SciPy 2023

Research on animal acoustic communication is being revolutionized by deep learning. In this talk we present vak, a framework that allows researchers in this area to easily benchmark deep neural network models and apply them to their own data. We'll demonstrate how research groups are using vak through examples with TweetyNet, a model that automates annotation of birdsong by segmenting spectrograms. Then we'll show how adopting Lightning as a backend in version 1.0 has allowed us to incorporate more models and features, building on the foundation we put in place with help from the scientific Python stack.