We are excited to announce the AI and Marine Mammal workshop at the SMM Conference in Perth, Australia, from 08:30 to 17:30 on Sunday, November 10: https://www.smmconference.org/workshops/#1718154442496-c6dbac38-4a6f 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 Guy W. Oliver, Ph.D. Research Associate Institute of Marine Sciences Long Marine Lab, UCSC Santa Cruz, CA 95064 831-458-4121 831-345-9495 cell oliver@ucsc.edu Keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was. Molly Ivins