -- do not allow it to boil.

Make the tarka: in a frying pan (perhaps the one you started with!), get the oil nice and hot. Finely slice the onion and the chilli, and put them in to fry until caramelised and a bit crispy. Also add the other tarka ingredients after a couple of minutes.

Serve the dhal in bowls, with the fried tarka sprinkled over the top. Eat with bread (e.g. roti/chapati) or as part of a larger meal.

We had gorgeous jackfruit fritters in a London pub. Somehow, they got them extremely chickeny tasting. Impressive! I had to try and replicate the effect.

So what we're doing here is lovely juicy jackfruit fritters, making sure there's not too much stodgy dough getting in the way. It's flavoured with herbs, but specifically with those flavours that remind you of chicken and stuffing: sage, thyme, onion. I'm using a mixture of fresh and dried herbs according to availability - you could change it around. You really need at least some of the herbs to be fresh, because they're not just there for flavouring, they provide leafy green body to the fritters too.

I use chickpea flour (gram flour) to hold the fritter together and to help give it a moist chew. You could try other types of flour but I don't think they'll give the same effect.

You need to get the ingredients as dry as possible - the less excess water, the better the fritter will hold together. So, try washing and draining your jackfruit and herbs early, and leaving them to drain for a good while. I also pat the jackfruit dry with kitchen paper.

Serves 1-2, takes 30 minutes.

• 1 tin green jackfruit in water
• 2 tsp onion granules, possibly more
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 1 small handful fresh parsley
• 1 small handful fresh sage
• 1 tbsp fresh mint (i.e. less than the other herbs)
• 1/2 tsp salt
• a twist of black pepper
• 1/2 tsp nutritional yeast (optional)
• 2 tbsp chickpea flour

Drain the fackfruit pieces as well as you can, cut off any very hard bits and discard, and then chop the rest roughly - it should end up as pieces a bit like chicken kebab meat, smaller than bitesize but still chunky. You can squish the pieces a little with your fingers, so that they break up a little and expose more surface area, and also look less like triangles.

Put the fresh herbs in a blender and pulse to chop them finely. (Or use a big knife and chopping board!) If you're using the blender, you do not need to discard the stalks for the parsley, but you will do for the others that have harder stalks.

Mix everything except the flour together well in a medium bowl, ensuring the herbs and other flavours are well-distributed over the jackfruit pieces. Leave to marinate for at least 1 hour.

When there's about 15 minutes before time to eat, sprinkle the chickpea flour evenly over the mixture, and mix it all through well. You're aiming to give the mixture enough flour that it's going to hold together well, but you do not want the flour to take over from the jackfruit. You're not making a dumpling! The flour should absorb pretty quickly into the mixture

On a flat surface, divide the mixture into two balls, then squish and compress them with your hands to make two compressed, burger-y shapes. Let this sit for a few minutes to absorb and to start to hold its shape, while you prepare other things.

In a large flat frying pan, warm up some veg oil ready for frying. You'll be shallow frying, but don't be stingy with the oil - you need enough oil (maybe about 1mm depth?) such that the surface of the fritters will form well. Very very gently, and without breaking or reshaping them, manoeuvre the fritters into the pan. Don't disturb the frying fritters too much, especially at first - let them get a surface from frying. They'll take about 5 minutes one side, and then you delicately turn them and give them 5 minutes the other side.

Serve as a starter, or as a midweek meal with chips and salad.

Ever since the immersive experience of the fantastic Biodiversity_Next conference 2019, I've been getting to grips with biodiversity data frameworks such as GBIF and TDWG. So I'm very pleased to tell you that I've been contributing to the Audubon Core standard, which is an open standard of vocabularies to be used when describing biodiversity multimedia. These standards help the world's collections and databases to talk to each other. It can enable some amazing stuff to happen, when the entire planet's evidence about animal and plant species can be treated almost as if it was one big dataset.

After community consultation we've just released an update to the Audubon Core Terms List which adds some terms that are very important for describing audio data. The terms added are:

• sampleRate for the sample-rate of the digitised recording.
• freqLow and freqHigh to specify the frequency range of the sound events captured in the recording.

Any audio experts reading this might find these rather unimpressive and basic metadata. But that's precisely the point - to add these basic and uncontroversial terms to the standard. I'm very happy with what seems to be the TDWG approach, which is to move forward by gradual consensus rather than over-engineering a standard in advance.

What can we do with this? Well, in the not-too-distant future I can imagine querying GBIF for all animal calls within a particular frequency band, or analysing frequency ranges globally to explore acoustic environmental correlations. We can't do this yet, but as these new terms get taken up it should happen.

These term additions came about primarily through joint efforts of me, Ed Baker, and Steve Baskauf - a TDWG expert who has guided us through the process very attentively. Plus, many people in the TDWG community who checked our work and gave input. Thank you!

I'd also like to acknowledge the Heidelberg Bioacoustics Symposium (Dec 2019) at which we had discussions with many different taxon experts on animal sound and how we can share it.

There are some presentation slides from the TDWG annual meeting, introducing the changes, and also looking forward to more detailed metadata that might be added in future (i.e. for sound-event annotations). We also proposed to import a term "dwc:individualCount", but we ran into some definitional issues so that will take a bit more time to resolve.

You can get involved in what happens next. Use TDWG standards such as Audubon Core to share your data. Get involved in the discussion about what else might be needed to share and aggregate bioacoustic datasets.

I'm extremely pleased to announce this publication, edited by Jérôme Sueur and myself: Ecoacoustics and Biodiversity Monitoring - a special issue in the journal "Remote Sensing in Ecology & Conservation".

It features 2 reviews and 6 original research articles, from research studies around the globe.

You can also read a brief introduction to the issue here on the RSEC blog.

I just want to put some of this down for posterity - i.e. to remind myself in future, of what was obvious at the time.

• "Shut the damn pubs," I've been thinking to myself for weeks. Saying it to friends too. Back in August, I think, the scientific advisors Chris Whitty and Graham Medley floated the idea that the pubs should shut in September to allow the schools and universities to come back with some level of reassurance, some help to restrict the spread of the virus. The idea didn't seem to catch on. It wasn't debated much in the media. Now, with the benefit of hindsight it's clear that the start of term would have been the IDEAL moment to put the pubs (and some other similar parts of that sector) into an autumn furlough. It would clearly need a furlough or some other financial support.

  The public messaging would have been clear - a straightforward cutoff that we can all understand. "You've had your summer in the beer gardens, now let's get the kids back to school". Much much easier to manage publicly.

  (Update: we now find that the science advisers were indeed officially in September suggesting shutting bars and restaurants)

  The current 10pm shutting of pubs and restaurants struck me as a useless compromise. People will have already been boozing, hanging around with strangers indoors. It's looking, at the moment, like it actually may be doing more harm than good, with people gathering in streets, supermarkets, homes. That's more than I'd expected. I wonder if people are making the most of their time before the expected imposition of even tougher restrictions.

• The second wave of covid was clearly blooming BEFORE the schools and universities went back into their term. Given the time-lag in detection, and the fact that the wave was picking up approx 2 weeks beforehand anyway, it must have kicked off about a month before. It seems likely that one cause is people coming back from foreign holidays: a fairly high chance of bringing novel infections in. But maybe it's also just the gradual relaxation - of rules and of attitudes - that did it.

• The union, UCU, was right. They had more insight than I did - I wasn't particularly committed as to whether universities should be trying to restart their academic year on-campus.

  (And we could see the financial problem facing universities: if they didn't offer some kind of "on-campus teaching and socialising" promise, the students might not come at all, which puts the universities into a massive financial loss. That could be handled by the big well-endowed universities, but for many of the more normal universities - like the one I work at - there's no big money pot in the background giving them strategic flexibility, they live on the balance of incoming and outgoing, and a bank loan facility to allow strategic investment.)

  But the union UCU spoke forcefully, saying that the teaching term should not go back on campus until it was clear how to do it safely. I did not foresee this horrible situation of students in accommodation lockdown and big discussions about whether to let them leave for Christmas. The union's position was the right one.

• Should students get some money back? They've paid "normal" fees and are not getting a normal education. Well: the first thing to say is that university staff have been moving heaven and earth this summer to create, very rapidly, a seismic shift in how they do their teaching, making it possible to do blended or online as necessary, often completely reworking their courses. It's not me that moved heaven and earth - it's the lecturers and support staff, especially those teaching the big first-year courses. They are knackered. So. The "cost of education" has definitely not decreased. Frankly, students this year have received, unknowingly, hundreds of hours of added free labour from university staff busting a gut to get things in place. If the outcome is thought to be not good enough - because as we all know, it's the social, group-learning and extra-curricular side the students will be missing out on - then yes, it's worth compensating. I'm afraid it should be government-backed compensation, since the cost of teaching hasn't decreased, it's more like a furlough of students' in-person experience. So how about a per-university scheme that pairs lockdowns/go-homes with student compensation.

• It beggars belief that the government was saying, in late August, "Now is the time" to go back physically to work, in offices and workplaces. They were doing this, as was obvious, mere weeks before the schools went back. Why not wait and make sure the schools get back OK? Why not let individuals and businesses make up their own minds? Sure, there are economic costs to staying remote, staying in furlough, etc. But the most reasonable way to go seems to lay off the government messaging for a moment - allow our collective intelligence to work out how to work sensibly and safely in the new era. Not to coerce people back into unsafe conditions. Not to give some bosses (and I have a couple of my friends' bosses in mind) the backing to force people back into face-to-face work that they personally feel unsafe doing.

I'm having problems focusing on my work. It's very difficult to avoid distractions.

One big distraction is something called the World Wide Web... well in my job the most difficult distraction is actually work email - there are lots of different things that distract attention by email. Email is great but it can so easily mean you have no focussed time at all.

I went on a time management course and realised that I should save at least one or two hours per day away from email. I've heard many times, people recommending "No email before noon" or suchlike. I can't imagine being able to go as far as that and also manage meetings etc, but at least I can defend some portion of time.

The problem is not just deciding to stay away from distractions. It's forcing yourself to do it.

I've found one way that helps me: forcing my laptop to be disconnected from the internet between 7am and 9am. It's not much - I mean, many people don't even consider work emails before 9am, though my daily pattern is a bit non-standard. Starting the day this way does help me focus, and make sure I've achieved at least one bit of thoughtful work most days.

Here's how I do it on my linux laptop. I couldn't find any reliable guides for it - I thought there'd be an easy command of some sort. But here's my way:

I tried a few options before this one, including commands that were supposed to auto-run whenever my laptop opened (to check the time and decide whether or not to enable wifi), but there were various problems getting that working, partly because there's a small delay in the "normal" wifi manager connecting, so it's hard to synchronise with that.

In the end I went for a rather brute-force approach: I used "cron" to ensure that once per minute, for every minute between 7am and 9am on a weekday, the "nmcli" command turns off my laptop's networking. Then at 9am it turns it on.

If you don't know cron or crontab, look it up, it's a really common way on linux to schedule commands.

# sudo crontab -e
# seems to need to be in sudo. Not sure why! Probably env vars.
0 9 * * 1-5 /usr/bin/nmcli networking on
* 7-8 * * 1-5 /usr/bin/nmcli networking off

You can see there's a "networking on" command and a "networking off" nmcli command. The numbers at the start of the line specify the day and time - for example "1-5" means Monday to Friday. And " 7-8" means to turn the networking off whenever the hour is 7 or 8, and whenever the minute is anything ("").

This method might seem a bit stupid (why not just turn wifi off once, rather than every 60 seconds?) but actually works very reliably, and has some handy side-effects. It is technically possible for the user (me) to turn wifi back on, and in practice there's often a temptation to do this. Sometimes there's even a good reason! But even if you do, cron will simply come along approx half a minute later and turn it off, meaning that the "rabbit hole" temptation of "oh I'll just check that one thing online" can't lead you off and away from your quiet time.