After finishing his undergraduate degree last spring at UCSD, Riley Yeakle has joined the Kastner group as its newest graduate student. As an undergraduate, Riley found the Engineers for Exploration group and dived into the world of remote imaging. As a student leader in Engineers for Exploration, Riley led development on the Intelligent Camera Trap, a robotic wildlife videographer, and the Tiger Tracker, a behavior monitoring system for the tigers at the San Diego Zoo. Riley even spent a summer in the District with the National Geographic Society working on the CritterCam, a camera collar for animals used to study animal behavior from a first person perspective in the wild. Work on these projects strongly influenced Riley’s research interests in machine learning, ecological sensor networks, and embedded computer vision.

A true Californian, Riley rock climbs, hikes, surfs, and plays Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu outside of school. In the Kastner Group, Riley is continuing his trend of creating technologies for exploration by developing acoustic localization algorithms for the SIO autonomous underwater explorers.