Co-op Student Project with VENUS
VENUS hosted a second year Electrical Engineering Co-op student Kris Dolberg this past term (January – April, 2011) to work on a number of multimedia data projects. The first project Kris worked on was to compile an extensive volume of archived VENUS hydrophone data for one of our principal researchers, Dr. Svein Vagle of the Institute of Ocean Sciences. The VENUS hydrophone arrays are capable of generating high data volumes, with typical data rates of between 6 and 20 MB per minute. At this rate, 3 months of data represent about a Terabyte (TB) of data. Kris wrote web-service scripts to extract raw hydrophone files from the DMAS archive and organize them into structured directories, filling a 2TB drive for Svein to analyze.
The second Kris worked on was to collect and organize photos and videos from our Webcam, presently deployed in the Strait of Georgia (SoG) at the Central Node site. Kris established a regular schedule when he would log onto the Webcam and collect a series of images and videos. The video signals were streamed through a “Live Video” link on the VENUS website. Kris also wrote a Matlab program to produce an HTML catalogue of the image/video files for users to browse, linked with a plot showing the phase of the tide when the images were collected. The final multimedia project Kris worked on was to develop some Python code to utilize web-service links as a means of loading hydrophone MP3 files directly from the data archive into the www.venus.Orchive.net audio analysis tool being developed by Steve Ness and Dr. George Tzanetakis of UVic’s Computing Science Department. These were all challenging projects. We’d like to thank Kris for his help and wish him the very best as he moves on in his Co-op education.
