Derya Akkaynak
Engineer & Oceanographer
Visual journalist and filmmaker Erik Olsen wrote a story about the Sea-thru algorithm for the December 2019 issue of the Scientific American, and produced with it a 4-minute video of how the method works in action. Unexpected to either of us, this video was watched by 2.2M people in just five days, rose to #8 trending on Youtube, sat on the front page of Reddit.com/r/videos for days, generated a massive discussion on online forums and an avalanche of emails from all around the world. I sincerely thank everyone who has taken the time to reach out; your support provides inspiration and empowerment not only to me, but to many young and aspiring scientists who have a dream.
Note: a color chart is not required for Sea-thru to work.
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Sea-thru is protected by a registered patent owned by Carmel Ltd the Economic Co. of the Haifa University and its subsidiary SeaErra.
Any use of this technology or other material presented here is prohibited without a prior written approval by the owners.
For more information, please contact Carmel@univ.haifa.ac.il.
How does the camouflage of octopus and cuttlefish appear to their prey and predators? We went on an expedition with Dr. Roger Hanlon to Lembeh Strait, Indonesia, to figure that out. Story in Hakai Magazine, by Erik Olsen.
I am incredibly honored to have been selected as a finalist for the Blavatnik Regional Awards in physical sciences and engineering.
At the 2016 International Marine Conservation Congress (IMCC), I told the story of why I gave up a well-paying consulting job to become an oceanographer.
MITEdx's User Innovation course features the story of divers4oceans, a citizen science project I started to collect temperature data from scuba divers, in their peer-to-peer diffusion chapter.
In 2011, during a scientific diving expedition to my hometown Urla (Turkey), my dive buddy Dr. Justine Allen and I filmed an incredible fight between two male cuttlefish over a female.
The Sea-thru method can recover colors in underwater images without any input about optical water type, but we can boost that correction using satellite data. Here's a short article by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) about our work.
With Dr. Roger Hanlon, we took a diver carried hyperspectral camera to Raja Ampat, Indonesia, to image camouflaged octopus and cuttlefish. Erik Olsen turned our trip into this short film.
Here's the story of how a manta ray feeding frenzy inspired the divers4oceans project.
This beautiful infographic shows some of the variation we see in the shape of bird eggs, based on a 2017 paper with Dr. Cassie Stoddard.
