Videos from JuliaCon are now available online
2018
Previous editions: 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014
Rob Blackwell

British Antarctic Survey



EchoJulia – a new approach to scientific echosounder data analysis

Fisheries surveys are typically conducted using echosounders on research ships to estimate animal abundance and biomass. New unmanned, marine autonomous vehicles and underwater gliders are being used to increase spatial and temporal sampling, but existing acoustic processing software is inadequate for embedded, autonomous applications. EchoJulia is a new, open source software library being developed at the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, UK as part of a PhD studentship. We found that the Julia programming language has enabled the same code to be used for embedded systems prototypes, desktop interfaces, and batch-mode, big data processing. Rob will talk about his field work in the Southern Ocean, his decision to use Julia for acoustic data processing, as well as the resulting applications in acoustic noise removal and Antarctic krill swarm detection.

Speaker's bio

After a long career in the computer software industry, Rob Blackwell is now a PhD candidate at the British Antarctic Survey learning about Scientific Computing and Data Science applied to fisheries acoustics. It’s really just an excuse to hack Julia code.