[ANN] Animal Detection shutting down

[Chris Mann]

Hello all,

It is with much disappointment that I'm announcing that Camelot's animal detection will be suspended indefinitely starting 21st August, 2022.

As many of you will be aware, Camelot has been able to provide built-in automatic animal detection for almost 2 years.  This was an initiative delivered in partnership with Microsoft, and over the period the animal detection feature has been consistently processing roughly 1 million images per month from Camelot users around the world.

Unfortunately in November 2021 Microsoft advised us of a shift in priorities that would prevent them offering the service beyond that calendar year.  Providing the specialised computing resources to run animal detection is expensive. We were able to set up a new funding model which allowed us to run the entire animal detection workload ourselves.  We knew this was at best a temporary solution, but one we hoped would buy some time to find a long-term solution.

Unfortunately no further funding options have been forthcoming.  With the lack of available funding and the minimal spare time that Heidi and myself have to find creative solutions to the problem, there is no option but to announce the forthcoming discontinuation of the service.

We felt it was important to advise the community with a notice period that will allow the change to be managed smoothly, as we are aware many of you have come to rely on this service for managing your image classification workload.

Finally, thank you for the work you're doing, and sorry for the disappointing news.

Regards,

-Chris

[Heidi Hendry]

Regarding this announcement, we would like to point you in the direction of a machine learning team called Lila BC.
https://lila.science/

This team were the people that created the Animal Detection algorithm (aka MegaDetector). If you have found the Animal Detection algorithm useful, then reach out to this team as they can assist you in setting up the Animal Detection algorithm for yourself. Please be aware that this is highly technical, and you should have someone involved with experience in:
GPUs
Azure Cloud
Machine Learning

When reaching out to them mention:
Camelot
MegaDetector
And ask for Dan Morris.

Regards

Heidi

[Charles Sanders]

This is sad. That was a wonderful tool. Thank you for all that you do.

Sent from my iPhone

On May 17, 2022, at 19:26, Heidi Hendry <heidi....@gmail.com> wrote:

Regarding this announcement, we would like to point you in the direction of a machine learning team called Lila BC.

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