4 ms·

$50k competition to spot icebergs off the coast of Newfoundland

toomuchtodo 9y ago
All ships over a certain gross tonnage or in commercial service must use AIS to announce themselves. Seems straightforward to subtract the satellite image objects that correlate to ships announcing themselves, leaving only icebergs (making it cheap to submit follow up satellite image tasking requests at high resolution to confirm). Cool crowdsourced challenge! Edit: Removed US Coast Guard reference, see peeters link below. https://www.marinetraffic.com/ https://www.marinetraffic.com/
- peeters 9y ago
  Not sure why US requirements are relevant to Newfoundland. Here are the Canadian requirements: http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/SOR-2005-134/page-5.html#h-41 http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/SOR-2005-134/... Automatic Identification Systems (AISs) 65 (2) Every ship, other than a fishing vessel, of 300 tons or more that is engaged on an international voyage shall be fitted with an AIS. (3) Every ship, other than a fishing vessel, of 500 tons or more that is not engaged on an international voyage shall be fitted with an AIS, but if it was constructed before July 1, 2002 it need not be so fitted until July 1, 2008. I've emphasized the part about fishing vessels because that is particularly relevant here. The waters around Newfoundland are huge fishing grounds.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Indeed, I should’ve grabbed the Canadian requirements. Mea culpa, I sail out of the US. AIS has been slowly rolling out for almost 13 years now, and is pervasive enough that you can be fairly confident most, of not all, large ships are announcing themselves with it. I know several blue water cruisers even with sailboats in the 30-50ft range that have it installed to prevent “death by cargo ship” in the middle of the night.
- pveierland 9y ago
  Statoil arranged a hackathon for this competition at my university (NTNU) where I asked this question. They said that AIS data makes the problem easier to solve, however in addition to not every ship having such a transponder, there are vessels where it is intentionally turned off due to for example illegal fishing or smuggling. When they are unable to identify an object using remote sensing they use airplanes to visually identify the object. More satellites and lower remote sensing costs have resulted in much more data being available, which is why they need to automate their analysis pipeline further.
BucketSort 9y ago
While the Kaggle competitions are cool for students, 50K would be a measly amount paid to an R&D company or contractor to do such a job. I don't like the bounty approach to data science the same way I don't like it for software engineering.
- foota 9y ago
  Sure, it's not much for well compensated contractors, but 50k can be a lot of money for some people.
  - stingrae 9y ago
    The point is that with 1000 people working on it, 999 are working for free.
    - onion2k 9y ago
      There are tens of thousands of people working on code to do object recognition for free already. This is just a incentive to get them to tackle a particular problem in a vast sea (heh!) of problems they could work on. It's quite likely that very few people understand that this even is a problem, and fewer still who'd be interested in it enough to work on it. This isn't getting people to work for free. It's simply getting people interested in a problem.
      - craftyguy 9y ago
        From their perspective, you are doing work for them, for free. What you just described is a benefit you receive (or more accurately, perceive) but ultimately cost them essentially $0.00 to provide.
    - paulgb 9y ago
      I spent a couple hours building a CNN for an entry to this competition last night. I don't consider it working for free, I consider it a way to practice on an interesting labeled dataset I'd otherwise not have access to.

All ships over a certain gross tonnage or in commercial service must use AIS to announce themselves. Seems straightforward to subtract the satellite image objects that correlate to ships announcing themselves, leaving only icebergs (making it cheap to submit follow up satellite image tasking requests at high resolution to confirm). Cool crowdsourced challenge! Edit: Removed US Coast Guard reference, see peeters link below. https://www.marinetraffic.com/ https://www.marinetraffic.com/

peeters 9y ago
Not sure why US requirements are relevant to Newfoundland. Here are the Canadian requirements: http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/SOR-2005-134/page-5.html#h-41 http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/SOR-2005-134/... Automatic Identification Systems (AISs) 65 (2) Every ship, other than a fishing vessel, of 300 tons or more that is engaged on an international voyage shall be fitted with an AIS. (3) Every ship, other than a fishing vessel, of 500 tons or more that is not engaged on an international voyage shall be fitted with an AIS, but if it was constructed before July 1, 2002 it need not be so fitted until July 1, 2008. I've emphasized the part about fishing vessels because that is particularly relevant here. The waters around Newfoundland are huge fishing grounds.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Indeed, I should’ve grabbed the Canadian requirements. Mea culpa, I sail out of the US. AIS has been slowly rolling out for almost 13 years now, and is pervasive enough that you can be fairly confident most, of not all, large ships are announcing themselves with it. I know several blue water cruisers even with sailboats in the 30-50ft range that have it installed to prevent “death by cargo ship” in the middle of the night.
pveierland 9y ago
Statoil arranged a hackathon for this competition at my university (NTNU) where I asked this question. They said that AIS data makes the problem easier to solve, however in addition to not every ship having such a transponder, there are vessels where it is intentionally turned off due to for example illegal fishing or smuggling. When they are unable to identify an object using remote sensing they use airplanes to visually identify the object. More satellites and lower remote sensing costs have resulted in much more data being available, which is why they need to automate their analysis pipeline further.

BucketSort 9y ago

While the Kaggle competitions are cool for students, 50K would be a measly amount paid to an R&D company or contractor to do such a job. I don't like the bounty approach to data science the same way I don't like it for software engineering.

foota 9y ago
Sure, it's not much for well compensated contractors, but 50k can be a lot of money for some people.
- stingrae 9y ago
  The point is that with 1000 people working on it, 999 are working for free.
  - onion2k 9y ago
    There are tens of thousands of people working on code to do object recognition for free already. This is just a incentive to get them to tackle a particular problem in a vast sea (heh!) of problems they could work on. It's quite likely that very few people understand that this even is a problem, and fewer still who'd be interested in it enough to work on it. This isn't getting people to work for free. It's simply getting people interested in a problem.
    - craftyguy 9y ago
      From their perspective, you are doing work for them, for free. What you just described is a benefit you receive (or more accurately, perceive) but ultimately cost them essentially $0.00 to provide.
  - paulgb 9y ago
    I spent a couple hours building a CNN for an entry to this competition last night. I don't consider it working for free, I consider it a way to practice on an interesting labeled dataset I'd otherwise not have access to.