(Development of WISE Program to foster AI Professionals
for Marine Industries)

Report on Completion of internship at the Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency (FRA) (MITSUYU, Course of Marine Policy and Management)

　From September 16 to October 28, 2025, I participated in a nine-day internship at the Fisheries Data Sciences Division, Fisheries Stock Assessment Center, Fisheries Resources Institute, Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency (FRA). The main activity during the internship was taking part in study sessions on two fisheries stock assessment models: the State-space Assessment Model (SAM) and the Woods Hole Assessment Model (WHAM). These sessions were designed to offer hands-on experience, from understanding the internal structure of the models to learning the workflow of implementation.

　During the study sessions, I was responsible for introducing WHAM. Using the official GitHub repository (https://github.com/timjmiller/wham) and documentation site (https://timjmiller.github.io/wham/), I explained the structure of the input data, model configuration, and visualization of estimation results through both slides and live demonstrations. In the preparation process, I found errors in 9 of the 13 official sample scripts. I corrected those scripts and verified that every example could run properly. I submitted the revised code as a pull request to the repository owner on GitHub, which became a valuable experience in contributing to the improvement of the official repository. The sessions included active discussions from both theoretical and practical perspectives, making the experience highly stimulating and academically enriching.

　Throughout my internship, I was warmly welcomed by everyone at the Fisheries Resources Institute. I will make full use of the knowledge gained through this opportunity and continue my research so that I can contribute to the advancement of fisheries stock assessment and resource management. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all of the staff for hosting me and supporting my internship.

(An example result obtained by running the sample code provided in the WHAM GitHub repository: age-specific selectivity)

 

(An example result obtained by running the sample code provided in the WHAM GitHub repository: fishing mortality (F), recruitment, and spawning stock biomass (SSB))

MITSUYU, 1st year student, Course of Marine Policy and Management