B.C. students’ whale-identification app wins Victoria’s international hackathon
Published 1:00 pm Friday, October 23, 2026
A team of B.C. university students has won the Canadian edition of an international ocean innovation competition with a machine learning tool that identifies whales and dolphins from underwater recordings.
The team’s prototype, Sea Who’s Calling, won Ocean Hackathon 10 in Victoria over the weekend, beating three other teams. It will now represent Canada at the competition’s global finale in Brest, France, on Dec. 10.
The app analyzes hydrophone recordings to identify marine mammal species, with the goal of helping the Royal Canadian Navy plan exercises while mitigating potential impacts on marine life.
The team said the idea emerged after learning about the navy’s need to identify marine mammals to reduce the impacts of sonar testing and other activities.
Initial trials using expert-labelled recordings from Ocean Networks Canada showed the prototype outperformed several leading bioacoustics models, including those from Google DeepMind, Cornell University’s K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics and the Earth Species Project, according to organizers.
The winning team includes Olivia Whitelaw, Grace Bertozzi, Pranav Rajesh Krishnan, Jossie Yan and Leanne Farmer.
The 48-hour event, hosted by COAST, an initiative of the South Island Prosperity Partnership, brought together 17 university students in Victoria, the only Canadian city participating in this year’s competition. Teams used marine data and digital tools to develop solutions to ocean-related challenges.
The other projects included a tool to track El Niño’s potential effects on the Salish Sea and northeast Pacific, an interactive ferry kiosk that visualizes live ocean data, and a machine learning system that identifies fish species in underwater camera footage.
Last year, Victoria’s winning project, Ocean Drift, placed second overall among 57 teams at the global finale.