Operating Within Limits – OWL

Project OWL proposes a new model of computation for more frugal intelligent autonomous sensors: circadian artificial intelligence (AI).

The targeted applications are in the field of environmental monitoring, especially bioacoustic and its application in conservation ecology.

This model is particularly well suited for sensors without batteries that are intermittently powered by ambient energy.
The great promises of these systems is the extension of their lifetime without the need for human intervention allowing for long-term biostatistics observation missions, and a lower impact on the environment thanks to the absence of battery.

Circadian AI is interested in observing phenomena that have a period of one day, such as the activity of birds or the pollution associated with traffic in a metropolis. It exploits the fact that this period is shared with the availability of solar energy, which is used to power the sensors. This correlation allows the systems to temporally shift the costly computations required to perform the AI functions to times when the observed phenomenon is at rest and energy is abundant.

The project proposes two main contributions.
The first is to propose new algorithms for circadian AI that allows for this temporal shift in computation.
The second is to provide the software and hardware infrastructure necessary to run circadian AI on intermittently powered sensors.

The work done in the project will be based as much as possible on open source / open hardware technologies.
Those built during the project (dataset, software, hardware design) will all be freely distributed.