Hiran Wijesinghe and Dananjaya Liyanage from the physics PhD program were among the winning team of Erdős Institute’s Cőde 2019 bootcamp. They were awarded “Cőde 2019 Best Team Project” for their machine learning classifier of audio recordings of birdsongs. The classifier has implications for ecology and study of metapopulations and migration patterns in birds, as it taps into a largely untapped resource – automated surveillance and identification of species and genera of birds based on audio recordings. The project utilizes tens of thousands of publicly available recordings of birdsongs to generate an automated classifier that achieves a high degree of accuracy using digital signal processing and advanced machine learning techniques.

Erdős Institute (erdosinstitute.org, named after Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős) is a PhD talent initiative collaborating with academia and industry. Their aims are to develop internal talent and to establish recruitment pipelines for top PhD level talent. Apart from the Cőde bootcamp Erdős Institute also organizes “Invitations to Industry” seminar series. There were about 65 participants in Cőde bootcamp, out of which 40 participants in 8 teams presented final team projects. The winning team included Hiran Wijesinghe and Dananjaya Liyanage from the physics PhD program, and Caleb Dilsavor from the mathematics PhD program. 

Congratulations!