Wild salmon are essential to the ecological, economic, and cultural sustainability of the North Pacific Rim. Y et climate variability, habitat loss, and data limitations in remote ecosystems that lack basic infrastructure support pose significant challenges to effective fisheries management. This project explores the integration of multimodal foundation AI and expert-in-the-loop frameworks to enhance wild salmon monitoring and sustainable fisheries management in Indigenous rivers across Pacific Northwest. By leveraging video and sonar-based monitoring, we develop AI-powered tools for automated species identification, counting, and length measurement, reducing manual effort, expediting delivery of results, and improving decision-making accuracy. Expert validation and active learning frameworks ensure ecological relevance while reducing annotation burdens. To address unique technical and societal challenges, we bring together a cross-domain, interdisciplinary team of university researchers, fisheries biologists, Indigenous stewardship practitioners, government agencies, and conservation organizations. Through these collaborations, our research fosters ethical AI co-development, open data sharing, and culturally informed fisheries management.

Ultrasound is a hand-held, low-cost, non-invasive medical imaging modality which plays a vital role in diagnosing various diseases. Despite this, many rural and remote communities do not have access to ultrasound scans due to the lack of local experts trained to perform them. To address this challenge, we built a mixed reality and haptics-based tele-ultrasound system to enable an expert to precisely guide a novice remotely in carrying out an ultrasound exam. The precision and flexibility of our solution makes it more practical than existing tele-ultrasound solutions. We tested the system in Skidegate on the islands of Haida Gwaii, BC, Canada, with the experts positioned 754 km away at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. We performed 11 scans with 10 novices and 2 experts. The experts were tasked with acquiring 5 target images and measurements in the epigastric region. The novices of various backgrounds and ages were all inexperienced in mixed reality and were not required to have prior ultrasound experience. The captured images were evaluated by two radiologists who were not present for the tests. These results are discussed along with new insights into the human computer interaction in such a system. We show that human teleoperation is feasible and can achieve high performance for completing remote ultrasound procedures, even at a large distance and with completely novice followers.

Tsunamis can trigger internal gravity waves (IGWs) in the ionosphere, perturbing the Total Electron Content (TEC) - referred to as Traveling Ionospheric Disturbances (TIDs) that are detectable through the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). The GNSS are constellations of satellites providing signals from Earth orbit - Europe's Galileo, the United States' Global Positioning System (GPS), Russia's Global'naya Navigatsionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema (GLONASS) and China's BeiDou. The real-time detection of TIDs provides an approach for tsunami detection, enhancing early warning systems by providing open-ocean coverage in geographic areas not serviceable by buoy-based warning systems. Large volumes of the GNSS data is leveraged by deep learning, which effectively handles complex non-linear relationships across thousands of data streams. We describe a framework leveraging slant total electron content (sTEC) from the VARION (Variometric Approach for Real-Time Ionosphere Observation) algorithm by Gramian Angular Difference Fields (from Computer Vision) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to detect TIDs in near-real-time. Historical data from the 2010 Maule, 2011 Tohoku and the 2012 Haida-Gwaii earthquakes and tsunamis are used in model training, and the later-occurring 2015 Illapel earthquake and tsunami in Chile for out-of-sample model validation. Using the experimental framework described in the paper, we achieved a 91.7% F1 score. Source code is available at: https://github.com/vc1492a/tidd. Our work represents a new frontier in detecting tsunami-driven IGWs in open-ocean, dramatically improving the potential for natural hazards detection for coastal communities.

Text analytics based on supervised machine learning classifiers has shown great promise in a multitude of domains, but has yet to be applied to Seismology. We test various standard models (Naive Bayes, k-Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machines, and Random Forests) on a seismological corpus of 100 articles related to the topic of precursory accelerating seismicity, spanning from 1988 to 2010. This corpus was labelled in Mignan (2011) with the precursor whether explained by critical processes (i.e., cascade triggering) or by other processes (such as signature of main fault loading). We investigate rather the classification process can be automatized to help analyze larger corpora in order to better understand trends in earthquake predictability research. We find that the Naive Bayes model performs best, in agreement with the machine learning literature for the case of small datasets, with cross-validation accuracies of 86% for binary classification. For a refined multiclass classification ('non-critical process' < 'agnostic' < 'critical process assumed' < 'critical process demonstrated'), we obtain up to 78% accuracy. Prediction on a dozen of articles published since 2011 shows however a weak generalization with a F1-score of 60%, only slightly better than a random classifier, which can be explained by a change of authorship and use of different terminologies. Yet, the model shows F1-scores greater than 80% for the two multiclass extremes ('non-critical process' versus 'critical process demonstrated') while it falls to random classifier results (around 25%) for papers labelled 'agnostic' or 'critical process assumed'. Those results are encouraging in view of the small size of the corpus and of the high degree of abstraction of the labelling. Domain knowledge engineering remains essential but can be made transparent by an investigation of Naive Bayes keyword posterior probabilities.

For applied scientists--that intrepid cadre who get their hands dirty in the sometimes dangerous world beyond the ivory tower, participating in difficult decisions with little time and major consequences--getting the right answer is only half the battle. The other half is successfully explaining what they've found, and what it means. This winter's debris flows in the posh community of Montecito, California, which led to more than 20 deaths, provided examples of success and failure on both counts. And those successes and failures have ramifications far beyond managing geophysical risks. Sean W. Fleming is a geophysicist by training and author of Where the River Flows: Scientific Reflections on Earth's Waterways.