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In
an award ceremony held at Sun Microsystem's annual JavaOne
Worldwide Developer Conference, Jason Holmberg accepted a
Duke's Choice Award on behalf of the ECOCEAN Whale Shark
Photo-identification Library team (Brad Norman, Jason
Holmberg, Zaven Arzoumanian). The award was presented to
ECOCEAN by Scott McNealy (CEO,Sun Microsystems) and James
Gosling (creator of Java) for "extreme innovation in
the world of Java technology." Each year, the awards are "granted to the best and most innovative
projects using the Java platform," and this year's
cadre of Java-based initiatives was no exception. From the
ScanEagle Unmanned Air Vehicle from Boeing to the patient
management systems of GE and the City of
Sao
Paulo
,
the award recipients represented an array of cutting-edge
projects using the Java platform. Past winners of the
award include NASA (for Mars rover software), Orbitz,
Avis, and eBay, among others.
In
this year's Enterprise Backend Category, ECOCEAN won an
award for its Whale Shark Photo-identification Library.
The Library is a visual database of whale shark encounters
and of individually catalogued whale sharks (see Sagren
Vol1.4, Dec 2003). Java technology allows the Library (a
web-based application) to collect, protect, and share
whale shark data with a global audience of
conservationists and scientists. In addition, Java drives
the pattern recognition system built into the Library,
which compares and matches natural whale shark spot
patterns scanned in from photographs across the 1000+
encounters stored in the Library. This new system of
tagging, combining photography and pattern recognition
software, has made over 150 photographic matches in the
Library and has matched individual sharks from photographs
taken up to 11 years apart (and counting).
You can read more about the ECOCEAN Whale Shark Photo-identification
Library at: http://www.whaleshark.org
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