Ben Pritikin

My name is Ben Pritikin and I’m a third-year at UCSC majoring in Earth and Planetary Sciences with a concentration in Oceans. I have been going to the beach and playing in the water for as long as I can remember. I’m always eager to learn more about the ocean. The sea does so much for us; I want to learn more about what I can do for it.

This summer I’ll be interning at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science center. I’ll be working with Dr. Hein who studies how organisms acquire, share, process, and respond to information using experiments, mathematics, and computational models to understand the rules organisms use to make decisions, and how these decisions influence the rates of ecological interactions and the dynamics of ecosystems. It is not yet set in stone what exactly I’ll be working on but I’d like to do more modeling, both physical ocean modeling and on fish behavior.

Currently, I want to go to graduate school to continue studying something in the ocean or coastal side of the Earth sciences. I’m between going into academia to work at a university to do research and teach, or working at a federal agency like NOAA or the USGS to do research. I want to accomplish something meaningful through science and contribute to the world which is why I want a research career.

This summer I hope to accomplish a few things. I want to expand upon and put more hours of practice into technical skills like programming, but I also want the chance to learn about what work in the Earth sciences is really like. If I am going to pursue a career in the Earth sciences, I would like to know what I’m getting myself into. I’ve gotten a little taste from the work I’ve done so far and it has been great, but I know there is so much more to research and industry that I’ve not yet tried and I look forward to learning more about the practical applications of my courses.

What have you learned so far in your internship? (week 3 update)

I’ve had a blast working with Dr. Hein at NOAA! Before I started this internship, I knew very little about machine learning and how it can be applied to the marine sciences. Since starting the internship I’ve been reading lots of papers and talking with Dr. Hein and the other folks in the lab about what they’re working on and I have learned a ton!

One of the things I’ve learned about machine learning is that it requires a lot of data, so I have learned how to use the VIA image annotator. I have been preparing data to train the machine by looking at images of reef fish from Thailand and tracing polygons around the fish and identifying their species. The goal is that with the data the machine will learn to track and identify fish on its own.

It is a very difficult problem. A lot of the images are pretty complicated. The fish are either partially obscured, overlap, or the background is complicated. It’s easy for a computer to identify people walking down the street but fish in a reef is much trickier. It is a very unideal situation for the computer; even I struggle to find the fish sometimes. I get the benefit of being able to watch the video that the still images came from so I can see the fish move and figure out where they are; however, the machine is only using the still images. I look forward to seeing how the machine performs.

From what I understand machine learning and AI is pretty uncommon in the Earth and marine sciences, so its cool learning about a field that is so cutting-edge.

How will attending AGU advance your academic and career goals?

AGU this fall will be my first time attending an event like this so I am excited for the new experiences and exposure. I plan on going to graduate school so events like these are something I’ll need to get more used to.

Aside from going to New Orleans for the first time, the thing I look forward to the most is the opportunity to network and meet new people. This will be the first large event I have attended since lockdown began so I’m excited to make connections and meet new people again. It will be interesting to see what advancements and cool new research is being done in the Earth sciences. I look forward walking around AGU to see what everyone is working on.

I am also excited for the opportunity to share what I’ve learned during my internship at NOAA. I think it will be fun sharing my poster in fall, but I am a little nervous if I’m being honest. I have not had to do much public speaking or presenting, especially in the last year, and I usually get nervous when I have to present so going to AGU this fall is a good chance for me to get some much-needed practice.

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