Meet the team

We are a group of marine, social, and data scientists who care about the protection of biodiversity, particularly the wonderful creatures living on the seafloor of the Swedish West coast. In this project we aspire to build a resource for outreach, education, and research on marine fauna in Northern Europe.

Pricipal investigators

Matthias Obst – Dr. Matthias Obst is an Associate professor in Marine biology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. He is also co-founder of SeAnalytics, a company specialised in marine biodiversity monitoring. Matthias is especially interested in building observation systems for biological diversity in the ocean.


Victor Anton - Dr. Victor Anton is the founder and general manager of Wildlife.ai. Victor advocates and works to combine the power of citizen science and machine learning to better understand complex ecosystems.


Jannes Germishuys - Jannes is a language expert working at Combine, a Gothenburg-based IT-consultancy. Jannes has a Master degree in Data Science and developed models to identify ‘fake news’ content in Sweden and the U.S. His interest in problem-solving led him to the world of marine biodiversity. He is now one of the lead Data Scientists in the Ocean Data Factory.

Research team and expert panel

Emil Burman - Emil Burman is an aspiring marine biologist with a great passion for the sea, underwater photography, and scuba diving, especially the seas around the Nordic countries. He has a Master in Marine Sciences from Gothenburg University, as well as experience in running various other citizen science projects.


Cecilia Edbom Blomstrand - Cecilia is a marine biologist at the Geological Survey of Sweden. She has experience in collection and analysis of underwater videos and images. Her primary focus has been on the Baltic Sea. She has a master’s degree in Aquatic Ecology and preferably spends time on or under the surface.


Kennet Lundin - Dr. Kennet Lundin is Associate professor and senior curator for marine invertebrates at the Gothenburg Natural History Museum. He is also really passionate about all small sluggy creatures crawling over the seabed.


Thomas Dahlgren - Dr. Thomas Dahlgren is a deep sea biologist with special interest in dead whales and everything feeding on them. He has been working for many years with biological monitoring for the oil and gas industry, and for deep-sea mining.


Björn Källström - Dr. Björn Källström is director of the Gothenburg Marine Biological Laboratory. His speciality is getting young people excited about marine biology, and he runs many citizen science projects every summer on the Swedish West coast.

Social science experts

Marisa Ponti is Assistant Professor at the Department of Applied IT, University of Gothenburg, and PI in the OptimHum project, funded by Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation – MMW 2018-0036.

Yixin Zhang holds a PhD degree in information systems from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include social media, online communities, human computer interaction, digital activism, and green consumption.

Alexander Semenov is an incoming research assistant professor at the ISE department, University of Florida. Alexander graduated from the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland with a doctorate in computer science. Alexander's research interests include network science, analysis of large datasets, efficient algorithms, optimization and machine learning.

Students

Xhoni Dalipi is pursuing a master's degree in the field of marine biology at the University of Gothenburg. His thesis project focuses upon utilising video technology and machine learning to explore the connection between biodiversity and small-scale fisheries. His thesis is part of the CoolBlue project which develops community ocean farms.

Christian Nilsson is a marine science master’s student who is fascinated by pretty much everything that lives underwater. He also has a great passion for sharing the wonders of marine life with the public and has done so both as a guide in nature as well as in public aquariums. His master’s thesis will be set on studying how the depth range of different species in Koster have changed over the past three decades.

Joel Hjärne Kokk is a Bachelor student in marine biology. Joels thesis will be on testing the accuracy of the object detections models and applying these to the study of temporal changes in biological communities in the National park.

Sarah Alkhateeb - Sarah Alkhateeb is an MSc student in the Applied Data Science program at the University of Gothenburg. She has a BSc in Mathematics and a passion for machine learning, inferential statistics, computer vision, and tracking. Some of her projects are on Automated Subsea Pipeline Inspection using YOLOv3 with MMT SWEDEN AB and Object detection for Intelligent Video Surveillance using YOLOv4 (school project).

Phong Trang is a Master's student in Information technology and learning at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has a Bachelor degree in language teaching and has been researching in learning science and technology for 5 years. He is designing and prototyping a chatbot for the Koster Project as a part of his Master's thesis.

Organizations

The Koster Seafloor laboratory is a collaborative project between Wildlife.ai, SeAnalytics and the University of Gothenburg. This project would not have been possible without the support from the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration, the Ocean Data Factory, the Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure, and the Center for Sea and Society.