I develop and apply machine learning techniques, informed by (mostly marine) ecological questions and engineering constraints, to facilitate observing systems that address long-standing scientific questions with societal relevance. I am an AI+ Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London working on diverse problems, from decision making for autonomus systems to making population estimates based on in situ visual data.

News

• 2026-06-05 The application for the 5th CV4Ecology Short Course is now open! Join us in January 2027 at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institue to learn how to accelerate the processing of your ecological visual data.
• 2026-04-10 I am speaking at the KCL Department of Informatics Industry Showcase during London Tech Week. Come by an hear about all the cool research happening at King’s (plus some fun underwater stuff).
• 2026-03-04 Check out the Smithsonian’s write up of the 2026 CV4Ecology Short Course.
• 2026-02-27 Our team had a great showing at the 2026 Ocean Science Meeting in Glasgow! Alex presented an e-Lightening poster on the BRAIN and Jonathan gave a talk about the machine learning work happening in SORTED.
• 2025-07-24 Our paper on using out-of-the-box foundation models to assist annotators of marine imagery is out in Frontiers.
• 2025-06-30 Welcome to Polina, our summer intern through the IGNITE DLA program! Polina will collect plankton samples from NOC’s pontoon, develop a computer vision model to classify the images, and examine population changes.
• 2025-06-02 The application for the 2026 CV4Ecology workshop is now live!
• 2025-05-24 Jonathan gave an introduction to our work in the ML for Ocean Modelling workshop at the University of Reading.
• 2025-06-27 Alex and Jonathan’s work with the NERC funded API4AI project resulted in a white paper on making UK enviromental data AI-ready.
• 2025-05-07 Applications are now open for the 2026 Computer Vision for Ecology Short Course. This year we are be hosting the three week class at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Insitute in the lovely Blue Ridge Mountains.
• 2025-03-28 Our paper Machine Learning Techniques to Characterize Functional Traits of Plankton from Image Data was one of Limnology and Oceanography’s most read articles in 2024. We were recongized by an invitation to present at ASLO’s Spotlight Session at Aquatic Sciences.
• 2025-01-04 I am co-leading the Workshop on Computer Vision Methods for Ecology workshop at the Caltech Resnick Sustainability Institute.
• 2024-06-18 We presented early results from the FathomNet2024 competition at the 11th Workshop on Fine-Grained Visual Categorization at CVPR.
• 2024-04-05 Our paper on tracking-by-detection methods to enable target acquisition and following on underwater vehicles is out in Frontiers.
• 2024-01-17 Our paper on digital holotyping resulting from Schmidt Ocean’s Designing the Future Two cruise was published in Science Advances.
• 2024-01-15 PAIDIVER, our project developing software to support estimating biodiversity metrics from image data, has been funded by the NERC AIAB program!
• 2023-12-16 Dani Ocampo presented our workshop paper on VLM failure modes on images of organisms at the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better Workshop at NeurIPS 2023.
• 2023-12-15 I was an invited panelist at the Computational Sustainability workshop at NeurIPS 2023.