Hacker Hall of Fame

Thank you, Orcasound App hackers!

We would like to acknowledge the tremendous contributions of time, technology, and code that have been made to our open source project. Beginning in the fall of 2018, we began participating in hackathons in Seattle and at the University of Washington. In summer, 2019, we partnered with Microsoft through their amazing hackathon community. In 2020, Orcasound became a host organization for Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

In combination with our Github repositories, these events have brought many talented programmers, designers, engineers, researchers, and “geeks for good” to the project. They have made it possible to rapidly develop and refine the Orcasound app — a new way to listen for whales — based on a cutting-edge suite of inexpensive and open source hardware and software for live streaming audio data.

Orcasound at a DemocracyLab hackathon in Seattle (photo by Mark Frischmuth).

So, let’s have a virtual round of applause for the following stand-out members of the Orcasound open source community. If you’re inspired by their contributions to our Github repositories or Democracy Lab hackathons, don’t hesitate to support the Founders and Influencers directly! Sing their praises on social media and networks; join them in hacking for orca conservation; reinforce their volunteerism financially.

Founders (long-term contributors)

Like Orcasound organizational members (who have their own amazing volunteers!), founders can raise funds under the auspices of Orcasound to support their own Orcasound efforts or the project in general. The also have shown leadership in the community and often have administrative access to key parts of the Orcasound infrastructure.

  • Paul Cretu – Orcasound site & player (2017+), GSoC mentor (2021)
  • Skander Mzali – Orcasound site (2017-2020) & admin UI (2019)
  • Brendan Thatcher – User Experience Researcher & UX Team founder (2020+), GSoC mentor (2021)
  • Valentina Staneva – Microsoft AI4Earth Innovation Grant lead (2019) with Shima Abadi; GSoC mentor and administrative lead (2020-2022); UW MS Data Science mentor (2022-23)
  • Val Veirs – Node engineering and machine learning (2017+), GSoC mentor (2020+)
  • Scott Veirs – Project management (2017+), GSoC mentor (2020+)
  • Steve Hicks – Orcanode repository (2018+), GSoC mentor (2020+)
  • Mike Castor – UI v2 implementation (2019-2020)
  • Ty Crisafulli – 2017 Kickstarter and design guidance (2017+), GSoC mentor (2021)
  • Christian Sarason – Orcamap repository (2018+)
  • Prakruti Gogia – OrcaHello project manager, Pod.Cast creator (Microsoft hackathons, 2019-2021)
  • Akash Mahajan Pod.Cast creator, OrcaHello ML developer (Microsoft, 2019-2020)
  • Praful Mathur – Experiment.com funding (2021), Quilt.com connector, GSoC mentor (2022)
  • Michelle Yang – Microsoft hackathon OrcaHello project manager (2020+)
  • Mike Cowan — Microsoft hackathon OrcaHello project, Moderation system, front end (2020+)
  • Jesse Lopez – GSoC mentor (2020-2021)
  • Liam Reese – Graphic design (2017+)

Influencers (major contributions)

Influencers can raise funds under the auspices of Orcasound to support their own Orcasound efforts or the project in general.

  • Beam Reach interns (externs during COVID)
    • Emily Vierling (2022): Humpback non-song vocalization catalogue
    • Ze Cui (2023): vessel detection and classification from side-view images
    • Lucy Day (2024): SRKW whistle catalog
  • Google Summer of Code (GSoC) participants
  • Live listening app v3 UX Design & Development team members
    • Elena Bukhonok – UX Project Team Lead (2020-21)
    • Brendan Thatcher – UX Project Team Lead (2020)
    • Catherine Zeng – UX Designer
    • Carina Cheng – UX Designer
  • Acartia.io data cooperative (sharing and analzying acoustic & visual observations)
  • Project management team (initiated 2021)
    • Firuze Gokce – Project Manager, fundraising (2022-23)
    • Heather Gordon – Project Manager (2021-2)
    • Sanjari Jain – Project Manager (2021)
    • Garima Chandra – Development Project Manager (2021)
  • PodCast ML-assisted annotation tool (2019-2020)
  • OrcaHello real-time inference system leads (2020+)
  • Darya Siadykh – UX Project Team Lead (Orcasite), Product Designer (2022+)
  • Rick Hines – UX Project Team Lead (Shipnoise), UX Designer (2021+)
  • Trey Berkeley-Hanson- UX Project Team Lead (Global Navigation), UX Designer (2023+)
  • Sara Loup – UX Project Team Lead (Notifications), UX Designer (2022+)
  • Hang Luong – UX Project Team Lead (OrcaLearn), UX Designer (2022+)
  • Christian Johnson – UX Designer (2023+)
  • Nick Mann – UX Designer (2023+)
  • Shivangi Agarwal – Product Manager (2023+)
  • Ivan Storck – Orcamap code clean-up & contribution standards (2020-21)
  • Joyce Liao – Orcanode repo & Raspberry Pi testing (2020+)
  • Adrian MacDonald – Content strategy, analytics, conservation impact (2021+)
  • Maria Palamar – Conservation impact (2020+)
  • Erin – User-centered design of 2019 UI v2 (2019)
  • Shawn Vita – Implementation of 2019 UI v2 (2019)
  • Samantha Berk – Administrative back end (2018-19)
  • Nóra Mészáros – Graphic design (2017-2020)
  • Erika Pelaez – Machine learning (2018)
  • Jennifer Rogers – Machine learning & spectrograms from FLAC files (2018+)
  • Sam St Michael – Design, branding, social media (2020-22)
  • Michelle Bocklage – UX Researcher and Designer
  • Kristen Gillaspy – UX Researcher
  • Wei Li – UX Researcher
  • James Pedersen – Full stack developer (2020)

Supporters (key one-time contributions)

  • Glenn Block – Prototype notifications (2019)
  • Amie Dabu – User research (2019)
Erika facilitating an early discussion of machine learning and the Orcadata repository.
Val working on the Orcanode software and hardware.