Hello there and thank you for visiting my page! My name is Jacob Ayers and I am working with Richard Hahnloser in a joint venture with the National Centres of Competence in Research's (NCCR) Evolving Language organization run by Balthasar Bickel. I am tasked with the research and development in methodologies for measuring Shannon Information Theory based estimates of Information Load in human and animal vocalizations.

I was born and raised in Southern California and was first exposed to Engineering working for my father at his Solid State Drive (SSD) company where at the age of thirteen I had been in charge of temperature testing SSDs for B2B applications.

I chose to pursue Electrical Engineering while studying at Santa Barbara City College where I worked as a general mathematics tutors with an emphasis in statistics.

I eventually transferred to complete my Bachelor's Degree at the University of California San Diego where I met Professor Curt Schurgers in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE) and joined his research lab, Engineers for Exploration (E4E) that he co-directed with Professor Ryan Kastner from the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department.

It was at this time that I took on their brand-new collaborative project with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (SDZWA) that was referred to as "Automated Acoustic Species Identification." In this role I was in charge of research and development of automated methods to extract useful information from a pilot large-scale acoustic survey from the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. I would continue this project into my Master's where I focused in Data Science and Machine Learning. My thesis would focus on methods of efficiently extracting training data to train deep learning models for bird acoustic species classification.