IBM DeepSense Collaboration to Advance ‘Blue’ Economy in Canada

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The global ocean economy is predicted to increase to US $3 trillion by 2030, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

With the world’s longest coastline, Canada is in an enviable position to capitalize on this growth.

Yet, without data-driven insight to integrate and leverage new technologies, Canadian industry will continue to struggle to capture its global share of the ocean opportunity. This is not a problem a single organization can solve.

At IBM we believe public-private partnerships are one of the most powerful forces for change. Stronger outcomes are possible when government, public, nonprofits and industry combine their best expertise to solve deeply entrenched industry challenges.

That is why IBM, Dalhousie University, the Ocean Frontier Institute, the Centre for Ocean Ventures and Entrepreneurship (COVE), the Government of Canada, local industry and the Province of Nova Scotia are collaborating on the rollout of  DeepSense  – a world class big ocean data innovation environment, powered by IBM technology, that brings together academic and industry collaborative projects to drive growth in the ocean economy.

Through DeepSense, businesses collaborate with scientists to develop ocean technology products and services using IBM’s high performance computing and analytics infrastructure. This is an area of great interest for IBM as we are already building supercomputers with GPU accelerated technology that solve some of the world’s most difficult challenges.

DeepSense is built around IBM Power Systems, the industry’s leading data centric infrastructure, ideal for the most demanding workloads, like AI. With 3 petabytes of IBM Spectrum Scale software-defined storage, DeepSense can provide performance, flexibility and capacity to multiple workloads.

In addition, IBM global research experts will provide their extensive industry expertise in environmental science, water and oceans to help guide and advise local industry

We launched the platform and reviewed initial projects today, together with our fellow collaborators.

One project with RealTime Aquaculture provides data-driven environmental monitoring for ocean farmers using underwater wireless sensors that deliver up to the minute data so farmers can make more immediate decisions about their inventory – which is living in the water. Sensors take 100,000 measurements daily, analyzing 11 million data points about temperature and tilt, salinity, dissolved oxygen, Blue Green Algae, Chlorophyll and Turbidity

Additional projects will focus on areas including fisheries and aquaculture, seaport and logistics, security and defence, marine risk, finance and insurance; offshore energy; shipbuilding; policy and government; ocean data centres; ocean data products, computational models, and analytical applications.

It is certainly a grand challenge putting emerging technology, infrastructure and services to work gleaning insights from vast amounts of ocean data. But the DeepSense collaborative team is fully equipped to meet it. We are already making great strides to progress the important work of fueling the new regional ‘blue’ economy where ocean related activity generates $5 billion in revenue and produces 60,000 jobs in the Province of Nova Scotia alone.