Supervisor

Suitable for

Abstract

Many detection tasks for acoustic sensors deployed in environmental monitoring (for example, triggering an extended recording after analysing a small sample of sound in order to capture the sound of a particular species of animal, or to detect human activity such as hunting and logging) can be readily described using functional or dataflow programming languages. Prototyping algorithms at this level is intuitive, and with the correct tools can be interactive, enabling non-specialist programmers to make rapid progress. However, to run on small embedded devices the resulting program typically needs to be converted to low-level C code. In this project, you will build a toolchain to automate this process. The resulting system will allow a functional or dataflow programming language (possibly one of your own design) to be used to prototype and evaluate acoustic algorithms. It will then automatically generate low level C code that can be compiled to run on an open-source resource-constrained acoustic sensor (www.openacousticdevices.info).

Prerequisites: Compilers and Principles of Programming Languages useful but not essential