Digital automated identification system (DAISY) is an automated species identification system optimised for the rapid screening of invertebrates (e.g. insects) by non-experts (e.g. parataxonomists). It was developed by Dr. Mark O'Neill during the mid-1990s. Development was supported by funding from the Darwin Initiative in 1997 and

BBSRC Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, is a non-departmental public body (NDPB), and is the largest UK public funder of non-medical bioscience. It predominantly funds scientific res ...

. The

intellectual property rights Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...

were acquired by O'Neill's company, Tumbling Dice Ltd, in February 2000 at the end of the grant funde
Darwin Project
The system underwent further development resulting in an producing an exemplar which is web accessible and which can cope in near real time with groups (e.g. hawk moths) which contain several hundred

taxa In biology, a taxon (back-formation from ''taxonomy''; plural taxa) is a group of one or more populations of an organism or organisms seen by taxonomists to form a unit. Although neither is required, a taxon is usually known by a particular nam ...

. On medium to high end PC server hardware (e.g. a

blade server A blade server is a stripped-down server computer with a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy. Blade servers have many components removed to save space, minimize power consumption and other considerations, whi ...

) an identification is possible in under a second for a 300 taxon group. Parallelisation of the critical DAISY classifier codes (using either bespoke

FPGA A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturinghence the term '' field-programmable''. The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware d ...

technology or general purpose

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

programming technology such as

CUDA CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ...

) will give an order of magnitude increase in performance. This means that DAISY can be deployed to make real time identifications within groups containing thousands of taxa (e.g.

true flies Flies are insects of the order Diptera, the name being derived from the Greek δι- ''di-'' "two", and πτερόν ''pteron'' "wing". Insects of this order use only a single pair of wings to fly, the hindwings having evolved into advanced ...

). DAISY has been used in several research projects by O'Neill and others, and featured in popular science TV and magazine articles. The project has also been the subject of a recent article in ''

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence ...

''. In 2011, the first DAISY installation capable of scaling to hundreds of taxa was installed at

Natural History Museum A natural history museum or museum of natural history is a scientific institution with natural history collections that include current and historical records of animals, plants, fungi, ecosystems, geology, paleontology, climatology, and more. ...

in London. This server offered both VNC and web service based interfaces and was able to offload compute intensive pattern matching operations onto an

NVIDIA Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

programmed using

. This installation was capable of providing identification to species given a 300+ taxon dataset in less than a second in a multiple user environment. More recently, under the aegis of

Innovate UK Innovate UK is the United Kingdom's innovation agency, which provides money and support to organisations to make new products and services. It is a non-departmental public body operating at arm's length from the Government as part of the United ...

funding, DAISY has been extensively modified to meet the needs of upstream activities within the oil and gas sector, in particular

biostratigraphy Biostratigraphy is the branch of stratigraphy which focuses on correlating and assigning relative ages of rock strata by using the fossil assemblages contained within them.Hine, Robert. “Biostratigraphy.” ''Oxford Reference: Dictionary of ...

. The resultant system, GeoDAISY represents a significant technological advance. It is capable of

deep learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. ...

, knowledge encapsulation, pattern based data mining and (image based) content search and can efficiently handle training sets consisting of millions of patterns on commodity hardware using a combination of smart data caching and

OpenMP OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing) is an application programming interface (API) that supports multi-platform shared-memory multiprocessing programming in C, C++, and Fortran, on many platforms, instruction-set architectures and operating syst ...

. Further details of GeoDAISY, and the rationale for developing it are available as white papers on th
Tumbling Dice LinkedIn page
File:Daisy_Image_Mosaic_1.png, Showing examples of images which have been classified using DAISY

References

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Digital Automated Identification System (Daisy) Automatic identification and data capture

See also

References

External links