Bioacoustics in Python with Kent English

Presentation on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. to 3:40 p.m. in Room 1180.

Certain species of bark beetle, such as the mountain pine beetle, have a devastating effect on forests across North America. They have been called “the greatest tree killers known” and their economic impact is measured in the billions. Not all bark beetles are destructive, though, and research is currently being done on using their acoustic signals to identify their species.

Python provides an excellent platform for exploring this costly ecological problem. This talk will look at:

  • how libraries such as LibROSA can be used to analyze the audio recordings;
  • how numpy, scipy and pandas can be used to extract features;
  • and how machine learning algorithms from scikit-learn can then be applied to build a classifier.

Kent English Bio

As a full-stack developer, Kent splits his time between working on back-end systems in Scala, Go and Node.js, doing data analysis in Python and R, and developing single-page applications using AngularJS, ReactJS and D3.js. In addition to coffee, his current passions include machine learning, distributed computing and data visualization.