Yu Shiu, Ph.D.

Dr. Yu Shiu
Yu Shiu

I am a Research Associate at the  K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics. I apply machine learning and statistics in order to decode information about wildlife, mainly whales and elephants, from years of acoustic data. Through the processing of endless sound, we are able to understand when animals vocalize (sound detection), what species it is (sound classification), where they vocalize (sound localization) and what sounds they make (call characterization). The goal of doing all these quantitative exercises, with a clear scientific question, experimental design, and behavioral information, is to understand how animals communicate as well as monitor their presence and population. I’m also looking for new generations of sensors so that we can collect a comprehensive dataset of everything about wildlife.

Year Hired: 2012

Contact Information
Cornell Lab of Ornithology, room # 147
159 Sapsucker Woods Road, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA.
Phone: +1.607.254.2193
Email: ys587@cornell.edu

Degree(s):

Ph.D., University of Southern California, 2008;

M.S., University of California, Los Angeles, 2002

Recent Publications

Li, P. et al. (2023) ‘Learning Stage-wise GANs for Whistle Extraction in Time-Frequency Spectrograms’, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, pp. 1–13. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/TMM.2023.3251109.
Shiu, Y. et al. (2020) ‘Deep neural networks for automated detection of marine mammal species’, Scientific Report, 10(607). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-57549-y.
Root-Gutteridge, H. et al. (2018) ‘A lifetime of changing calls: North Atlantic right whales, Eubalaena glacialis, refine call production as they age’, Animal Behaviour, 137, pp. 21–34.
Madhusudhana, S. et al. (2021) ‘Improve automatic detection of animal call sequences with temporal context’, Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 18(180), p. 20210297. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2021.0297.
Guerra, M. et al. (2016) ‘High-resolution analysis of seismic air gun impulses and their reverberant field as contributors to an acoustic environment’, in N.A. Popper and A. Hawkins (eds) The Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life II. New York, NY: Springer New York, pp. 371–379. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2981-8_44.
Charif, R.A. et al. (2019) ‘Phenological changes in North Atlantic right whale habitat use in Massachusetts Bay’, Global Change Biology, 26, pp. 734–745. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14867.
Odom, K.J. et al. (2021) ‘Comparative bioacoustics: a roadmap for quantifying and comparing animal sounds across diverse taxa’, Biological Reviews [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12695.
Keen, S.C. et al. (2017) ‘Automated detection of low-frequency rumbles of forest elephants: A critical tool for their conservation’, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 141. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4979476.
Wrege, P.H. et al. (2017) ‘Acoustic monitoring for conservation in tropical forests:examples from forest elephants’, Methods in Ecology and Evolution [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.12730.