Mapping the Ocean Floor

Project Summary

William Willis (Mechanical Engineering, Physics) and Qitong Gao (Masters Mechanical Engineering) spent ten weeks with the goal of mapping the ocean floor autonomously with high resolution and high efficiency. Their efforts were part of a team taking part in the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, and they made extensive use of simulation software built from Bellhop, an open-source program distributed by HLS Research.

Themes and Categories
Energy & Environment
Data+
Year
2017
Contact
Paul Bendich
Mathematics
bendich@math.duke.edu

Project Results: The team adapted Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) methodology to produce high-resolution images. They also built a Convolutional Neural Network that classified, with high accuracy, different features on the ocean floor.

Partially funded by the Duke Marine Lab

Click here for the Executive Summary

Faculty Leads:

Martin Brooke

Douglas Nowacek

Tyler Bletsch

Project Manager: Vaishakhi Mayya

 

  • "We made a lot of progress that would not have happened otherwise." — Martin Brooke, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Pratt School of Engineering

Related People

Related Projects

American Predatory Lending (Year 3)

This team is part of an ongoing project dedicated to exploring how states and local communities responded to the causes of the 2007-09 Global Financial Crisis. Led by faculty from the Global Financial Markets Center at Duke Law the Data+ team  will conduct analysis of multiple states mortgage enforcement databases to gain a better understanding of how state regulators were, or were not, enforcing existing state law pertaining to mortgages leading up to the crisis. Our website has an example of what this will look like, as last year we analyzed North Carolina’s mortgage enforcement actions and displayed them by topic.

Project Lead: Lee Reiners

Project Manager: Malcolm Smith Fraser

Racial Disproportionality and Disparities in the Child Welfare System: Child Protective Services and Foster Care

Nationally there is a disproportionate number of children of color (African American & Latino) in the child welfare system. Durham County is no different. However, reviewing this problem through the lens of data has not been done to formulate or implement possible solutions. Durham County Department of Social Services Child & Family Services would like to evaluate systems to identify where and how disproportionality and disparity are occurring. It is occurring at the entry point of Reporting child abuse and neglect? Is it occurring at the case decision? Is our reunification time different for African American children? Or Does it take longer for a child of color to achieve permanence through adoption? Organizing the data to show us our “hot spots” would facilitate further discussion and focus on solutions to an age-old systemic problem.

Faculty Lead: Greg Herschlag

Project Lead: Jovetta L Whitfield

Agile Waveform Design in the Presence of Opposition: Quantifying Performance

Student teams will develop a benchmark dataset and explore its efficacy in an in house competition where they will put new innovative techniques such as machine learning to the test through a series of challenges.  A team of students will develop benchmark data pertaining to network performance in the presence of intentional and non-intentional degradation, ranging from sensor failure and additive noise to adversarial interference.  The students will analyze the baseline performance of the network, and measure performance of the degraded network with and without the inclusion of robust techniques that shore up robustness.  Students will have the opportunity to present findings to scientists & engineers from the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Faculty leads: Robert Calderbank, Vahid Tarokh, Ali Pezeshki

Client leads: Dr. Lauren Huie, Dr. Elizabeth Bentley, Dr. Zola Donovan, Dr. Ashley Prater-Bennette, Dr. Erin Trip

Project Manger: Suya Wu

See all Research