Video-Calling Tech Could Help Lonely parrots Flock Together
A new study which helped pet parrots make video calls to each other suggests that the birds may have benefited from making new feathered friends over the internet. Animal-computer interaction specialists at universities in Scotland and America are behind the research, which is set to be presented as a paper at the ACM Conference on Human…
Visual-Cognitive Abilities of Pigs: A Case Study with Pigs and Tablet Computer Screens
Applied Animal Behaviour Science is about understanding animals’ mental, emotional and physical capacities in real life. We met with two animal scientists, Marianne Wondrak and Ariane Veit, to discuss their recent work with pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus) to categorize pictures of human heads [1]. The work was motivated by the ever-ongoing quest to discover surprising…
Putting Concepts in Practice for Animals-in-Computing Scientists: From Data Collection, over to Programming and Communication Protocols
Animal-Computer Interaction and Animal-Cyber Systems (a term we coined in our past Project Entitled ‘Animal-Cyber Systems (ACS) – Gaining Access to Farm Animal Welfare’) require a practical and reproducible approach to teaching students. This teaching is about animal behaviour and acquiring hands-on experience in software and hardware development of IoT devices, machine learning and artificial…
DogPhone Could Empower ‘Pandemic Pups’ to Stay In Touch With Their Owners
On the internet, the old saying goes, nobody knows you’re a dog – but that could be set to change with the invention of a device which helps pets place video calls to their owners. The system, dubbed DogPhone, is the first of its kind to empower animals to use the internet to contact their owners. In…
Machine Learning to Recognise Pain in Animals: What is the Future?
To honour September 2021 as the ‘Animal Pain Awareness Month’, we revisit the role of computing and machine learning in recognising animal pain in this blog. The usefulness of machine learning (ML) is well versed in animal medicine and animal behavioural science across many settings. Indeed ML as a method is extensively applied in pets,…
Interspecies Information Systems: An Interview with Dirk van der Linden
After spending a lot of time studying how people design, use and think about technologies for animals, Dirk van der Linden from Northumbria University started to ponder how to improve data-driven technologies that inform us about animals. While Dirk kept hearing the phrase “data, data, data”, he began to wonder what people need the data…
How to Train Birds to Use Tablets: An Interview with Jennifer Cunha
After teaching inner-city children to read, Jennifer Cunha took this experience and began teaching her cockatoo phonics and reading skills using Tablets. During this experience, she has been interested in their behaviour, asking questions like how parrots can use communication boards and what they would use tablets for? Digging into this further, we interviewed her…
Tracking technologies for Reindeer Husbandry – A Chat with Luke Researchers
We asked Dr. Jouko Kumpula of the National Resources Institute in Finland (Luke) about the role of tracking technology in reindeer research and husbandry. Dr. Kumpula has previously used tracking devices to collect data in several reindeer research projects studying their habitat usage and monitoring the effect of climate change on reindeer behaviour and reproduction.…
Researchers Find Dogs Prefer Robots to Look like Dog-Like But Dog Owners Do Not
Robots are increasingly being used in our homes, from robot vacuums to help with cleaning to using voice-agents to play music. Especially for social robots such as Siri and Alexia which communicate with us, these robots take many different forms, from having human-like faces and features to static boxes that talk in human voices. Recently…
Building Interactive Enrichment for Elephants
Elephants in captivity face several challenges – from not getting enough exercise (potentially leading to weight gain and foot problems) to not having enough stimulation to prevent them from getting bored. Addressing these problems is not always an easy task, as there is limited space in zoos and often few other elephants to interact with.…
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Animals in Computing 