Eric Orenstein

Eric is an AI+ Senior Fellow at King’s College London working at the intersection of computer science and ecology, enabling unique studies of rapidly fluctuating marine environments. His expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning has provided novel perspectives on marine population dynamics, how they are impacted by their environment, and how they in turn influence the rest of the ecosystem. He has studied diverse organisms, from plankton to fish; built and maintained imaging devices; worked with autonomous and remotely operated vehicles; and executed field programs as a diver, small boat operator, and scientist aboard global class vessels. He spends lots of time thinking about sampling strategies for robots and how to get AI models to recognize populations changes in distribution shifted environments.

Before arriving at KCL, Eric was a Senior Research Scientist at the UK National Oceanography Centre leading the institution’s AI Team. They worked on diverse projects from gap-filling approaches for sparse observations to building embedded GPU-accelerated hardware for the Autosub (aka Boaty McBoatface). Eric was previously a Research Engineer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California where he worked on real-time classification of image data on Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, studied marine particles in the deep ocean, and co-led the FathomNet project. He did a postdoc at the Sorbonne Université’s Villefranche Oceanographic Laboratory working to extract functional trait data from a global plankton image database. He earned his PhD at the University of California – San Diego for his work on fine-grained image classification of marine plankton.