Smart Industry No.1 2022

source ©: Marine Science Institute, UC Santa Barbara, Salesforce.com, San Diego State University
SharkEye
AI Drones Track and
Protect Great White Sharks
Academics from the University of
California and San Diego State have
teamed up with AI researchers from
Salesforce to create software that
can spot sharks swimming around
popular beach sites.
SharkEye, as the system is called,
uses drones to spot sharks from
above. The unmanned flying vehicles
follow pre-programmed paths
at a height of around 120 feet (36.5
metres) to cover large areas of the
ocean without disturbing marine
life. The goal of SharkEye is eventually
to produce automated ‘shark reports’
for beachgoers to help them
assess levels of risk.
The researchers hope this application
of AI can help keep beaches
safer, encourage a more informed
public and help people learn how
to share the waves with wildlife. Perhaps,
most importantly, the system
could help protect the gradually improving
populations of great white
sharks, top predators that are a
healthy part of the California ocean
ecosystem, says Doug McCauley, director
of the Benioff Ocean Initiative
and a professor at the University of
California Santa Barbara.
Salesforce AI is using its proprietary
Einstein Vision algorithm – ordinarily
used for visual search, brand
detection and product identification
– to process drone video and
recognise the unique attributes
of sharks, thereby identifying
them without the need for physical
tagging. This information will
then be shared with local officials
and beachside communities, so,
without ever touching the water,
SharkEye can make sure it’s safe for
the rest of us to hop in!
Shark Alarm!
The dashboard created
for the SharkEye project
at Santa Barbara's Parado
Beach is meant to openly
share data insights on
sharks collected from dronebased
arial surveys as well
as acoustic detections. Both
are shown on a current-day
and a seven-day rolling
average.The latter provide
a clearer picture of trends
in abundance compared
to expected variation in
daily peaks and dips in shark
activity. Absence of shark
sightings or acoustic signals
are not an indicator that
no sharks are present - in
California's costal waters,
they almost always are.
The goal here
is to reduce
the number
of traffic
accidents.
Ivan Ndip
Fraunhofer Institute
for Reliability
and Microintegration
(IZM) in Berlin
Fraunhofer
Many Still Wait for 5G –
but 6G is Just
Around the Corner
Most smartphone owners are still
waiting for 5G to appear but the telco
industry is already gearing up for the
next step. The starting pistol for this
next generation of mobile communications,
6G, has already been fired.
"With 6G, we have the ambitious
goal of achieving data rates of terabits
per second and a latency of
about 100 microseconds – that’s 50
times the data rate and one-tenth
the latency of 5G," says Ivan Ndip,
an expert on antennas and radio frequency
systems at the Fraunhofer
Institute for Reliability and Microintegration
(IZM) in Berlin.
Ndip uses autonomous driving to
explain the difference. The goal here,
he says, is to reduce the number of
accidents. 5G has a maximum data
rate of about 20 gigabits per second
– nowhere near enough to communicate
a car’s position to other road
users in real time, much less to measure
distances and scan through 360
degrees at the same time.
The self-driving car needs to be
able to look far into the distance
while also focusing on close-up
things. For this, autonomous vehicles
require sensors that combine
both radar and cameras, and need
to be able to collect enormous
amounts of data and share them
simultaneously. According to Ndip,
Fraunhofer IZM is currently developing
such sensors.
source ©: Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM
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