Shir Bar

Hi! I’m Shir, I’m a PhD candidate at Tel Aviv University’s School of Zoology, co-advised by Prof. Roi Holzman (Zoology) and Prof. Shai Avidan (Electrical Engineering). I’m intereseted in how we can use recent advances from the field of computer vision to advance ecological research.

I’ve been mostly focusing on animal behavior data (video, landmark-based kinematics, accelerometery), asking how we can find behaviors of interest, which in most cases are not commonly observed. For example, I worked on detecting larval fish feeding behavior in aquaculture rearing pools. Since the tiny fish are freely behaving in a large body of water, one can’t predict when or how often these feeding events will occur in videos.

Currently, I’m trying to build a single system to assess morphological landmarks of interest across the morphological diversity of reef fishes

When I’m not geeking about animals or computers, I go snorkelling, hang out at the pottery studio, or bake (a lot).