![]() ![]() They all have personalities, built-in traits,” LaDonna Davis told Morales. ![]() His wife lost a thumb.Īnd yet, like Herold, the Davises maintained that chimpanzees should be allowed to live with humans. James Davis wears a prosthetic nose and his face is scarred from the attack and the scores of surgeries he has undergone. Moe was not involved in the attack.Īfter Rossen’s report, the Davises and their attorney, Gloria Allred, spoke from California with TODAY’s Natalie Morales. A ranger at the refuge shot and killed both chimps. James Davis was savagely mauled, losing an eye and several fingers as well as sustaining other injuries. While they were feeding Moe birthday cake through a hole in his fenced enclosure, two adolescent chimpanzees somehow escaped from their own enclosure at the refuge and attacked the Davises. James and LaDonna Davis of West Covina, Calif., were visiting Moe, a 39-year-old chimp they had raised as a human, at a wildlife refuge the chimpanzee had been sent to by a court after he showed aggressive behavior in 1999. Such attacks are rare, but they have happened before. How many people go crazy and kill other people? This is one incident that I don't know what happened.” “We can give them a blood transfusion, and they can give us one. They're the closest thing to humans - to us,” Herold said. 'Interdisciplinary collaborations like this have huge potential to make an impact, by finding novel solutions for old problems, and asking biological questions which were previously not feasible on a large scale.“After what you've been through with this - your friend is in the hospital fighting for her life - do you still think chimps should be pets?” Rossen asked her. 'With an increasing biodiversity crisis and many of the world's ecosystems under threat, the ability to closely monitor different species and populations using automated systems will be crucial for conservation efforts, as well as animal behaviour research' adds Schofield. As a computer vision researcher, it is extremely satisfying to see these methods applied to solve real, challenging biodiversity problems.' 'We hope that this will help researchers across other parts of the world apply the same cutting-edge techniques to their unique animal data sets. 'All our software is available open-source for the research community,' says Nagrani. Although the current application focused on chimpanzees, the software provided could be applied to other species, and help drive the adoption of artificial intelligence systems to solve a range of problems in the wildlife sciences. The technology has potential for many uses, such as monitoring species for conservation. 'Additionally, our method differs from previous primate face recognition software in that it can be applied to raw video footage with limited manual intervention or pre-processing, saving hours of time and resources.' 'Access to this large video archive has allowed us to use cutting edge deep neural networks to train models at a scale that was previously not possible,' says Arsha Nagrani, co-author of the study and DPhil student at the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford. The new software is the first to continuously track and recognise individuals in a wide range of poses, performing with high accuracy in difficult conditions such as low lighting, poor image quality and motion blur. The computer model was trained using over 10 million images from Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute (PRI) video archive of wild chimpanzees in Guinea, West Africa. 'By harnessing the power of machine learning to unlock large video archives, it makes it feasible to measure behaviour over the long term, for example observing how the social interactions of a group change over several generations.' 'For species like chimpanzees, which have complex social lives and live for many years, getting snapshots of their behaviour from short-term field research can only tell us so much,' says Dan Schofield, researcher and DPhil student at Oxford University's Primate Models Lab, School of Anthropology. ![]()
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