Kelly Lineman

Wow! This was really cool. I think it’s great to see artificial intelligence potentially being used in this way. As I started to think about how this could be used to clean our oceans, it made me think that this could potentially be used for “search and rescue” missions for people lost at sea or helping the coast guards perform their job function.

Thank you for sharing this article Kelly. I love how this focuses AI usage on a global problem (often ignored by the masses). I think the issue of water pollution is even greater now with all the masks and gloved from covid being irresponsibly disposed of and eventually landing in our oceans.

Hi Kelly! I really enjoyed your article. I’ve been trying to be more mindful about my current plastic consumption and recycling measures. I do know that Intel has partnered with two environmental foundations – Accenture and the Sulubaaï Environmental Foundation – to create CORaiL, an artificial intelligence project that collects information on the status of coral reefs. It came out last year and is currently monitoring the Pangatalan Island in the Philippines.

More info here! https://newsroom.intel.com/news/using-artificial-intelligence-save-coral-reefs/#gs.hjqwyt

Kelly, this was a really interesting read. I had actually heard of clean up systems from a ’60 minutes’ episode and have always been concerned with the large build up of waste in the ocean and the life (ocean plants/animals) that it harms in the process. The AI side to this article is new knowledge to me and actually makes a lot of sense. With 5 trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean, I can imagine this will be a process executed for decades to com, but technology that can locate the cluster of plastic anywhere in the world especially in the deepest areas will help speed up the process versus if the technology was human operated. Philip mentions the use of AI for ‘search and rescue’ missions, but AI in the ocean could also help locate particular lifeforms within the ocean or explore the hard-to-reach deep sea ecosystems.

This would be a great thing for the environment. I could also see using AI like this to identify areas of high air, land, and water pollution. I heard of scientist working on microbes that eat plastic. That would be a nice addition to these collectors. A bunch of these machines collecting and digesting the plastic in the oceans could be an easy way to limit our impact on the world.