Kolkata: Young minds on tech route to check wildlife crimes

KOLKATA: Sixteen teams of students, representing various educational institutions, and professionals presented a host of online solutions aimed at curbing wildlife trafficking at a two-day event held in the city recently.
The young minds were at work during the Zoohackathon 2019 in Kolkata.
The winner was Team Pineapples with students from St Thomas College of Engineering and Technology who provided tech solution to find out changing prices of wildlife product online.

Talking to TOI, Arghojeet Christopher Gomes said that the software they developed scraps data from the forums available in the surface web to do illegal wildlife transactions. “Using the data, we’ve built a bare-bone graphical user interface to facilitate the ease with which the conservationists and foresters can access the price of certain species and their parts,” Gomes said.
Another team member, Aousnik Gupta, said anyone who wishes to extend a helping hand to these animals in the wild by understanding the trends of these illegal activities needs to just write the name of the item whose data needs to be found and press a button. “The interface then scans through the database available and displays the trends in the form two graphs — price per month and number of advertisements per month. While the first graph helps one understand the months during which prices peak and the months when demand rises, the second graph will help predict the time when there’s illegal selling of wildlife parts,” he added.
The duo said both these graphs aim to inform government officials of the time during which an animal is at extensive risk.
Among the other issues on which the teams worked to come out with tech solutions are tracking of captive elephants in India, use of blockchain technology to track supply of forest-based products and targeted scanning of media to enrich counter wildlife trade intelligence efforts.
Presented by US Consulate General in Kolkata in partnership with WWF-India, TRAFFIC-India and Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the event in Kolkata became only the third such event to be held in India ever since it was started in 2016 globally. In India, it was first hosted in New Delhi in 2017.