Harnessing deep learning and data science to create a research data platform of intensively monitored cattle to underpin sustainable food security and animal welfare research

The project:
A growing population and climate change are stressing the availability of food worldwide. At the same time, high animal welfare and health practice is more important than ever. Through a grant from the John Oldacre Foundation, the University of Bristol has invested in comprehensive monitoring infrastructure for its dairy farm, including blanket video coverage, research wearables and real-time environmental monitoring of weather and emissions emissions (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/vetscience/research/john-oldacre-centre--farm-research-data-platform/). The aim of this Centre is to realise an open research data platform on the world’s most intensively monitored cohort of dairy cattle to underpin next-generation research in global food security and animal welfare, as well as provide a testbed for sensor and sensor informatics developments that can be translated into the human realm.

The aim of this studentship is to pilot the creation of this platform through the development and application of cutting-edge deep learning and data science methods. Building on our previous work [Andrew et al., VWM Workshop at IEEE ICCV, 2017], the student will develop cattle identification and localisation methodology able to uniquely track every cow in our facility from our network of video cameras, 24/7. By integrating this data stream with environmental data and feeding/production records, the student will create an online resource that can be mined to characterise animal behaviour patterns and social networks, linking them to animal health and sustainable production.

The studentship will be based in Bristol within Prof Andrew Dowsey’s Data Science group in Population Health Science, and close to the Department of Computing and co-supervisor Dr Tilo Burghardt’s group in Machine Learning. The student will also benefit from a rich collaboration with Prof Michael Lee at Rothamsted Research, who will provide expertise on sustainable food security, and Prof Mike Mendl at Bristol Veterinary School, who is expert in animal welfare and behaviour.

This studentship will start in September 2019.

How to apply:
This studentship is part of the BBSRC SWBio Doctoral Training Partnership (https://www.swbio.ac.uk/). For UK and EU students satisfying the eligibility criteria (https://www.swbio.ac.uk/programme/eligibility/), please apply directly at https://www.swbio.ac.uk/programme/projects-available/. For International students and others outside this eligibility criteria, we are keen to accept students onto the programme who are self-funded. In the first instance, please contact us if you intend to follow this path.

Candidate requirements: The studentship would suit an applicant with a strong first degree or masters in a computational discipline (e.g. mathematics, computing, electrical engineering) and competent programming skills (preferably knowledge of Python, C++ and Matlab).

Contacts: Prof Andrew Dowsey: [Email Address Removed]