Tshering Dema

Collaborative Exploration and Sensemaking of Big Environmental Sound Data

Many ecologists are using acoustic monitoring to study animals and the health of ecosystems. Technological advances mean acoustic recording of nature can now be done at a relatively low cost, with minimal disturbance, and over long periods of time. Vast amounts of data are gathered yielding environmental soundscapes which requires new forms of visualization and interpretation of the data. Recently a novel visualization technique has been designed that represents soundscapes using dense visual summaries of acoustic patterns. However, little is known about how this visualization tool can be employed to make sense of soundscapes. Understanding how the technique can be best used and developed requires collaboration between interface, algorithm designers and ecologists. We empirically investigated the practices and needs of ecologists using acoustic monitoring technologies. In particular, we investigated the use of the soundscape visualization tool by teams of ecologists researching endangered species detection, species behaviour, and monitoring of ecological areas using long duration audio recordings. Our findings highlight the opportunities and challenges that ecologists face in making sense of large acoustic datasets through patterns of acoustic events. We reveal the characteristic processes for collaboratively generating situated accounts of natural places from soundscapes using visualization. We also discuss the biases inherent in the approach. Big data from nature has different characteristics from social and informational data sources that comprise much of the World Wide Web. We conclude with design implications for visual interfaces to facilitate collaborative exploration and discovery through soundscapes.

The Ambient Birdhouse: An IoT Device to Discover Birds and Engage with Nature

We introduce the Ambient Birdhouse, a novel IoT design for the home that seeks to encourage awareness and discovery of birds outside. People increasingly have routines and technologies that disconnect them from nature. Moreover birds are hard to come to know, seen but not heard, heard but not seen, or simply around when we are not. The Ambient Birdhouse aims to reconcile these positions, by using local bird media to leverage peoples playfulness and curiosity, calmly sustain interest over time and ultimately to garner interest and engagement in nature and conservation projects. We trialled the Ambient Birdhouse with five families. Key findings are that the playful nature of the Birdhouse has an immediate grasp on children, and through them on the rest of the family. Children were prompt to learn bird calls, and invented and played games that involved the Birdhouse. Learning strategies emerged spontaneously from family routines and arrangements, with each family creating different moments and spaces for learning.

Design participation lab

How would you describe your lab to visitors? At the Design Participation Lab, our projects have a humanitarian or environmental focus. We work with Indigenous communities, older people, children with autism, and people with intellectual disabilities, seeking to understand how they appropriate technologies and how we might co-design desirable technologies. We value pluralism, seeking to make technologies that reflect the rich diversity and idiosyncrasies of people and the ways in which they wish to interact. Recently we have extended our work to exploring interaction between people and nature. Working with ecologists, eco-acoustics researchers, communities, and government organizations, we aim toward new kinds of socio-enviro-technical systems that make it easier, more interesting, and more fun to monitor and understand species.

An Investigation into Acoustic Analysis Methods for Endangered Species Monitoring: A Case of Monitoring the Critically Endangered White-Bellied Heron in Bhutan

Passive acoustic recording has great potential for monitoring soniferous endangered and cryptic species. However, this approach requires analysis of long duration environmental acoustic recordings that span months or years. There is a variety of approaches to analysing acoustic data. However, it is unclear which approaches are best suited for monitoring of endangered species in the wild. Specifically, this study is undertaking acoustic monitoring of the critically endangered White-bellied Heron (Ardea insignis) in Bhutan. Four different acoustic analysis methods are investigated in terms of their detection accuracy, involvement of human experts, and overall utility to ecologists for target species monitoring work. Our experimental results show that human pattern detection using a visualization technique has detection performance on par with a cluster-based recogniser, while a machine learning classifier implemented using the same acoustic features suffers from very low precision. Further, specific cases of false positives and false negatives by the different methods are investigated and discussed in terms of their overall utility for ecological monitoring. Based on our experimental results, we demonstrate how an integrated semi-automated approach of human visual pattern analysis with a recogniser is a robust system for acoustic monitoring of target species.

The Ambient Birdhouse: Bringing Birds Inside to Learn About Birds Outside

We demonstrate a technology to explore the problem of the disconnect between people and nature, the Ambient Birdhouse. Although people are surrounded by flora and fauna, nature is often hidden and difficult to learn about. Birds are active outside when many people are indoors, seen but not heard, or heard but not seen. So, can technologies play a role in reconnecting us to and through nature? This project researches how to learn about local birds in a non-intrusive, fun calm and engaging manner. The Ambient Birdhouse sits inside the house and plays media of local birds - sometimes giving clues about them. Bird houses are connected. You can share bird media from your phone of your own sightings, challenging a neighbour to identify them. Known calls are interspersed with environmental sound to foster listening and developing an ear for local birds. The Ambient Birdhouse follows principles of ambient interaction. It poses the design research challenge of how to engage people in a gentle, social way over time to build awareness of nature, bringing it back into our lives.

Challenges in Designing Visual Analytics for Environmental Acoustic Monitoring

The sounds of animals leave remarkable traces of information about their habitat. Ecologists use environmental sound as a proxy to monitor the environment. This has led to the collection of massive sound archives, posing a big data problem of how to investigate it all. Visualization can transform aural information into visual representations summarizing huge datasets, revealing patterns, trends, and relationships in the data. New techniques in interactive visual analysis will enable ecologists to explore and mine for insights about animals and the environment. We envision a synergistic design cycle of discovery and refinement between the user and the system. However, this gives rise to a unique set of design challenges in crafting interactive visual analytic techniques that can cater for large, highly contextual and complex environmental acoustics. This paper presents the key characteristics of big environmental sound data and identifies challenges in designing visual analytics for ecological investigations.

Visual Analytics of Eco-Acoustic Recordings: The Use of Acoustic Indices to Visualise 24-Hour Recordings

Audio recording is a convenient and important method for large-scale terrestrial environmental monitoring. However, it is impossible to listen and make sense of all the data collected. Attempts to generalise automated analysis tasks have not been successful due to the unconstrained nature of long-term environmental recording. Our approach to this big-data challenge is to facilitate visualisation of long-term audio recording, to keep ecologists in the loop. The content of long-duration audio recordings are visualised by calculating acoustic indices. Our interface facilitates the customised visualisation and navigation of long-term audio recording by ecologists. Two case studies, one in Australia and one in Bhutan, are presented as examples.