Articles from the Research Group

Why do we analyze data in 1-minute chunks?

09 Aug 2019 | Anthony Truskinger, Michael Towsey

We received an email earlier this week about why we choose one-minute sized audio chunks as our standard for analysis:

Bristlebird Adventures: Designing Technology to Support Saving Wildlife

05 Aug 2019 | Jessie Oliver

Our newest paper Listening to Save Wildlife: Lessons Learnt from Use of Acoustic Technology by a Species Recovery Team, demonstrates how technology design research can reveal new opportunities, barriers, and future needs for conservation technology. Having been presented at the Designing Interactive Systems Conference in June, we would like to share it with you, as well as bonus pictures, sweet...

2018 Ecoacoustics Congress Follow-up

23 Jul 2018 | Anthony Truskinger

Last month our lab helped organise the 2018 Ecoacoustics Congress. We had a great time at the congress, learnt a lot, and met a whole bunch of interesting people! This post will point out some of the resources from the congress that we’re making available.

Consistent Manual Bird Annotations

18 Jul 2018 | Philip Eichinski

In the past I have needed to measure the amount of bird calling activity to see how the vocalising behaviour of birds in general responds to changes in sunlight. So, how should the amount of bird calling activity be quantified? One way might be to use any number of acoustic indices that have been developed to estimate biodiversity. These indices...

Open sourcing our analysis code

30 May 2018 | Anthony Truskinger

We have wanted to open source our analysis code for some time but various complications made this a difficult prospect. We committed to open sourcing back in October last year and we are now finally ready to announce it.

Discovering the Secrets of Cryptic and Endangered Birds

21 May 2018 | Anthony Truskinger, Michael Towsey

Over the last few years we have explored the on-ground ecological outcomes of our work in a dynamic two-way relationship with Liz Znidersic (@LizZnidersic) from Charles Sturt University (@ILWSCSU). Liz is interested in secretive wetland birds and uses many methods to look for and monitor these birds, including passive acoustic recording.

A little about our platform

18 Oct 2017 | Anthony Truskinger

Recently at IBAC 2017 we got the chance to share our work with the bioacoustics community. Phil Eichinski represented our research group and will write a blog post soon about the experience.

Ecological Society of Australia Annual Conference

09 Dec 2016 | Karlina Indraswari

The 2016 Ecological Society of Australia Annual Conference was held in Fremantle, Western Australia on 28 November to 2 December 2016. The conference attracted more than 600 ecological researchers from all over Australia. It is the largest gathering of ecologists in the country. The theme of the conference has was Diversity: Pattern Process and Prospects. The conference ran six different...

The 2016 eScience Conference

11 Nov 2016 | Philip Eichinski

The 2016 IEEE international Conference on eScience attracted a wonderful assembly of researchers from around the world to Baltimore to share some very interesting work concerning ways in which computer science is being used to support and enhance traditional science.

ARC Grants Awarded

01 Nov 2016 | Paul Roe

This morning the results of the latest Australian Research Council (ARC) funding round were announced. We are very pleased to announce that the lab and our collaborators have been awarded two grants totalling $1,320,500.

QOC2016: Queensland Ornithological Conference

19 Jul 2016 | Jessie Oliver

This conference was a wonderful opportunity to connect with fellow bird nerds! The the conference kicked off with powerful talks by Richard Fuller and Judit Szabo about the global declines and monitoring efforts for shorebirds. Steve Murphy also updated us on uncovered mysteries of the night parrot and described how acoustics are critical to understanding species distribution. Mark O’Brien also...

SCBO 2016: Society for Conservation Biology Oceania Conference Brisbane 2016

18 Jul 2016 | Jessie Oliver

The Society for Conservation Biology Oceania Conference (SCBO 2016) this year, which was themed “Science meets action, water meets land”, drew people from across the Pacific region to Brisbane to network and take part in workshops, talks, and field trips from 4-10 July 2016.

Soundscape Ecology with ABC Catalyst

12 Jul 2016 | Anthony Truskinger

ABC Catalyst recently ran a feature on soundscape ecology and our lab was privileged to be a part of the story. It was a great story that aptly summarised the new field of soundscape ecology. The story was entertaining, yet simple and that makes it a great resource for our field - I showed it to my all my family...

DIS2016 Designing Interactive Systems Conference

13 Jun 2016 | Tshering Dema, Jessie Oliver

The biennial ACM SIGCHI conference, #DIS2016, Designing Interactive Systems was themed “fuse”. This theme highlights fusing boundaries in all areas and exploring design possibilities of all form. The conference was held at QUT Garden Points Campus in Brisbane. In the 3 day conference, designs of all forms were discussed, highlighting design as a process as well as design as a...

Long-duration Audio-recordings of the Environment

07 Apr 2016 | Anthony Truskinger

Our lead researcher, Michael Towsey, recently visited some ecoacoustics research labs in Europe and the USA. Michael’s slide deck evolved into a great summary of our current research. It discusses our current visualization techniques and includes content from many of our fantastic collaborators.

The 2015 ICISP Conference

16 Feb 2016 | Jie Xie

The conference ICISP was held in Trois-Rivières, Québec, Canada. The aim of ICISP 2016 is to report on the latest developments in image and signal processing, multimedia and computer graphics.

The 2015 ICICS Conference

16 Feb 2016 | Jie Xie

As a biennial event since 1997, ICICS 2015 was held in Singapore this year. The conference consists of many interesting topics in following areas such as multimedia systems, information systems, signal processing, communications, networking and related fields. The main goal of this event is to provide researchers around the world an opportunity to exchange ideas and latest research results in...

What is big-data in the world of environmental acoustic recordings?

07 Dec 2015 | Michael Towsey

The ecosounds lab is hosting more than 21 years of audio recordings of the environment. This is equivalent to about 186 000 hours of continuous audio. Total file count (at the time of writing, 07/Dec/2015) is 334 302. This seems like a lot of data. Who could ever possibly listen to that much sound? However, these figures should be put in perspective....

What do hydrophones look like?

07 Dec 2015 | Michael Towsey

A marine microphone is shown in the above image. It is made of a hard ceramic material. Most hydrophones are based on a special property (piezoelecticity) of certain ceramics that produce a small electrical current when subjected to pressure changes. When submerged in water, a ceramic hydrophone produces small-voltage signals over a wide range of frequencies as it is exposed...

Distance Sampling

07 Dec 2015 | Michael Towsey

While visiting University of Sussex recently, I was talking with conservation biologist Mika Peck http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/76093. They are interested in the use of acoustic recordings for species richness surveys which obtain information about presence/absence but not about species abundance. I made the comment that acoustic methods cannot easily deal with abundance because it is not easy to determine if a single...

The 2015 DICTA Conference

04 Dec 2015 | Xueyan Dong

I attended the 2015 International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA) conference at Town Hall, Adelaide, on 23-25 November, 2015. DICTA 2015 is the main Australian Conference on computer vision, image processing, pattern recognition, and related areas. I would say that DICTA 2015 is more international rather than domestic because the attendees are from all over the...

IEEE Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA') 2015

11 Nov 2015 | Liang Zhang

19-21 October 2015

2015 IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing

10 Nov 2015 | Xueyan Dong

Multimedia includes a combination of individual content forms including text, images, audio, and video. It has a broad range of applications in various fields comprising advertisements, art, education, engineering, medicine, business, and scientific research. Signal processing techniques focus on image/video coding and processing and speech/audio recognition. The topics of this conference this year cover techniques and applications in big media...

IEEE International Symposium on Big Data Visual Analytics 2015

12 Oct 2015 | Mangalam Sankupellay

Everyone seems to know what ‘Big Data’ is. However, very few people are aware about ‘visual analytics’. So what is visual analytics? Visual analytics is analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces.

IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2015

01 Oct 2015 | Jinglan Zhang

I attended the International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2015), in Québec city, Canada, 27-30 September 2015. Our paper that was presented at ICIP2015 was authored by Jie Xie, Michael Towsey, Jinglan Zhang, Xueyan Dong, Paul Roe. It was entitled: Application of Image Processing Techniques for Frog Call Classification.

Interfaces for Analysing Long Duration Audio

28 Sep 2015 | Mark Cottman-Fields

I’m a PhD student at Queensland University of Technology. I’m approaching the end of my degree. My final seminar was in late July, and I’m revising my thesis before I submit it for external examination. My work was in the discipline of Human-Computer Interaction. My research looked into computer interface designs for enabling bird watchers to analyse long duration audio...

Mounting the SM2

15 Sep 2015 | Yvonne Phillips

There are a variety of ways to mount the SM2 to a tree, I find that one of the most convenient ways to do this is to use small loops and wire. This has the advantage of allowing the lid to be removed without the need to remove the whole instrument from the tree to change batteries and SD cards....

Citizen Science is for the Birds

29 Aug 2015 | Jessie Oliver

Did you know that sharing your bird sightings contributes invaluably to science, and that doing so makes you a citizen scientist? For decades, bird enthusiasts across Australia and around the world have enjoyed keeping track what birds they’ve seen on excursions. Before internet and mobile devices, many naturalists, including Charles Darwin, contributed observations to museums and universities for researchers to...