Tai-Kwan Andy Lau

EDUCATION:

From Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA.

M.A. in Interdisciplinary studies in Operations Research, Statistics, & Economics, 1987 M.S. in Mathematics, 1982 B.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Mathematics, 1980

EXPERIENCE:

Applied Mathematician

December 1985 to Present

National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration Ocean Environment Research Division OSU Hatfield Marine Science Center Newport, Oregon 97365, USA.

Develop, support computer programs, and solve problems as needed by resident geophysical scientists for data, signal, and image processing. Problem solving is mostly mathematically and statistically oriented.

Software are implemented using the Interactive Data Language (IDL) from the Research Systems, Inc., C or FORTRAN. Most developments involve either 2-D or 3-D graphic products. Other shell scripts such as perl and C-Shell are also used for programming applications. For web programming, JavaScript and perl are also used. All the software are operating in the UNIX workstations.

Current Projects

1) Noise Levels (part of T-Phase) project to use the collections of the Hydrophones data for computing the average noise levels in dB re μPa²/Hz at different points of the oceans.

2) T-Phase (underwater seismic signal) project to display T-Phase data recorded from different instruments, to detect both biological and geological T-Phase events (e.g. submarine volcano eruptions and whale calls) using mathematical filters, to determine their possible locations on earth, and to produce audio from the selected T-Phase signals.

Past Projects

BeamForming (part of T-Phase) project to focus the T-Phase signals into a specified directional area of interest using the existing T-Phase data collected from stationary hyrdophone arrays.

Error Analysis (related to the T-Phase Project) using Monte-Carlo method to determine the standard errors of the T-Phase Event locations computed from a Nonlinear Least-Square Method.

Hydrophone Data Retrieval project to allow users to request data through a web site by specifying either a time range or the time of an event occur and let the program to retrieve the data that contain the signals of the event. A perl cgi script will prepare the users' request. Then an IDL program will retrieve the data and notify the users when the data are ready.

AutoChart project to allow users to generate a map (using gmt software) by entering the map boundary in latitudes & longitudes through a web-browser.

GIS project to adopt AML & C programs from other sources for creating ArcView projects & Arc/Info coverages.

Sidescan project to display sonar data (equivalent to remote sensing signals) into digital mosaic images including orthorecification and allow various image enhancements.

Geological Photo project to plot specified data onto selected mapping coordinates.

SEABEAM (a high-resolution bathymetric sonar mapping system) data processing project to remove noise from the data files.