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Mark Patterson is a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. He has a joint appointment between Marine and Environmental Sciences and Civil and Environmental Engineering. He directs the Field Robotics Lab (FRL) at Northeastern's Marine Science Center in Nahant, MA.
The primary focus on Mark's work is understanding marine ecosystems using new technologies. For the last decade, Mark has been developing Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), free-swimming robots that survey the seabed and water column in ways superior to previous approaches like towed bodies or lowering an instrument over the side of a ship. The FRL has used AUVs to make new discoveries such as coherent structures of lowered oxygen over coral reefs, how krill swarms in the Antarctic appear on high-frequency side-scan sonar, and how to identify fishes from their side-scan sonar images using neural network processing.
Mark is also director of the Three Seas Program at Northeastern University and is involved in the Global Resilience Institute and the Urban and Coastal Sustainability Initiative.
More information can be found here.
Autonomous sensing promises solutions to two problems vexing sustainability science in the ocean: 1) The environment often changes more quickly than we have the ability to observe these changes. 2) Emerging threats to coastal systems like coral reefs need new sensors and new methods to quickly analyze the raw data for decision support (machine learning). Many data sets collected on coral reefs suffer from under-sampling in space or time. Undersampling results in signals that are said to be ‘aliased’. Aliased data incorrectly present a high frequency fluctuation as a lower frequency fluctuation. Autonomous mobile robots can act as fast-moving taxicabs for sensors and overcome this aliasing problem. My lab has developed autonomous marine robots and diver-held measurement systems to gain rapid situational awareness for water quality and distribution of biota. I will present case studies in autonomous sensing from four continents: benthic environments in Panama, Florida, Bonaire and Iceland, and the rapidly warming western Antarctica peninsula.
Chair: Ann Marie Hulver