Cyprus maritime stakeholders are joining forces on a €1 mln artificial intelligence project that puts the island on the technological map to keep the seas cleaner and safer, says an article published on financial mirror website.
MARI-Sense
MARI-Sense, a project using intelligent systems for human operators to make sense of the complex maritime environment for transport, shipping, coastal tourism, search and rescue, spatial planning.
It supports the shipping industry, environmental authorities, academia, and law enforcement in decision making by providing the bigger picture of underwater and overwater ecosystems.
The system deploys smart equipment that includes buoys, smart-boats, smart-floats, and land-based stations that monitor weather conditions, presence of swimmers, potential illegal activity in marine protected areas, ports, tourism areas, and critical infrastructures, providing early warning and tools for planning and action by authorities.
Funding of project
The Maritime Cognitive Decision Support System (MARI-Sense) project is co-financed with €1 mln by the European Development Fund and the Republic of Cyprus through the Research and Innovation Foundation.
Petros Petrikkos, a researcher at the University of Nicosia Research Foundation, lead partner of the project, told the Financial Mirror: “MARI-Sense is a strategic project for smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth with a beneficial impact on society, technology, and the economy”.
Objective
The project’s research associate Olympia Nisiforou of the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT), said the system could help save lives by giving out early warning systems to the coast guard.
The project’s scientific and technological objectives are designing marine nodes with onboard processing capabilities for smart sensing, power and bandwidth savings, remote sensing capabilities, sensor interconnectivity for swarm intelligence.
“Buoys in the water and smart boats patrolling the area can detect changes in the sea environment that could pose an unforeseen danger to ships or swimmers in danger, dispatching help,” said Nisiforou.
“The Maritime Cognitive Decision Support System is a holistic ecosystem of AI systems which gathers information on the sea environment from changes in currents to changes of the seabed,” she added
Environmental benefits
It could help with marine farming, as the system will provide farmers with all the data they need regarding the sea environment.
Nisiforou stressed the importance of monitoring the seaweed at the bottom of the sea, which act as a natural carbon sink, cleaning the sea and the atmosphere from carbon dioxide pollutants emitted by ships.
“We often talk about pollution on land, but we often ignore pollution created by ships in the sea. The ecosystem at the bottom of the sea helps to regulate the global climate system.”
MARI-Sense will also be in a position to help the shipping industry meet its environmental targets, detecting vessels that do not meet green criteria.
Summary
- Cyprus maritime stakeholders are joining forces on a €1 mln artificial intelligence project.
- MARI-Sense, a project using intelligent systems for human operators to make sense of the complex maritime environment for transport, shipping, coastal tourism, search and rescue, spatial planning.
- Project’s research associate Olympia Nisiforou of the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT), said the system could help save lives by giving out early warning systems to the coast guard.
- It could help with marine farming, as the system will provide farmers with all the data they need regarding the sea environment.
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Source: financialmirror
