I have together with a research group here in Sweden built an acoustically operated touch screen, used for visualizing the echolocation of dolphins. Dolphins and all other whales with teeth can use echolocation, a way of "seeing" with sound instead of with their eyes. Humans have developed systems that use echolocation too, but we usually call it SONAR (Sound Navigation and Ranging). A type of sound that is useful in echolocation is ultrasound, i.e. a high pitch sound above our hearing range. You can find it on boats, but also in ultrasound machines for human diagnostics. Toothed whales, however, have in many respects a much more advanced echolocation system than humans ever has managed to build. That is part of why it is so interesting to study these animals. It is not far fetched to think that we have something to learn from millions of years of fine tuning of their echolocation though evolution.

The measurement system that I have been part of developing is called ELVIS (ver. 2). (The first version was developed as a result of a couple of Master's Thesis projects here at the department of Measurement technology and Industrial Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Lund University in the south of Sweden.) The development of ELVIS (ver. 2) was the focus of my lecture today. I teach a class of 30 students in Computerized Measurement Systems.

Here is one of the slides that I showed them.

I know it looks pretty much like a ball of tangly yarn, but most of the cables are not even in this picture. Still, it is doing its job. All the cables are used for connecting 47 hydrophones to a computer. Hydrophones are microphones for underwater use. (The black dots on the next picture.)

That photo was taken during a field trip were we studied the echolocation beam of free-swimming dolphins housed in a big natural pen, big as a couple of soccer fields, on Roatán, Honduras. Yes, I can imagine worse filed sites. :-) Especially considering that some of the dolphins would follow us out on dives by the coral reeves in between measurement sessions. The water was comfy 26 degrees.

I told you that I have the best job on the planet! However, these pictures are not representative as the most common days of my working life. In fact, I find other parts of my job even more tempting. In contrast to what some people probably would dismiss as a bit boring, I find it GREAT to sit inside and work on a computer program or do some signal analysis on the data we collected. To harvest the fruits of your hard work preparing for field trips and traveling with bulky luggage. I admit that it is nice to take out these photos during cold and snowy days like today. (I had to get out of bed at 5 o'clock this morning in order to make sure I had time to shovel snow and dig out the car before the lecture started at 8:15 this morning.) But still, my very best days are the ones spent trying to figure out what is going on in the data and what the dolphins are actually doing with their sounds.