Community Marine Biodiversity Research

Inspiration

In my volunteer work with The Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, CT, I have learned about the serious issues facing The Long Island Sound caused by global warming, population growth, over building, pollutants and debris. While much has been done to improve the quality of our waters, there are significant issues with research efforts to date: • Data quality: manual capture and transcription errors • Minimal data and information sharing: regionally, nationally, globally • Not correlated with other important structured and unstructured data: ie, weather data, water data • Untapped army of volunteer researchers – You!

This idea and video are a dramatization of how IBM Watson, Big Data and Analytics could be used to develop a global data collaboration platform to enable the sharing and analysis of structured and unstructured data as outlined in the 2016 Fishackathon Problem Statement #2. The intent of this submission is to help build the vision and find "like minded" research, academic and public/private organizations to collaborate to make the vision a reality.

What it does

What if we could deliver a platform that allowed for the collection, enrichment and analysis of marine biodiversity data, while encouraging the interaction and collaboration of the community, research, academia and the public/private sectors while promoting the awareness and discovery of the effects of environmental and social change on biodiversity? While this scenario focuses on Long Island Sound, an Estuary of Significance in the United States, the app, approach and technology can be replicated for any of earth’s ecosystems.

This fun, educational, cognitive, mobile app analyzes mobile phone pictures of marine life, taken by water and beach enthusiasts. Using the Watson Visual recognition API, it accurately identifies the species and tags the photo with size, weight, date, time and GPS location information. It links to social sites such as Facebook and Twitter and importantly forwards the information to marine research organizations where it is added to their data bases and analyzed with other important data such as weather and water information. Marine Biologists use The IPad version of the App to improve the speed and quality of data captured from research expeditions and to train the Watson app. The App has speech recognition and supports Questions and Answers about marine life and exhibits, which can also be used in aquariums and classrooms.

How it can be built

Leverages IBM Watson APIs including: Visual Recognition, Speech to text, Text to speech, Natural Language classification, Concept Insights, Personality Insights, Alchemy News, Weather data. Available via IBM Bluemix. It also leverages IBM Big Data and Analytics tools such as Cognos and SPSS.

Challenges

The biggest challenges to realizing this vision are not technical, but gaining consensus on a standard global data and collaboration model and obtaining the funding to make this important platform a reality.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Leveraging my understanding of technology and IBM Watson APIs to depict The Maritime Aquarium's vision of a Biodiversity Database and collaboration platform. I'm pretty proud of the video too!

What I learned

I learned about capabilities of IBM Watson APIs in greater detail. I utilized a Design Thinking approach to develop user scenarios for Brandie and Joe.

What's next for Community Biodiversity Research

The first phase of this project is envisioned to focus on community social engagement via a social, cognitive app. This technology and additional analytics can be leveraged in future phases to support research/university engagement and ultimately result in a comprehensive cognitive biodiversity platform where scientists worldwide can collaborate on marine research and generate hypotheses.

Watch the Video

See how the Community Biodiversity Research app inspires eight-year-old Brandie’s love of marine science and changes the course of her life… and learn how the app and platform led Joe, a Research Biologist at The Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, CT, to ground breaking discoveries about the dwindling lobster populations in Long Island Sound.