Echospace

Echospace

Applied Physics Lab & eScience Institute

University of Washington

Ocean Acoustics + Data Science

We are a diverse group of researchers whose work centers around extracting knowledge from large volumes of ocean acoustic data, which contain rich information about animals ranging from zooplankton, fish, to marine mammals. Integrating physics-based models and data-driven methods, our current work focuses on mining water column sonar data and spans a broad spectrum from developing computational methods, building open source software and cloud applications, to joint analysis of acoustic observations and ocean environmental variables. A parallel but closely related focus of our research involves using echolocating bats and toothed whales as biological model systemss for adaptive and distributed ocean sensing.

Research areas:

  • Acoustical oceanography
  • Machine learning in ocean acoustics
  • Fisheries acoustics
  • Animal echolocation / bioacoustics
  • Data systems and workflows
  • Data science in oceanography

What we value

Code of Conduct & What we value

We review and discuss the code of conduct and what we value as a group regularly, as reminder and inspiration for ourselves.

Recent news!

All news»

[05/19/2023] Aditya presented his ongoing research on the effects of subsampling for passive acoustic monitoring of bats at UW’s 26th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium.

[12/16/2022] Aditya has been awarded the Mary Gates Research Scholarship for his research on passive acoustic monitoring of bats in the Union Bay Natural Area!

[08/15/2022] Many of us in Echospace and alumnus Derya are hosting the OceanHackWeek 2022 Northwest satellite this week!

[07/01/2022] We welcome Dr. YeonJoon Cheong to join Echospace as a postdoc scholar!

[05/27/2022] We have released a new, major version of echopype, 0.6.0. There are significant breaking changes, but also significant improvements in convention adherence, consistency across sensors, and dataset documentation.

[05/23/2022] Wu-Jung will be giving the keynote lecture on “Understanding Echoes” in the ASA Denver meeting.

[05/20/2022] Aditya gave a talk on using machine learning to monitor bats in UW’s 25th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium.

Meet the Team

Principal Investigators

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Wu-Jung Lee

Senior Oceanographer

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Valentina Staneva

Senior Data Scientist

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Emilio Mayorga

Senior Oceanographer

Researchers

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Don Setiawan

Research Software Engineer

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Aditya Krishna

Undergraduate Research Assistant

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Caesar Tuguinay

Research Assistant

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Dingrui Lei

Research Software Engineer Intern

Alumni

Brandon Reyes

Now: HPC specialist at CU Boulder

Derya Gumustel

Now: Instructor Associate at General Assembly

Kavin Nguyen

Now: Operations Automation Engineer, SpaceX

Josie Sachen

Recent Posts

Hello from Dingrui Lei, GSoC contributor of Echoshader!

Echospace hosted a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) contributor to jump start echoshader, a new package for interactive visualization of echosounder data.

Projects

Machine learning in fisheries acoustics

Accelerating information extraction from fisheries acoustic data through a cloud-based machine learning workflow.

Scalable, cloud-native processing of water column sonar data

Accelerating ocean exploration through cloud-native processing of active ocean sonar data.

EchoPro workflow modernization

Modernizing the EchoPro workflow for integrating acoustic and biological survey samples for biomass estimation.

HakeIGP: Hake biological data integration

Systematic integration of biological data for Pacific hake from scientific surveys and commercial fisheries.

ADCP-equipped underwater glider as a distributed biological sensing tool

Enabling distributed, persistent observation of mid-trophic zooplankton and fish using autonomous underwater gliders equipped with acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs).

Pattern discovery from long-term echosounder time series

Developing algorithms to discover prominent spatio-temporal patterns of animal movement and grouping behavior observed in sonar echoes using data from the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI).

Modeling target search by echolocating toothed whales

Modeling the echolocation-based target search behavior of toothed whales as an information-seeking process.

Recent & Upcoming Talks

Investigation of duty cycles in passive acoustic bat monitoring

Investigation of duty cycles in passive acoustic bat monitoring

Understanding echoes

Keynote Lecture at the 2022 Denver Acoustical Society of America meeting.

Updates from Echopype developers: changes and roadmap

This presentation was also given at the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Water Column Sonar Data Archive 2022 Workshop on March 29, 2022.

Software

Echopype

A Python package that enhances the interoperability and scalability in ocean sonar processing.

Echo Statistics

Matlab code to reproduce all figures in an in-depth tutorial on echo statistics.

Recent Publications

Beluga whale (Delphinapterus leucas) acoustic foraging behavior and applications for long term monitoring

Compact representation of temporal processes in echosounder time series via matrix decomposition

We developd a data-driven methodology based on matrix decomposition to build compact representation of long-term echosounder time series using intrinsic features in the data.
Compact representation of temporal processes in echosounder time series via matrix decomposition

Echo statistics associated with discrete scatterers: A tutorial on physics-based methods

From basic foundational concepts to advanced topics in modeling the statistics of echoes from discrete scatterers, inspired by sonar observation of marine organisms.
Echo statistics associated with discrete scatterers: A tutorial on physics-based methods

Macroscopic observations of diel fish movements around a shallow water artificial reef using a mid-frequency horizontal-looking sonar

Mid-frequency sonar provides a first-of-the-kind macroscopic observation of the nightly foraging runs of fish inhabiting a shallow-water artificial reef in northern Gulf of Mexico.
Macroscopic observations of diel fish movements around a shallow water artificial reef using a mid-frequency horizontal-looking sonar

Contact

  • echospace@uw.edu
  • 1013 NE 40th St, Seattle, WA 98105
  • Henderson Hall, University of Washington