Meet the winners of FishAI: Sustainable Commercial Fishing Competition 2022
In august 2021 Vekstlandet contacted us with a challenge they had started working on. How can we make the domestic search for fish more sustainable? The background for this project is that the Norwegian government aims to reduce CO2 emissions from domestic fishing by 50% by 2030. Vekstlandet had done a quite bit of research in front of this meeting and could tell us:
Searching for fish is the fishermen's core activity. Today's practice is neither sustainable nor future-oriented:
The skipper's own history and experience are very limited, compared to all the data that is available
History and experience are becoming less and less relevant as the fish's behavior changes as a result of climate change
The geographical area the fleet searches at the same time becomes very limited, as the vessels tend to concentrate within the same areas
Many boats search the same areas - often several times
As a result of this, 1100 Norwegian vessels over 11 m use 7500 liters of fuel per day. Could we reduce their search by one day shorter search period we will save 8 million liters of fuel?
We first contacted NCE Seafood to get more information about what they and their members have done within this field and how they could participate.
We then connected Nora who suggested that we could organize a European competition through all involved parties’ different networks with an attractive price for the winner of the competition
The competition proposed three tasks:
To build a model that can predict which coordinates a vessel should prioritize in order to maximize the likelihood of catching a specific type of fish
To write a report based on the conducted analysis that can be read by experienced fishermen and to create a user-friendly visualization that a captain can read to make an assessment of where the vessel should search for fish the next day
To make a Sustainable Fishing Plan; a weekly plan that suggests the routes the fisherman should follow to optimize fish caught and fuel consumption
The winners of the FishAI dataset challenge were announced at the NordicAIMeet on the 14th of November 2022. FishAI was a competition hosted in collaboration with Simula, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Vekstlandet, Agenda Vestlandet, Norwegian Cognitive Center and NORA.ai. The competition invited teams from all over the world to take a deep dive into publicly available data collected from the fishing industry and transform them into a powerful decision-making tool for Captains of the 1100 vessels operating across the Norwegian fishing zone.
Photo: NORA
The winning team was “Team Poseidon” (The team later changed its name to Catchwise and also made digital services out of the solution) a composite group of people from different companies. We have sent the winning team a request that they can come to one of our events and present their solution and hope that we early in 2023 can announce that they will present for us.
