AI is transforming how science gets done

In the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, oceanographer Kaitlin Frasier of the University of California, San Diego, set out to assess the damage that the massive oil spill caused. "We needed to know what happened to marine mammals," she says. Specifically, Frasier was concerned with the spill's impact on dolphin populations. Trying to track the animals from the surface is expensive and time consuming, so Frasier used a different approach: deploying hydrophones to the seabed to passively record every sound in the ocean. By separating out dolphin vocalizations from the general thrum of ocean noise, Frasier hoped to detect trends in the animals' population density.