a human researcher would the program can also track multiple animals simultaneouslyanother key feature of labgym is its species flexibility ye said while it was designed using drosophila it is not restricted to any one speciesthats actually rare he said its written for biologists so they can adapt it to the species and the behaviour they want to study without needing any programming skills or highpowered computingafter hearing a presentation about the programs early development um pharmacologist carrie ferrario offered to help ye and his team test and refine the program in the rodent model system she works withferrario an associate professor of pharmacology and adjunct associate professor of psychology studies the neural mechanisms that contribute to addiction and obesity using rats as a model system to complete the necessary observation of druginduced behaviours in the animals she and her lab members have had to rely largely on handscoring which is subjective and extremely timeconsumingive been trying to solve this problem since graduate school and the technology just wasnt there in terms of artificial intelligence deep learning and computation ferrario said this program solved an existing problem for me but it also has really broad utility i see the potential for it to be useful in almost limitless conditions to analyze animal behaviourthe team next plans to further refine the program to improve its performance under even more complex conditions such as observing animals in nature