Former Tulane engineering professor Dale Joachim, now at MIT, had to start over after Hurricane Katrina. But it was a chance for him to get back to nature.
Lori Valigra
When Dale Joachim heard that some bird species had left New Orleans shortly before Hurricane Katrina hit in late August 2005, he became intrigued. Perhaps the birds had been able to sense the impending storm.
Joachim could have used such a warning system himself. In 2005, he was an assistant professor in electrical engineering and computer science at Tulane University. He and his family escaped just in time, but he had to look for a new job. The upheaval turned out to be an opportunity to reevaluate his life and career and move his research into a new and more meaningful direction: applying technology to wildlife conservation. Now, as a visiting professor in MIT’s Media Lab, he’s using cell phone technology and sensors to locate and count owls in the forests of Connecticut and Maine.
“After Katrina, I wanted to focus on something that contributes to a larger picture,” says Joachim. “As humans, we’re losing track of our connections with nature.”
MIT’s Dale Joachim uses cell phone technology and distributed sensors to locate and count owls in the wild. (Credit: Donna Coveney, MIT)
Evacuation
A few days before Katrina’s landfall in New Orleans, Joachim was on a cruise in the Gulf of Mexico. He could see the tip of the hurricane over Florida. He and his wife scrambled to evacuate their family the day before the storm hit. “There was no time to think about my lab at the university,” he says. “We packed the car with six people and drove to Canada, where we have relatives.”
The family spent the first night in a shelter in Meridian, Miss., an experience Joachim says he doesn’t want to relive.
When he returned to New Orleans two weeks later, he found his house in good condition, but looted. Tulane was shut and his students had dispersed; he didn’t know where they were until one student contacted him a month after the storm. All were well and most ultimately ended up at other universities, including MIT. His former department at Tulane was shut down this June.
Joachim returned to his alma mater, Michigan State University, where he earned his master’s and PhD degrees in electrical engineering. Being back at a place that he describes as his “comfort zone,” he took stock of his life and career.
New direction
As a child, Joachim had traveled the world with his teacher parents, at one time living in Africa, where he felt a strong bond with nature and animals. But over the years working in academia and industry as an engineer, he lost touch with nature.
Joachim decided to build on his work at Tulane in speech processing and distributed sensors by applying it to biology. Conservation biology relies on accurate population surveys, but counting animals in the wild can be both difficult and tedious. To do bird surveys, researchers either sit in the forest and listen for bird sounds or play prerecorded birdcalls and count the number of responses. Joachim has developed technology to automate that process.
He’s devised a network of cell phones that, when scattered throughout a forest, can broadcast owl calls and record the birds’ responses. Joachim can control the scheduled recording and broadcasting events via the Internet using voice-over-Internet Protocol technology, the same technology that enables Internet telephone calls. He tested his devices in the woods of Connecticut last winter and in Maine this past spring on the Barred Owl and the Eastern Screech Owl.
The cell phone network can also help alleviate the disruption caused by playing owl sounds. Some researchers are concerned that using playbacks at one location can affect owls further down the survey route and skew the survey results. Joachim’s technology allows owl sounds to be broadcast simultaneously from multiple points for long periods of time. Joachim says the technology could be used for other species.
Joachim has been in Boston for about a year and is still getting used to a different culture. “New Orleans is a very social environment,” he says. “People talk to each other more.”
And he’s already thinking about his future after his MIT appointment ends in May. He’ll decide whether to start a company to commercialize environmental technology or become a faculty member.