Join us for an exciting workshop on the
uses of AI in marine mammal science. Experts from various fields will discuss innovative
approaches to studying marine mammal behavior, bioacoustics, and ecology. Following each presentation, a Q&A session
will be held. This will be a hybrid
workshop, allowing both in-person and virtual participation.
Invited
speakers:
Kevin
Bierlich, a Professor at Oregon State University, has described whales'
physical condition using a combination of drone photography and computer vision.
Ted
Cheeseman, creator of Happy Whale, used crowdsourcing to assemble the
largest dataset of humpback whale fluke photographs and utilized it to document
the recovery of humpback whales in the North Pacific and the subsequent loss of
almost 7,000 whales between 2012 and 2021.
Denise
Herzing is the Director of the Wild Dolphin Project and has been studying
the behavior and ecology of spotted dolphins and bottle-nose dolphins for over
35 years.
Amanda
Hodgson, Professor at Edith Cowan University, monitors dugong and cetacean
populations with aerial surveys and computer vision.
Aiden
Lundberg created an app that censuses male, female and pup elephant seals from
drone photographs.
Brian
Miller, a researcher at the Australian Antarctic Division, analyzes
passive acoustic monitoring data using machine learning techniques.
David
Robinson created BioLingual, which pairs an animal vocalization audio
encoder with a human language text encoder allowing Zero-shot audio
classification of passive bioacoustic monitoring data.
Pratyusha
Sharma analyzed sperm whale codas with AI, allowing her to describe their
contextual and combinational structure.
Naomi
Rose, Researcher at the Animal Welfare Institute, and
Emily
Charry Tissier, CEO of Whale Seeker, have been invited to speak on ethical
issues related to AI in behavioral experiments.
Following the invited speakers'
presentations, we will break into smaller group discussions, focusing on topics
based on the expressed interests of participants. These topics might include
machine learning tools for pattern recognition, current solutions for differentiating
individual, species, and age/sex identification, and necessary data preparation
and annotation for AI analysis. If you have specific topics or questions
you would like discussed, please contact Guy Oliver at oliver@ucsc.edu. If virtual participants want to create
their own group(s) using Zoom calls, we will try to accommodate these requests.
Prior discussions with the workshop organizers will be essential to ensure the
successful implementation of this option.
We are striving to obtain full
scholarships for virtual participants, but while we have not been successful yet, we will
continue to pursue it until the start of the conference. If we are only partially successful, awards
will be prioritized to individuals in underrepresented locations.
Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions. We look forward to seeing you there.
Guy Oliver and Aiden Lundberg