2017/18 seminar archive
Autumn 2017
18th October: Developing Imaging Spectroscopy Technologies for Marine Environments: Monitoring and Remediation of Coastal Oceans and Coral Reef Ecosystems
Bio: Dr. Robles-Kelly received a B.Eng. degree in Electronics and Telecommunications from the Inst. Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), Mexico with high distinction in 1998. In 1999, after a year in industry, he enrolled in a PhD programme at the University of York, UK. In 2001 he received the Gibbs/Plessey Award to the best research proposal to visit an overseas research lab and, in 2003, he completed his PhD in Computer Science. He remained in York until Dec. 2004 as a Research Associate under the MathFit-EPSRC framework.
In 2005 he moved to Australia and took a research scientist appointment with National ICT Australia (NICTA) at the Canberra Laboratory. Together with this appointment, he became an adjunct academic at the Australian National University (ANU). In 2006 he became the project leader of the Imaging Spectroscopy team at NICTA. From 2007 to 2009, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Australian Research Council. In 2016, he became a Principal Researcher of the CSIRO with the Cyber Physical Research Programme at Data61. He is the president of the Australian Pattern Recognition Society (APRS), an associate editor of the Pattern Recognition Journal, the IET Computer Vision Journal and a Senior Member of the IEEE. He is also the president of the TC2 (Technical Committee on structural and syntactical pattern recognition) of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and and Adjunct Associate Professor at the ANU. He has been a technical committee member, area and general chair of several mainstream computer vision and pattern recognition conferences.
Abstract: Coastal oceans have a direct impact on the maritime security and safety as they provide buffer zones against extreme events, such as tropical storms, tides, and current systems. They also play a critical role in sustainable fisheries and aquaculture industries. I will talk about the work we are undertaking to improve, design and deploy in-situ optical sensors that can operate in extreme weather and nocturnal conditions over long periods of time. I will elaborate on how these technologies will be primarily applied to visual recognition of sea fauna and underwater structures to assess biodiversity and health of coral reefs and in-situ identification and quantification of phytoplankton, zooplankton, nutrients and sediments to validate and improve current modelling platforms. If time permits I will also elaborate on how we plan to exploit the relationship between bathymetry, geomorphology and biodiversity with optical phenomena such as fluorescence and variations in sensed irradiance to perform wide-area coral reef monitoring.