To test a predictive model for informing whale-safe sea-vessel navigation and passage, advanced data modeling and synthetic datasets are being used.

To help sea vessels avoid striking critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, a tech spin-off firm of North Carolina State University is building digital twins of the ocean to validate their whale location prediction model.

Fathom Science Inc seeks to provide expert, tailored information on the marine environment to enable timely and reliable decision making, empowering transformative marine operations and conservation efforts.

The tech firm is combining analyses of historical whale sightings with its ocean data model to create a heatmap projection showing the likelihood of whale activity in targeted ocean areas. The system is designed to be integrated with vessels’ existing on-board touch screens so that mariners can gauge how likely whales will be present in their navigational path.

Ship captains can use this information to guide their speed regulation in flagged areas, with the goal of decreasing the strike rate on endangered whales. The system is now being validated through deeper statistical and machine learning methods:

  • Synthetic data is generated with characteristics closely matching the original data for more effective validation
  • Armed with nearly 500,000 data points, the system can divide the data into groups to perform more robust training, validation and testing for seven machine learning models
  • With the initial models set up, the system uses a third-party standalone programming environment to help solve a second problem: calculating the probability of whales’ distance from shore
  • The goal is to quickly program calculations and add the distance data to the models to validate the system’s predictive accuracy

The data testing and analysis tools were from SAS, which runs a corporate social responsibility program to support humanitarian research. According to Fathom Science’s Head of Marine Resiliency, Taylor Shropshire: “It was interesting to see SAS create multiple models very quickly. They were able to expand from a very simple model to complex neural network and machine learning-type models to show the benefits and the limitations of each.”

Source: According to the American Oceans, only 300 to 400 North Atlantic “right whales” still exist in the wild.