This Friday's Open Hack Night is a little different. We hope you all can join us!

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Wild Me is a Portland non-profit that uses artificial intelligence to study endangered species. Right now, they’re performing a country-wide census of Grevy’s zebras and reticulated giraffes in Kenya called the Great Grevy’s Rally using nothing but photographs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLw_I1ghvLM

Hundreds of Kenyan tourists, biologists, and citizen scientists helped by taking all of these photos, but now their A.I. needs our help. They are teaching the A.I. to better identify zebras and giraffes in photos through a nice web interface where humans look at pretty pictures and match animals. Every decision we make will either make the population estimate go up or down, directly influencing the count! We'll see lots of original photos of African wildlife, genuinely help with conservation and science in Kenya, and maybe learn a thing or two about machine learning, computer vision, and convolutional neural nets in the process.

For your scientific contributions, there will be pizza!

If you want to join us in training A.I. for wildlife conservation — or if you just want to look at lots of pictures of zebras and giraffes while eating pizza — please bring a device that can connect to WiFi and run a Chrome or Safari web browser. Wild Me's non-profit staff will be here to hang out, participate, and guide us along.

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Every Second Friday is Open Hack Night here at ^H. Come hangout with us at the most happening (and productive) place in town! Hackerspace activities encompass Hardware, Software, Crafting/Textiles, all the Realities (Real, Virtual and Augmented), Infosec, Audio/Video, Cryptocurrencies, Gaming, you name it - if it's technology then it's in scope. Our Hackerspace is a place where people with an interest in computing or technology can gather to work on projects while sharing ideas, equipment, and knowledge. There is plenty of table space, bandwidth and 3D printers (for those looking to try that out). Bring your ideas, works in progress, or something to show off. We'll see you there!