aerial view of Western's campus at night, with golden lights surrounded by dark trees

WWU alum Neal Digre and Team Limelight claim top honors in $10 million XPRIZE: Rainforest

Digre, a computer science and linguistics major, built the machine-learning module that decoded the nighttime sounds of the rainforest

by John Thompson

WWU Communications

WWU alumnus Neal Digre steadies the Limelight platform in preparation for it to be taken by drone to the top of the rainforest canopy outside Singapore in the semifinals of the XPRIZE: Rainforest competition.

Neal Digre, ‘16, was part of a 52-person team that won the $10 million XPRIZE: Rainforest competition, a global competition to develop innovative ways of surveying biodiversity in hopes of preserving some of the world’s most important ecosystems: rainforests. 

The organizers of the XPRIZE hope that if the world knows the true value of the Amazon, people will work harder to preserve it instead of rapidly destroying it. Key to valuing the rainforest’s rare ecosystem is fully understanding its biodiversity.  

Digre, who completed WWU bachelor’s degrees in both computer science and linguistics, brought his specialized expertise in natural language processing to the winning team, Team Limelight.  

Digre built a computer model that could analyze the sounds of birds, insects and other rainforest critters and discern the individual calls, cries, hoots, and chirps to identify the species emitting those noises. 

His experience with both languages and machine learning was a perfect match for the task — what are the chirping of crickets or the calls of birds but their own languages?    

The sounds were collected in the team’s namesake technology, the Limelight, a remote-sensing platform delivered by drone to the top of the jungle canopy, where it used lights to attract and listen in on birds, insects and tree-dwelling animals. 

Of the total of $10 million in prize money from the contest, the winning team gets $5 million to split among its members.  

But the five-year competition was never about the money for Digre, he explained, especially when they began working on it years ago without any idea they would make a single cent. 

When asked about the possibility of winning just before the finals began last summer, Digre said, “I kind of feel like we’ve already won, because of the connections we have made, and the exposure that the contest has given to the plight of the rainforest. In the end, this is about what I could do to help the planet—and it is easy to feel good about that.”