Dear colleague,

To save you some reading time, we will go straight to the point : we are currently organizing a task on the detection of blue and fin whale species from Antarctica for the upcoming bioDCASE data challenge.

Regarding annotated datasets, this first edition will rely heavily on materials produced within the IWC-SORP Acoustic Trends Project (including the famous AcousticTrends_BlueFinLibrary [1]), represented by Brian Miller in our organization team.

As you may already know, a critical requirement of such challenges is the high-quality of annotations, and more specifically those involved in the evaluation of models. One particular aspect of annotation quality is inter-annotator variability, which has been shown to propagate through a model development workflow up to the evaluation metrics, and thus plays a critical role in data challenges.

In this context, our team is calling on the international community to participate in a multi-annotator annotation campaign with two main goals :

• producing annotated evaluation sets for the bioDCASE task that reach some sort of “international consensus”; 
• investigating at a larger scale the question of inter-annotation variability between bioacousticians including experts on large baleen whales.

Below we give you some practical information :

• we know «you don't have time» :) : but considering the potential scale of this work, even only 10 minutes per week during 3 months may provide precious data for this study !
• the annotation campaign will be set up with the web-based APLOSE tool; and all you need is a browser !
• Time period of the campaign: starting on the 1st of March and ending at the end of May.
• anybody is welcome to participate, whatever your level of experience!

Now, if you feel interested in participating please fill up this excel sheet , and do not hesitate if you need more information

Thank you for reading,

All the best,

Organization Team of the “ Supervised detection of strongly-labelled Antarctic blue and fin whale calls” in bioDCASE