From the New York Times
Letter of Recommendation: iNaturalist
By Ferris Jabr
One Christmas, when I was about 8, I received a modern bestiary, a large photo-dense encyclopedia of animals. I had loved animals from toddlerhood....
So when I heard reports that a free app called iNaturalist could identify just about any wild animal, plant or mushroom on sight, I immediately downloaded it....
iNaturalist is a novel hybrid of artificial intelligence and ceaseless human curiosity. In 2008, Ken-ichi Ueda and several other students at the University of California, Berkeley, founded iNaturalist as an online community for biologists, citizen scientists and people who simply enjoyed observing wildlife. Members helped one another identify species, eventually amassing a database of more than six million labeled photos. When the iNaturalist app was introduced, it was essentially a mobile version of the website. But it has been updated several times, and the current version employs a neural network trained to recognize species using images from the rich library compiled by human users....
iNaturalist originated as a 2008 master’s final project by MIMS students Jessica Kline, Ken-ichi Ueda, and Nathan Agrin (all MIMS ’08).