JavaFX In Action #18 with Brian Schlining: Annotating the Deep-Sea Wildlife

March 20, 2025

Brian has a dream job! He is responsible for a complex system that allows scientific researchers to research the animals living in the deep sea. He provides them with the tools to annotate videos and images made by submarines diving thousands of meters deep in the oceans. While he works on this software, he gets to know all the amazing creatures living in this mysterious world.

About Brian

Brian Schlining is a Software Engineer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), specializing in designing software systems to support scientific research. This includes data systems design, database development, user interface development (desktop and web applications), GIS, image and video analysis, micro-services, and analysis of large data sets.

His primary development languages are Java(FX) and Scala, combined with SQL, JavaScript, TypeScript, Groovy, Python, C, Objective-C, and Matlab for projects.

You can find him on:

About VARS Annotation

Within MBARI, a full system of micro-services has been developed to store a large number of deep-sea videos and images, a knowledge base about the animals living in the sea, machine learning tools, etc.

VARS Annotation is a JavaFX user interface for creating and editing video annotations. It targets modern video workflows and is part of the MBARI Media Management software stack. It’s not a standalone application but depends on several external services that need to be deployed.