contributed articles

BLOGGING BIRDS IS a novel artificial intelligence
program that generates creative texts to communicate
telemetric data derived from satellite tags fitted to red
kites — a medium-size bird of prey — as part of a
species reintroduction program in the U.K. We
address the challenge of communicating telemetric
sensor data in real time by enriching it with
meteorological and cartographic data, codifying
ecological knowledge to allow creative interpretation
of the behavior of individual birds in respect to such
enriched data, and dynamically generat-
ing informative and engaging data-driv-
en blogs aimed at the general public.

Geospatial data is ubiquitous in today’s world, with vast quantities of telemetric data collected by GPS receivers on, for example, smartphones and automotive black boxes. Adoption of telemetry has been particularly striking in the ecological realm, where the widespread use of satellite tags has greatly advanced our understanding of the natural world. 14, 23 Despite its increasing popularity, GPS telemetry involves the important shortcoming that both the handling and the interpretation of often large amounts of location data is time consuming and thus done mostly long after the data has been gathered. 10, 24 This hampers fruitful use of the data in nature conservation where immediate data analysis and interpretation are needed to take action or communicate to a wider audience. 25, 26

The widespread availability of GPS data, along with associated difficulties interpreting and communicating it in real time, mirrors the scenario seen with other forms of numeric or structured data. It should be noted that the use of computational methods for data analysis per se is hardly new; much of science depends on statistical analysis and associated visualization tools. However, it is generally understood that such tools are mediated by human operators who take responsibility for identifying patterns in

Blogging
Birds:
Telling Informative
Stories About
the Lives
of Birds from
Telemetric Data
DOI: 10.1145/3231588
The system transforms raw telemetric data
into engaging and informative blog texts
readily understood by all.
BY ADVAITH SIDDHARTHAN, KAPILA PONNAMPERUMA,
CHRIS MELLISH, CHEN ZENG, DANIEL HEPTINSTALL,
ANNIE ROBINSON, STUART BENN, AND RENÉ VAN DER WAL
key insights

˽ Summarizing environmentally enriched satellite-tag data in the form of informative, engaging, and fluent blogs is a challenge, even for trained ecologists, and computer-generated blogs were preferred by readers.

˽ Natural language generation, specifically data-to-text technology, is sufficiently advanced to achieve more than just factual summarization of data for professional use.

˽ This development opens new avenues for addressing societal challenges related to communicating data effectively and engaging the public with scientific research.