Computer Vision News - July 2022

BEST OF CVPR 17 Kakani Katija Kakani, can you tell us about theMonterey Center? The MBARI, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, is a research institute that focuses on developing technologies as well as methods for studying proxies or animals in the deep sea, originally founded by David Packard in the late 80s, maybe late 90’s. It's about 250 people, ranging from engineers to scientists to marine operations people and communication. MBARI is located in Moss Landing, California, which is between Monterey and Santa Cruz. Our sister institution is the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which I think more people have heard about or know about. You’re not originally from Monterey. Can you tell us where you come from? I’m originally born in Hawaii, raised in Portland, Oregon, and then went off to undergrad at the University of Washington, Graduate School at Caltech, and then post- doc in New England, and then back in California for my current position. Let’s start by you changing fields. Yes, I have changed fields. My previous field was aerospace engineering. It wasn’t until graduate school that I realized that there were plenty of opportunities to develop technology to study biology, particularly biology in its natural environment. I got pulled into the ocean, literally and figuratively. Now I’ve been a member of the ocean sciences community for almost a decade, maybe a little bit more. We use imaging in novel ways to understand biological systems. So that’s essentially the transition that I’ve gone through. What do you want to discover in this new field? All sorts of things! For me, my particular interest is in bio-inspired design. The idea is that if we can study animals, we can study them very well, and we can perhaps back out the kind of mechanisms that animals use to survive. Those mechanisms could potentially be used for other technologies that we probably haven’t even dreamed up yet. What I focus on is trying to develop technologies that allow us to ask those kinds of questions of animals in their natural environment, and particularly in difficult access places like the deep sea. Does this include understanding photography in the sea or it’s a completely different thing? No, it’s part of that as well. Underwater imaging is so different from terrestrial imaging. The conditions are very different. There are a lot of things to learn from that process. Maybe I should introduce you to Derya Akkaynak. She does great work in this area. Oh, I know Derya! MBARI