Thejasvi Ravindra Beleyur from the Animal Communication and Urban Ecology group at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence gives a talk "Active sensing groups - an exciting field 'screaming' for interdisciplinary synergy"

Speaker: Thejasvi Ravindra Beleyur, Animal Communication and Urban Ecology, Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence

Title: Active sensing groups - an exciting field 'screaming' for interdisciplinary synergy

Abstract:

When active-sensing animals like echolocating bats come together in groups they undergo severe deterioration in what they can detect. Each individual effectively jams its own neighbours through loud calls, all while trying to listen for faint returning echoes. Despite the extremely limited sensory information individuals can access, we know echolocating bats can cope from a sensorimotor perspective. Most species live or aggregate in groups of hundreds to millions at least once a year. While bats seem unfazed by complex audio scenes with many similar overlapping sounds, the same cannot be said for most experimentalists handling such data. Methodologically, echolocation in general remains centred around the individual, relying on clean audio data for acoustic tracking and acoustic gaze inference - which limit the insights we can achieve in group behaviour. I will present the multi-sensor Ushichka dataset, consisting of multi-channel audio, video and LiDAR data of free-flying bats in a cave. I will showcase some of the methods developed by my collaborators and I such as thermal-LiDAR alignment in featureless scenes, all-round sound radiation models for acoustic gaze inference, along with my (not very successful) attempts at localising sources in complex audio. I hope to demonstrate that the study of active-sensing groups is enabled only by the synergetic interaction of biology, acoustics, computer vision, applied math - and look forward to hearing your ideas and thoughts.