FathomVerse: Explore the Depths

This seminar will be presented in person only; there will be no live remote viewing available. Please join us in Bren Hall 1414. 

ABSTRACT

The deep sea is the largest habitable ecosystem on the planet and remains one of the least explored. Very little is known about deep sea inhabitants, their behavior, and the limits and drivers for their survival. Researchers estimate that anywhere between 30-60% of life in the ocean is unknown to science, and these gaps in knowledge need to be filled to inform exploitative activities like aquaculture, offshore wind, and deep-sea mining. In order to fully explore our ocean and effectively steward the life that lives there, we need to increase our capacity for biological observations; massive disparities in effort between visual data collection and annotation make it prohibitively challenging to process this information. State-of-the-art approaches in automation and machine learning cannot solve this problem alone, and we must aggressively build an integrated community of educators, taxonomists, scientists, and enthusiasts to enable effective collaboration between humans and AI. FathomVerse, a mobile game designed to inspire a new wave of ocean explorers, teaches casual gamers about ocean life while improving machine learning models and expanding annotated datasets (FathomNet). Of the three billion gamers worldwide, up to 70% say they care about the environment; FathomVerse taps into this engaged community with innovative gameplay and rich graphics that draw players into the captivating world of underwater imagery and cutting-edge ocean science. Here we will share our process of designing FathomVerse, discuss early successes from the v1 launch on May 1, 2024, and highlight some areas of future focus. In less than two weeks after v1 launch, 5k players from 90 different countries generated >2M annotations that are currently being used to generate consensus labels. Through FathomVerse, we hope to activate audiences in high school and up, providing social engagement and workforce education, with the goal of increasing public awareness and inspiring empathy for ocean life. 

BIO

Dr. Kakani Katija is a Principal Engineer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and has a PhD in Bioengineering from the California Institute of Technology. As lead of the Bioinspiration Lab, Kakani and her group investigates ways that imaging and broad community engagement can enable observations of ocean life. By developing novel imaging and illumination tools (e.g., DeepPIV, EyeRIS), automating the processing of visual data using artificial intelligence (FathomNet), building large-scale community science contributions through mobile gaming (FathomVerse), and integrating next-generation algorithms (ML-Tracking, DeepSTARia) on robotic vehicles (e.g. Mesobot, ROVs, and AUVs) to consistently and persistently observe ocean life, her group’s efforts will increase access to biology and related phenomena in the deep sea. She has received generous funding support from the Packard Foundation, National Geographic Society, NSF, NOAA, Schmidt Ocean Institute, Dalio Philanthropies, Schmidt Marine Technology Partners, and the Moore Foundation.