We were pleased to have attended and supported the 2025 meeting of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) Working Group on Fisheries Acoustics, Science and Technology (WGFAST). This year’s meeting took place in April and was hosted by Iceland’s Marine and Freshwater Research Institute at its headquarters in Hafnarfjörður.
The meeting featured three main sessions focused on the acoustic characterization of marine organisms, emerging technologies, and acoustic methods to characterize populations, ecosystems, habitat, and behavior.
Two of our staff delivered presentations, including Senior Software Developer, Joel Brand, who delivered a talk, “Looks Easy, Sound's Hard: Challenges for Image Segmentation on Acoustic Data". Joel discussed the feasibility and value of building machine learning models that can generalize more broadly in the hydroacoustic domain in response to an increasing number of models being trained in the context of specific institutions and survey conditions.
He highlighted important considerations in achieving this outcome, including the complexity of ground-truth labeling, differing institutional data processing approaches, and the challenge of measuring model impact with expert oversight in place.
Our Training Manager and Hydroacoustics Specialist, Toby Jarvis, also delivered an update from the WGFAST terminology subgroup in his role as the current liaison between ICES and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Briony Hutton (Chief Scientist) and Rowland Washington (Sales Manager) also enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with and support our partners, colleagues and friends.
To find out more about WGFAST outputs and activities, visit here.
