In the spotlight: Marjaneh Taghavi, researcher at ABG
‘In the spotlight’ is an interview series in which we ask one of the employees at ABG to share about his/her/their work activities. The interviewee then gets to decide who should be the next person to be interviewed.
Last time, Pascal Duenk shared a bit about his background and his work for ABG. This time we asked Marjaneh Taghavi, researcher at ABG, about her work and research activities. (And her hobbies, of course.)
Hello Marjaneh, could you perhaps introduce yourself and share a
bit about the work you do for ABG?
My name is Marjaneh and I come from a city named Mashhad (a city famous for Saffron) nestled in the northeast of Iran. My journey into the world of technology began there, where I pursued my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in electrical engineering, specialising in Digital Signal Processing. In 2016 I moved to the Netherlands to start my PhD. This was an important step for me, not only was it a chance to expand my academic horizons, but also an opportunity to blend my engineering background with a new, impactful domain: medical imaging. During my PhD, I focused on combining diverse sources of information to build predictive models, aiming to make healthcare diagnostics more accurate and efficient. Today, I work at ABG, where my passion for innovation meets real-world challenges.
My role involves developing and implementing cutting-edge deep learning algorithms to analyse different sources of tracking positioning data and video footage. Specifically, I work on detecting and tracking livestock, like dairy cows, pigs, and broilers, and implementing deep learning models to detect body landmarks of livestock from RGB images, enabling accurate pose estimation and locomotion status monitoring. It’s fascinating how much we can learn about animal individual and group behaviours by leveraging these advanced technologies.
How and when did you start at ABG? And where did you work before you came to Wageningen University & Research (WUR)?
I started my work at ABG in 2021, when the NLAS project kicked off. My very first project focused on analysing the video footage of dairy cows to automatically analyse the animals’ locomotion. Before I started at ABG, I was doing a PhD at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in the beautiful city of Amsterdam.
I'm curious, what sparked your interest in genetics and/or animal breeding? Or animal sciences in general?
I was intrigued by the challenge of using computer vision and AI to study livestock behaviour and welfare; the NLAS project was a unique chance to apply my expertise in image processing in a domain I hadn’t explored before.
Here at ABG, my passion for innovation meets real-world challenges
What motivates/drives you in your work? What is it about your work that gives you energy?
My colleagues are the main motivation when we are working on multidisciplinary projects. It’s amazing how open and collaborative they are. I enjoy our progress meetings and brainstorming sessions which always give me new insights, both personally and professionally. And, of course, the coding part of the day is always a good bonus!
Can you share some information about a project that you are currently working on? Something that you're proud of?
Welfare and health are among the cornerstones of sustainable husbandry. New technologies, such as tracking and image processing, offer opportunities for continuous and non-invasive monitoring of individual animals. We have used these technologies to develop a data architecture that enables continuous and non-invasive monitoring of individual animals in group housing. Our tools extract valuable insights from raw position and video footage data, with a focus on locomotion and behaviour. This process ensures data quality and transforms video footage into actionable information. In this project I collaborate with a lot of different people, from software developers to animal health and welfare behaviour experts.
On a more personal note, what are your hobbies? How do you like to spend your free time?
I like sport in general; every day I try to do some activity in the gym in the group classes or go to the swimming pool. I also enjoy cooking, and I recently started watching Dutch shows on the television to improve my Dutch language skills.
Final question, who would you like to nominate for the next interview in this series?
Coralia Manzanilla-Pech, researcher at ABG.