For the past couple of years, we have been participating in the Early Research Scholars Program (ERSP). This provides first or second year undergraduates a glimpse into the life of academic research. The goal is to allow the undergraduates to begin to understand what it means to be a researcher, write papers, deal with their annoying advisors, sit in on generally boring research group meetings, and experience all of the other activities of a university research group. It is a valuable and rewarding program run by Prof. Christine Alvarado and sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The second ERSP cohort sent our group a “thank you” card of sorts. It was very much appreciated. We certainly enjoyed working with those ERSP’ers (Proud Heng, Aishika Kumar, Rene Sanchez), and we look forward to seeing them go on to do great things. Of course, we hope that they will continue to do research with us. We would be honored to continue to have them as part of our research group.

Links: Early Research Scholars Program

Our group was well represented at the Oceans conference this year. Antonella Wilby and Riley Yeakle traveled to Monterey, CA to present two papers. The first paper discussed the development of an acoustic triggering system for an underwater camera trap. Antonella was the first author along Engineer for Exploration summer students Ethan Slattery (an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz), Andrew Hostler (undergraduate at Cal Poly SLO), and Ryan. Riley presented work that details how one can use ambient acoustic ocean noise to determine the relative locations of underwater vehicles. This was joint work with Perry Naughton, Curt Schurgers, and Ryan. Of course, no visit to Monterey would be complete without a visit to the aquarium.

Links: “Design of a Low-Cost and Extensible Acoustically-Triggered Camera System for Marine Population Monitoring“, “Inter-­node Distance Estimation from Ambient Acoustic Noise in Mobile Underwater Sensor Arrays“

Another Summer is gone and Fall Quarter and the new academic year is upon us. But before classes started up and campus awakened from its summer slumber, we spent a few days in Mammoth Lakes relaxing, hiking, kayaking, climbing, eating, drinking, and giving some research talks. Some of the highlights this year included homemade group dinners every night, an “easy” (compared to last year) group hike in Yosemite, and of course the compelling research discussions. Some pictures from our expert photographers (Quentin, Mike, Lu, and Ryan) are below.