CSP - International Animal Biosonar Satellite Meeting
Abstract
The International Animal Biosonar Satellite Meeting is a one-day meeting, scheduled for July15, 2018, held immediately prior to the International Congress of Neuroethology (ICN), whichthis year will be held in Brisbane, Australia. The host organisation is The International Societyfor Neuroethology (ISN - www.neuroethology.org), an academic society comprised of scientistswhose research focuses on understanding neural mechanisms underlying species-specificbehaviors. Bat biosonar has long been one of the core model systems for neuroethology, and, infact, this role was initiated by earlier ONR and AFOSR support. Past ICN meetings haveincluded echolocation symposia, but these were focused on aspects of bat echolocation.Scientists studying echolocation in marine mammals have historically not attended ICN, in partbecause invasive neurophysiological research cannot be performed on these animals, and inmany respects the bat and the marine mammal communities have remained somewhat separate.The most recent prior international conference on animal biosonar that included considerablerepresentation from both the bat and marine mammal community took place in Kyoto, Japan in2009. That meeting was a watershed because for the first time, comparable experimentation hadbeen done on both animal groups, and the results were compared explicitly. Since then,methodological, experimental, and theoretical progress has outstripped its dissemination acrossthe field of echolocation research, as well as neuroethology more generally. Particularlyimportant has been the evolution of non-invasive techniques for neurophysiological recordingdone in the context of behavioral testing. This is a major focus of current ONR-supportedbiosonar research, and it is desirable to find out about progress being achieved by other groups.The Brisbane Animal Biosonar satellite meeting will assess new acoustic, behavioral,neurophysiological, and computational results so that both ONR researchers and otherparticipants can integrate this new knowledge into their own particular research programs.Echolocating bats and marine mammals achieve high-resolution imaging with light-weight,low-power biological sonar systems that can serve to inspire advanced Navy sonar designs.Because different species may employ somewhat different strategies to solve the basic problemof detection in clutter, and because invasive mechanistic research is not possible in marinemammals, research on both bats and marine mammals are of extreme importance forunderstanding animal biosonar and for building new artificial sonar devices that can overcomethe current deficiencies in man-made technology. Current underwater sonar systems are veryrigid in their implementations and are not robust to environmental changes for which they havenot been extensively trained. A comprehensive, bio-inspired, neurobiologically-based approachthat incorporates active sonar sensing and specifically addresses environmental challenges facedby echolocating animals offers the possibility of greatly improved performance over currentundersea warfare platforms. This is a two-way street, too: The newest findings from the ONRinvestigators have been driven by considerations brought up in the course of attempting to modelaspects of echolocation performance. These are not likely to have been implemented in moregeneric auditory modelling, because details of computations needed for sonar imaging do notresemble what is usually taken to be auditory computation. This meeting will provide theimportant opportunity for researchers to share empirical and modelling efforts and to discussnew approaches, which will lead to key advances in sonar imaging.An overarching goal of this satellite meeting is to bring together scientists from both the batand the marine mammal communities to address the goal of developing a comprehensiveapproach to biosonar. At the meeting, scientists from both research communities will evaluate new methods, new findings, and new concep
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Sep 04, 2018
- Source ID
- N629091812135
Entities
People
- Stuart Parsons
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- Queensland University of Technology
- United States Navy