The LOBSTgER research initiative at MIT Sea Grant explores how generative AI can expand scientific storytelling by building on field-based photographic data.
The LOBSTgER research initiative at MIT Sea Grant explores how generative AI can expand scientific storytelling by building on field-based photographic data.
In the Northeastern United States, the Gulf of Maine represents one of the most biologically diverse marine ecosystems on the planet — home to whales, sharks, jellyfish, herring, plankton, and hundreds of other species. But even as this ecosystem supports rich biodiversity, it is undergoing rapid environmental change. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans, with consequences that are still unfolding.
A new research initiative developing at MIT Sea Grant, called LOBSTgER — short for Learning Oceanic Bioecological Systems Through Generative Representations — brings together artificial intelligence and underwater photography to document the ocean life left vulnerable to these changes and share them with the public in new visual ways. Co-led by underwater photographer and visiting artist at MIT Sea Grant Keith Ellenbogen and MIT mechanical engineering PhD student Andreas Mentzelopoulos, the project explores how generative AI can expand scientific storytelling by building on field-based photographic data.
Read More: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Image: Can you spot the real photo? One of these blue shark images was captured 30 nautical miles off the coast of Cape Cod; the other was generated by LOBSTgER’s diffusion models after 30,000 training epochs (an epoch refers to one complete pass of an entire training dataset through a learning algorithm). Answer at the end of this article. (Credits: AI-generated image: Keith Ellenbogen, Andreas Mentzelopoulos, and LOBSTgER. Photo: Keith Ellenbogen)
