The Bat(ty) Team

Dave Kilbey – Project Manager

Dave Kilbey

Project Manager Dave Kilbey works primarily at the University of Bristol where he heads up the Nature Locator project (http://naturelocator.org/).  He trained as an ecologist and is also a Wildlife Photographer, Digital Media Trainer and freelance natural history writer.  He’s always been interested in bats but due to their cryptic nature and nocturnal habits has never really got to grips with them.  This project presents a fantastic opportunity to develop a system that will lift the veil on bats and allow non-experts to readily ID them.

Dave’s knowledge of ecology will stand him in good stead for acting as a bridge between the team’s biologists and the developers/designers in order to ensure that the application works well both technically and in terms of collecting the appropriate data.

Feel free to contact Dave regarding this or other Nature Locator projects – d.kilbey@bristol.ac.uk

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Professor Kate Jones – Academic Lead

Kate Jones

Kate has recently moved from the Institute of Zoology to UCL.  One of her main research interests is the evolution of echolocation and its use in a global monitoring program. This is a dynamic and interdisciplinary new project at the interface of evolution and conservation biology.

Kate is investigating how echolocation has evolved in bats and how different call structures are adapted to their ecologies. To translate this work into a conservation and policy perspective, we have developed the use of bat ultrasonic calls as a biodiversity monitoring tool to indicate biodiversity change. In 2006 Kate’s team launched the iBats Program, which uses bats as a model system to engage citizens in science and integrates the fields of biodiversity monitoring, bat bioacoustics and computer science.

BatMobile is the evolutionary next-step of the iBats app

Simon Price – Development advisor

Simon Price is the Assistant Director of IT Services R&D/ILRT at the University of Bristol. Simon has 20 years of experience in educational software development during which time his projects at ILRT have been awarded a medal from the British Computer Society, a European Academic Software Award and, in the US, the Interactive Award. He is also currently working on the JISC data.bris Research Data Management project and has previously worked on MyMobileBristol, NatureLocator and Mobile JISC projects. He also a member of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory in the School of Engineering where he works on applications of machine learning to data integration, the Semantic Web and e-Research/e-Science.

Mike Jones – Lead developer

Mike Jones

Mike is a Senior Web Developer / Researcher based in IT Services / R&D with over ten years experience of software development.

Mike was technical lead on the MBiblio, Mobile Campus Assistant and MyMobileBristol projects and has experience in developing for mobile platforms, including native and mobile web solutions.

He holds an MSc in Computing with Distinction (Cardiff University, 2003) and has skills in software development, including Java, JavaScript, Objective-C, HTML and CSS.

Mark van Rossum – Developer

Mark van Rossum has many years of developing Web applications with the
University of Bristol and elsewhere.   Having spent the last 2 years
supporting and developing Bristol University’s e-Learning systems, Mark is
the latest member of the R&D team in ILRT.  Mark will be working with Mike
Jones on developing the mobile code to perform the analysis of the bat calls.

Dr Kate Barlow – Comms and Project Steer

Kate Barlow works for the Bat Conservation Trust where she is Head of Monitoring.

She got hooked on bats as an undergraduate while on summer expeditions to South America, and was then very fortunate to complete her PhD at Bristol University with Professor Gareth Jones, looking for ecological differences between what are now the two pipistrelle species: common and soprano.

On BatMobile Kate will be helping with the project steering and comms

Professor Julian Partridge – Project Steer

Julian is a Professor of Zoology at the University of Bristol.  He is a member of the Steering Committee and was a fundamental force in setting the Nature Locator project up.  His broad experience of the biological sciences and also of the University and its intricacies has proved to be a key factor in the success of previous projects.  He will provide vital links within and outside the University and contribute ideas towards sustainability.

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