MBARI's (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute) FathomNet development team is seeking a qualified team or individual developer to help enhance the visitor experience at Monterey Bay Aquarium (MBA) and other participating aquariums. FathomVerse, a mobile game inviting animal lovers and ocean enthusiasts to contribute to labeling ocean imagery, aims to improve artificial intelligence capabilities in underwater exploration and discovery. FathomVerse is expected to launch in April 2024, and this effort, FathomVerse: Aquarium Explorer, is a follow-on extension of the game that will be made especially for aquarium visitors. Using the App, visitors will select and load an existing machine learning object detection model that runs directly on device hardware, and view object proposals on video streaming from the device’s camera. Additional capabilities may include displaying a list of animals observed during the video streaming session, and providing clickable links to existing websites (e.g., Wikipedia, WoRMS, Deep Sea Guide) for further details about the animals. We anticipate experienced teams or individual app developers will require about 400 hours to complete this project. Applicants should provide an estimate based on this number but are expected to invoice for actual hours worked.
Required qualifications:
- Demonstrable experience with building and setting up apps for the Google and Apple app stores.
At least 3 years of experience with Unity.
- Familiarity with running and deploying machine learning models on devices.
- Ability to work with other developers to design efficient solutions where system requirements fall short.
- Attention to detail in documenting code and creating user guides.
- Excellent communication skills (English; remote meetings, collaborative docs, Slack).
- Ability to follow a prescribed timeline and deliver projects on time.
- Ability to attend regular virtual meetings during Pacific Standard Time (PST) between 9AM and 5PM.
Desired qualifications:
- Experience interacting with game developers and software engineers.
- Ability to create an in-app user experience based on existing brand design guidelines.
We are looking to fill this position immediately with a start date of April 1st. We require a minimum of 20 hrs per week for the initial two months. You will work mostly independently with approximately 2 virtual meetings a week (and more as needed). The project is targeted for completion in June 2024, with potential additional time allocated for bug fixes and improvements, as needed.
This work is part of a multi-institutional, NSF-funded effort to study cryptic midwater gelatinous animal behavior and biomechanics. As part of this project, we are supporting an outreach activity with Ocean Vision AI (OVAI), which seeks to address the extraordinary challenge of scaling up our capacity to analyze underwater visual data through a globally coordinated network. One of OVAI’s platforms, FathomVerse, is a community science game that enables gameplayers to contribute directly to visual data analysis pipelines through the use of artificial intelligence. This project, FathomVerse: Aquarium Explorer, extends that capability for use by visitors at participating aquariums.