The Wire Communications Laboratory (WCL) was established in 1970 in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering  (http://www.ee.upatras.gr/en/index.php) of the University of Patras. It currently has a staff of more than 50 researchers, support personnel, and PhD students. The WCL is active in three main areas with organised R&D teams: Artificial Intelligence Group (AIG), Telecommunications, and Audio & Acoustics Technology.

AIG (http://www.wcl.ece.upatras.gr/ai) has a proven expertise on sound acquisition, signal processing and machine learning technologies, which constitute the base-ground for automated bioacoustics surveillance in open-air environments. Moreover, the AIG has a proven research record in the area of Artificial Intelligence, and specifically on topics such as: Search Methods, Problem Solving, Rule Based Systems, Knowledge Representation, Logic Programming, Machine Learning, Intelligent Human-Machine Interaction, Automata Theory, Acoustic Biodiversity Monitoring, Sound Event Recognition, etc. This know-how would be of great importance for the development of autonomous technology for biodiversity monitoring, intelligent information filtering, and management of atypical, emergency or crisis events. Finally, the AIG has a proven research record on automatic identification of species and detectiona of pests from their sound emissions.