André Ferreira

In his work, André Marques Condeço Ferreira aims to revolutionize both the popular hobby of feeding wild birds and the field of wildlife research by introducing the "Bird'sEye" smart camera bird feeder.

This innovative device captures videos and images of visiting birds and uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically generate valuable data on various aspects of the birds’ lives. This data will allow to address fundamental questions in ecology - including studying the impacts of climate change on avian biodiversity - that have been hindered by the lack of large-scale monitoring systems.

In his postdoctoral work at UZH, André has developed multiple AI- and computer vision-based algorithms to extract behavioural and morphological features from video recordings of individual animals. During the fellowship, he will be working together with industrial product designers and software engineers to implement the algorithms into an aesthetical pleasant bird feeder that bird enthusiasts can interact with through a mobile app. Through this app, users will gain access to detailed information about each wild bird visiting their feeders in their gardens creating an immersive and unprecedented connection between people and local wild birds.

In the later stages of the fellowship a proof-of-concept testing will be run with early adopters from Switzerland and Germany. The feedback and experience obtained during this testing phase will be used as the basis for a crowdfunding campaign.

Affiliation: Prof. Damien Farine

Start date: 12/2023