How do you answer a question like, “Is the particularly round robin that visits my bird feeder huge or just fluffy?” This talk documents Hugh’s attempt to answer this question by building a smart bird feeder that tracks the weight of visiting birds, which, in combination with a custom computer vision model and a night-vision webcam, helped him build a dataset of all the visitors to his bird feeder and how that led to the creation of a large-scale data pipeline for citizen science ornithology.

In this talk, Hugh will explore working with sensor data, data streaming, multimodal data analysis at scale, and the answer to the titular question, “How heavy is this robin?”