Archive of posts from 2021

  • Acoustic Species at NeurIPS 2021

    Posted on Dec 21, 2021

    featured image On Tuesday December 14th, 2021 Jacob Ayers and Mugen Blue of the Automated Acoustic Species Identification team attended the NeurIPS 2021 workshop dedicated to “Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning”. During this workshop they talked with various members of the machine learning community about their paper: “Reducing the Barriers of Acquiring Ground-truth from Biodiversity Rich Audio Datasets Using Intelligent Sampling Techniques”. The paper tackled the challenges the team faced when p...

  • 2021 Fall Info Session

    Posted on Sep 23, 2021

    featured image Are you interested in scientific exploration? Do you want to take your technical skills and apply them to real-world problems? UCSD’s Engineers for Exploration is a unique opportunity to apply engineering skills and technologies to solving scientific problems in areas like behavioral ecology, Maya archaeology, and physical oceanography. Engineers for Exploration is a one of a kind program that develops intelligent systems that aid research in conservation, cultural heritage, and exploration....

  • Pacifico Aquaculture Deployment

    Posted on Sep 21, 2021

    featured image Pacifico Aquaculture, Ensenada, Mexico | pacificoaquaculture.com On August 26th, 2021, Peter Tueller, Ronan Wallace, and Patrick Paxson deployed a prototype of the FishSense platform at Pacifico Aquaculture sustainable fish farm off the coast of Ensenada, Mexico. During this trip, the FishSense team deployed the fish detection device in a real world environment, where the device was able to be tested fully through a user lens, allowing the tea...

  • Scripps Coastal Reserve Deployment

    Posted on Sep 15, 2021

    featured image The Scripps Coastal Reserve is part of California’s delicate coastal ecosystem lost to construction and property development. Despite the size, the reserve is home to about a hundred different bird species like the endangered California gnatcatcher (P. californica), whose homestead in the coastal sage scrub is being upended throughout the state. Thus, as humans step in, we must monitor these critical species to ensure their survival. ...

  • Acoustic Species at ICML 2021

    Posted on Aug 9, 2021

    featured image On Friday July 23rd, 2021 two members of the Automated Acoustic Species Identification team, Jacob Ayers and Yaman Jandali, attended the ICML 2021 conference workshop on tackling climate change with machine learning after having had their paper “Challenges in Applying Audio Classification Models to Datasets Containing Crucial Biodiversity Information” accepted. Their paper details the potential of the field of passive acoustic monitoring in measuring biodiversity loss that results from clim...

  • FishSense Prototype Testing

    Posted on Aug 4, 2021

    featured image Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography | aquarium.ucsd.edu On July 22nd, 2021, Peter Tueller, Maddie Bland, and Ronan Wallace deployed a prototype of the FishSense platform in the Giant Kelp Forest Exhibit at Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UC San Diego. The prototype, which uses the Intel RealSense D455 camera to capture RGBD images of fish for length and biomass measurements, had only been tested in an ...

  • 2021 Summer Research Students

    Posted on Jul 19, 2021

    featured image This summer, we are hosting 23 students from around the US in our 2021 summer research program, both at UC San Diego and remotely. We’ll be working on projects from mapping Maya ruins with LiDaR and mangroves with drone imagery to measuring fish with underwater cameras. Meet our students by reading their bios below: Student Researchers Chris Maldonado is a first year transfer student from Allan Hancock College to UC Santa Barbara who is studying electrical engineering. This s...

  • Measuring Bird Presence in the Peruvian Amazon Using Neural Network Predictions

    Posted on Apr 29, 2021

    featured image On April 13th, 2021, the Acoustic Species Identification project lead Jacob Ayers posted a dataset containing the predictions from a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) trained to estimate the probability of bird presence (global scores) across close to 100,000 audio clips from the Peruvian Amazon. The dataset also contained information about the Audiomoth audio recording devices such as latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates and when each audio clip was created. The Acoustic Species Identificat...

  • Radio Telemetry Tracking Paper

    Posted on Apr 7, 2021

    featured image We are excited to announce the latest publication for the Radio Telemetry Tracking project. We’ve detailed the development, testing, deployment, and analysis of the Radio Telemetry Tracking platform and compared it to the performance of other platforms in the context of a field expedition. This provides context for the significant impact drones can have on radio telemetry tracking work, particularly on smaller animals. Read the published paper at https://doi.org/10.1002/rob.22017

  • Spring 2021 Projects

    Posted on Mar 22, 2021

    featured image Are you bored out of your mind at home? Do you want to get involved in meaningful projects? Make an impact on scientific research? Check out our Spring 2021 projects! We are looking for students who want to build projects to do underwater mapping, VR archaeology visualization, animal behavior recognition, and much more! Learn more about our projects at https://e4e.ucsd.edu. Applications for Spring 2021 will close on Friday, April 9. Apply at https://e4e.ucsd.edu/join We will also be hostin...

  • 2021 HDSI Undergraduate Scholarship Recipients

    Posted on Jan 28, 2021

    featured image Two students of the Engineers for Exploration research group, Ameya Singh and Katie Miyamoto, were awarded with the Halicioglu Data Science Institute Undergraduate Scholarship for the purpose of supporting their educational and research activities. In collaboration with the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research, the goal of the Aye-Aye Sleep Monitoring project is to determine variations in the sleeping patterns of the Daubentonia madagascariensis species through the analysis of vi...

  • 2021 NCWIT Award Finalist

    Posted on Jan 6, 2021

    featured image Congratulations to Nicole Meister for becoming a finalist for the NCWIT Collegiate Award! This award honors the outstanding technical accomplishments of collegiate women, genderqueer, and non-binary individuals at all levels. Conferred annually, the Award recognizes individuals for their technical contributions to innovative projects that demonstrate a high level of creativity and potential impact. Nicole’s project is Bringing Technology to Conservation Groups by Creating Accessible Mangrove...

  • Winter 2021 Projects

    Posted on Jan 4, 2021

    featured image We are excited to start 2021 with a slew of active projects, continuing to explore and do research during the pandemic. This quarter, we are looking for students to join projects ranging from creating 3D graphics visualizations of Mayan ruins to using machine learning to recognize animals from both images and their calls. See our active recruitments here! Maya VR Structure M7-1 in El Zotz, Guatemala visualized using Unreal Engine Tradition...