Dr. Michael Towsey has held research positions at QUT since 1997. He uses machine learning methods to solve biological problems. These have ranged from the sublime (analysis of bird song) to the ridiculous (analysis of milk yield in cow herds) with some bioinformatics in between. Michael is currently in the Bioacoustics Research Group within the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at QUT. He works on the ‘big data’ problems associated with long duration recordings of the environment, in particular, building recognizers for species of interest, extracting acoustic indices to aid navigation and visualisation.