David Fouhey, New York University - For the Birds

On New York University Week: Bird wings aren’t just made for flying.

David Fouhey, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, examines another benefit.

David Fouhey is an Assistant Professor at NYU, jointly appointed between Computer Science in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Tandon School of Engineering. From 2019 to 2023, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. Before that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. He received a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Fouhey works on learning-based computer vision, with a particular focus on systems that reliably estimate physical properties and dynamics from images. This has led to three interrelated interests:

– Measurements for the Sciences: Developing computer vision sensors and capabilities for other scientific disciplines through long-term collaborations, including work on NASA solar physics missions like SDO and MUSE.
– 3D from Pictures: Building systems that reconstruct 3D models from multiple images
– Interaction: Developing systems that understand human-object interactions, including hand detection and reconstruction for interactive applications.

For the Birds

We’ve long known that bird wings are marvels of flight engineering, but our new research reveals they’re also sophisticated cooling systems.

For centuries, scientists have observed that animals in warmer climates have longer limbs, but there are still a lot of missing details about the precise cause, and where it applies.

To answer this and other questions, we developed “Skelevision,” an AI vision system that automatically identifies and measures bird bones from museum specimens.

We use a deep neural network to detect individual bones in specimen images, identify their type, and create precise digital outlines of each one. Along with specially designed hardware, we’re able to create a system that’s both extremely accurate and reliable.

Before this technology, researchers were limited to studying small sample sizes. The laborious process required manually handling fragile bones and measuring each element with calipers, taking 15 to 30 minutes per specimen. Our integrated system reduces this to about one minute each, allowing us to analyze wing-bone measurements from 1,520 species across 80 families from every continent except Antarctica.

What we discovered was remarkable. Brian Weeks from the University of Michigan, who co-led this research with me, found that wing bones play a unique role in thermoregulation. When birds fly, these bones become crucial for dissipating the enormous heat generated by flight muscles. The pattern we found — longer wing bones in warmer climates — is driven primarily by the need for efficient cooling rather than heat conservation.

This changes how we think about bird wing evolution. Even traits as critical as wings, which we’ve traditionally studied only for flight mechanics, are being shaped by thermoregulation demands. This has important implications for understanding how birds might respond to climate change as temperatures continue to rise.

By collecting skeletal measurements on this unprecedented scale, we can now answer big questions about how species evolve and interact with their environments.

David Fouhey, New York University – For the Birds

For the Birds