Tools for comparative analysis - visualisation and deep learning

Our meetup this month features a comparative analysis double bill, with an introduction to phylogenetic comparative analysis and visualisation in R from Chris Cooney and machine learning approaches to image categorisation (with a python flavour) from Yichen He.

Phylogenetic comparative analysis and visualisation in R

Chris Cooney (http://macroevolution.group.shef.ac.uk/about-the-team/dr-chris-cooney/) is a postdoc in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield working on evolutionary questions related to the diversification of birds. Central to this work are phylogenies ('trees' showing the evolutionary relationships among species) and large, multidimensional datasets capturing variation in organisms' phenotypic traits. In his talk, Chris will present some useful tools for analysing and visualising phylogenetic comparative data in R (e.g. ape, phytools, MCMCglmm), and provide a brief discussion of some of the challenges (and opportunities) associated with analysing complex – and slightly unusual – datasets of avian traits, including 3-D scans of bill morphology and calibrated digital photographs of plumage colouration for the majority of the world's 10,000 bird species.

Deep learning on labelling bird plumage images

Yichen He (http://macroevolution.group.shef.ac.uk/about-the-team/yichen-he/) is a PhD student in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield. His research interests encompass computer graphics, computer vision and machine learning. In this talk he'll demonstrate using the python package tensorflow to label bird plumage images automatically.