Project CityShark sinks its teeth into waterways clean-up

By Caroline Firer, Global Sustainability Manager                                        

As global temperatures rise, so does the need for innovative technology to address the variety of challenges surrounding building back better. The Danish Ministry of Climate, Energy, and Utilities and the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI) have both embarked upon an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Kinetica-powered project that merges aerial drones and waste removal from the world’s waterways.

Also known as project “CityShark”, a fleet of aerial drones equipped with AI-guided cameras are deployed to identify and collect waste in public waterways. According to the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC), in 2019 80% of assessed bays and estuaries did not meet one or more standards meant to ensure the safety of activities, such as fishing and swimming. Humans can experience harmful impacts of polluted waterways by ingesting microplastics, consuming contaminated water, and having less water sources to enjoy. 

Thankfully, both the Danish Ministry of Climate, Energy, and Utilities and SFEI are taking a leading technology approach to address water pollution. This is made possible by using Kinetica’s streaming data warehouse and OCI HPC. By running machine learning algorithms using the OCI High Performance Computing (HPC) platform’s parallel processing capability, the drone-captured images are instantly processed and analyzed to provide insights into how much waste is taking over the water source. The WasteShark (pictured above) can then navigate to the polluted areas to filter and collect debris. Doing such a task using on-premises servers wasn’t possible if they were to report on the findings quickly and efficiently.

Danish Climate Ministry partner RainMarine Technology, provides the WasteShark sailing drone to clean up liquid and solid waste along the Port of Aarhus [RanMarine Technology BV].

Join the webinar “CityShark Project – How drones and Oracle Cloud aid cleaning up the oceans” on Thursday, June 10 from 10:00 – 10:45 CEST to uncover the planning, process, and results behind CityShark. During this webinar you will hear from Martin Skjold GrØntved, Special Consultant at the Danish Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency (SDFE) – Office for Data and Green Transition Technologies. He will present more findings from this project in a live interview with Ingrid MjØen, Country Manager at Oracle Denmark. Register today!