Jimmy O'Hara, Penn Today
As whales face harm from ship strikes, fishing net entanglements, and redistribution of prey due to changes in ocean temperature, it’s increasingly important to track their locations and populations across the globe. To help accelerate these efforts, second-year Chinmay Govind and third-year Nihar Ballamudi dedicated their summer to a Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program (PURM) project that combines mathematics, signal processing, animal behavior, and machine learning.
Their goal: Leverage whale sound data and artificial intelligence to map the locations of whales and determine how many live in any given target area.
For this work, Govind and Ballamudi have used National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data from sound receivers north of Cape Cod Bay, though their research applies to any location.
Results from this endeavor could help the duo obtain “better data on how many whales are in an area or the distribution of whales in an area, which can inform policymakers and environmental groups on policies involving whales,” says Govind, a double major in artificial intelligence and computer engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and originally from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. “The findings of our research can extend not just to whales, but [also] other sea animals.”
PURM, offered by the Center for Undergraduate Research & Fellowships, immerses students finishing their first or second year at Penn in a 10-week summer research experience under the expert guidance of a faculty mentor.
Ballamudi and Govind are mentored by John Spiesberger, a visiting scholar in the Department of Earth & Environmental Science, along with his son, Ari Spiesberger, a recent Penn graduate with expertise in machine learning models. Both students took interest in the whale monitoring project—which is sponsored by Joseph Kroll, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and John Spiesberger’s colleague of five decades—because of its multidisciplinary, problem-solving nature, as well as the tangible impact it could have for whale conservation efforts worldwide.
“Math research isn’t really used that often outside of, you know, just math,” says Ballamudi, a mathematics major in the College of Arts & Sciences and computer science minor from Madison, Wisconsin. “It’s really cool for me to be able to work on a project that [uses math to] help influence what policy will look like if we can census whales.”