Keynote Talk 3: Dr. Yogesh Girdhar

AI-Enabled Autonomy for Monitoring Complex Marine Ecosystems

Effective observation of complex marine ecosystems such as coral reef assemblage and dynamic phytoplankton communities, remains severely constrained by limited remote-sensing penetration in water, unreliable long-range communication, and sparse prior knowledge. These limitations impede scalable, persistent measurement at the spatial and temporal resolutions required to understand ecosystem function and resilience.

This talk will outline algorithmic and robotic advances that address these barriers, including correcting underwater color distortions, observing marine animal behavior, searching for rare species, and discovering biological hotspots. I will also highlight open problems at the intersection of marine ecology and machine learning, particularly those involving self-supervised representation learning in data-scarce environments, active perception under bandwidth constraints, and autonomy for long-duration deployments.