The team is working with citizen scientists and the Orcasound project to provide several terabytes of whale call datasets, being collected by Steven Bergner, a computing science research associate at SFU's Big Data Hub. Bergner says the acoustic data will be used to'teach' the computer to recognize which call belongs to each type of cetacean. The project requires interdisciplinary expertise and brings together experts from fields such as biology, statistics and machine learning. "In the end, we are developing a system that will be a collaboration between human experts and algorithms," he says. Orcas or killer whales that are seen along the West Coast are divided into four distinct populations: the salmon-eating southern and northern residents, the transients, which prey on seals or other whales, and offshore, which mostly prey on sharks.

DiPaola's and Yalcin's extensive research on empathy in AI is also addressing issues in a variety of industries, including e-health. In a collaborative project with the national AGE-WELL initiative, a helper AI conversational bot is being developed to assist the elderly in staying independent at home. Other applications are geared to the entertainment industry. After premiering at the NeuroIPS conference, the AI Empathic Painter system will travel to Europe to be showcased in Florence in May 2020. Formerly from Stanford University, DiPaola lead SFU's Interactive Visualization Lab (iVizLab), which strives to make computational systems bend more to the human experience by incorporating biological, cognitive and behavior knowledge models.