Related article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1552060,00.html Scientists have unveiled plans to create a digital library of Aricept Namenda all life on Earth. They say that the Digital Automated Identification System (Daisy), which harnesses the latest advances in artificial intelligence and computer vision, will have an Aricept Prices enormous impact on research into biodiversity and evolution. Daisy will also give Britain's army of amateur naturalists unprecedented access to the world's taxonomic expertise: send Daisy a camera-phone picture of a Buy Aricept Online plant or animal and, within seconds, you will get detailed information about what you are looking at. Norman MacLeod, the Aricept 5 Natural History Museum's Aricept 10mg keeper of palaeontology, has spent several years developing the new technology. He said that Daisy will make the identification of plants and animals more objective and directly comparable. "Right now, taxonomy is as much of an art form as it is a science," Prof MacLeod said. He will present his vision for Daisy to an international meeting of taxonomists at the museum today. Taxonomists normally identify specimens through a painstaking process in which the features of an unknown plant or animal are compared with identified specimens in the museum's collections. If it is sufficiently different, the unknown specimen is confirmed as a new species. However, there is plenty of room for error - the museum's collection might be incomplete or the Aricept Online person making the identification could make a mistake. If scientists did not have to What Is Aricept make routine identifications and teach others how to do it, argues Prof Aricept 23 MacLeod, they could get on with the business of learning more about biodiversity and evolution. "Say you saw a butterfly, you might take a digital image of it, connect up to the world wide web and access a Daisy internet portal," said Prof MacLeod. "The portal would accept the picture and farm it out to the servers in individual institutions, such as the Natural History Museum." Using pattern-recognition software, Daisy would try to match the picture with images in its archives. "The portal would route the answer back as a web page that had the confidence level of the identification and the institution that made Aricept 5mg the identification," said Prof Aricept 23 Mg MacLeod. Daisy can also Aricept Cost identify sounds and scans of DNA barcodes. For something so useful, it is perhaps a surprise Cheap Aricept that no one has thought of such a system before. According to Prof MacLeod , the hold-up has been the lack of neural network software - programmes that learn - required by Daisy. "New developments in artificial Aricept 10 intelligence and computer algorithms have taken neural nets to Aricept Price where they act more Aricept 5 Mg like human intelligence," he said. "When we see something new, we don't have to re-compute our understanding of everything else we've ever seen, we just add it to the mix. That's pretty much what we're doing with Daisy." The other limitation with Daisy is that the system will only be as good as the quality and quantity of its reference images. "Museums are only just starting to get into that type of work," said Prof MacLeod. "That has its own Price Of Aricept technological and storage and manpower barriers. "Now there's a Purchase Aricept tool that we can use to justify making the investment in getting these collections of Cost Of Aricept images together Buy Aricept and building the software structures that are necessary to make the neural net able to access the images, then there's a reason to do it." There is also a role for Britain's army of amateur naturalists in improving the library. "One of the neat things about Daisy is that, if you submit an image and it's identified with a high level of certainty, that can then be added to the library of images, which makes Daisy more powerful," said Prof MacLeod. "That information can keep growing. The more people that use [the system], the better it gets." He said that the first images and sounds have already been used to test that everything works. But filling Daisy with data from all the museums will take several years. The Natural History Museum has 70 million specimens that would need to be entered Aricept 10 Mg into the database.