Stephen Marsland
Professor of Mathematics & Data Science, Victoria University of Wellington
Stephen Marsland is a Professor of Mathematics and Data Science at Victoria University of Wellington, where he leads the AviaNZ research group. AviaNZ is part research project, and part open-source software, combining acoustics, mathematics, and conservation biology for the monitoring of New Zealand species. Stephen grew up in the UK, and moved to New Zealand in 2004 following postdoc jobs in the US and Europe. As well as AviaNZ, his research interests are in the theory and application of geometry, including machine learning.
AviaNZ: Analysing bioacoustic data
In this talk I will give an overview of the AviaNZ research project, which combines mathematics, ecology, signal processing, and machine learning with the aim of allowing people to analyse bioacoustic recordings. Our ultimate aim is to facilitate the estimation of population abundance for a species from automatic recordings. I will describe a few of the challenges that are inherent in this aim, and some of the ways that we are approaching them, including showing examples from recordings from various places (and of diverse species) from around New Zealand that have been processed in our open-source software, also called AviaNZ, and which is available from www.avianz.net.