Researchers train AI to distinguish flow
patterns created by swimmers
Date: April
5, 2018
Source:
University of Southern California
The shape of water. Can it tell us about what
drives romance? Among fish, it might. Eva Kanso, a professor of Aerospace and
Mechanical Engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering studies fluid
flows and almost like a forensic expert, Kanso, along with her team, is
studying how aquatic signals are transported through the water.
When it comes to mating, tiny crustaceans
called copepods are one of the most abundant multi-cellular organisms, says
Kanso, the Zohrab Kaprielian Fellow in Engineering.
To locate their mate, male copepods search
for and follow the hydrodynamic and chemical trail of the female. Scientists
like Kanso believe aquatic organisms transmit and read information through the
movements they make and the wakes they leave behind in the water. Harbor seals,
for example, have been shown to track the wake of a moving object, even when
the seal is blindfolded and initially acoustically-masked. Researchers believe
the flow of water encodes a pattern of information -- a type of language by which
an organism can call another to mate, use to avoid predators or even in the
case of salmon, begin upstream migration.
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