Intel's Project Corail Monitors Coral Reef Health With AI

To commemorate Earth Day, Intel -- in partnership with Accenture and Sulubaai Environmental Foundation, a Philippine-based nonprofit dedicated to protecting Palawan's natural resources -- detailed Project Corail, an AI-powered platform that monitors and analyzes the resiliency of coral reefs. From a report: Since its launch in May 2019, it's collected 40,000 images of the reef surrounding Pangatalan Island, which researchers have leveraged to gauge reef health in real time. If the pilot program in Palawan is successful, Project Corail could be used to monitor more of the world's at-risk reef population. (Stresses such as pollution, overfishing, and global climate change will kill an estimated 90% of reefs in the next century.) It's a worthwhile mission considering that reefs not only protect coastlines from tropical storms, but that they provide food and income for 1 billion people, generating $9.6 billion from tourism and recreation alone each year. Project Corail consists of a buoy equipped with marine-grade solar panels, batteries, and a transmitting device (either Wi-Fi or 4G), as well as a camera attached to the mooring line. An Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 plugged into a Raspberry Pi handles on-buoy computing, while an onshore PC processes images with an Intel Arria 10 FPGA.

A.I. Can Be Good Stuff

[LifesABeach]

But once it is discovered that it is human activity, how are we going to cause those involved to stop ?

Re:

[alvinrod]

You probably won't. At the end of the day no one is willing to take up arms for the coral reefs. There are some that will try to drag out a battle in court, but that's just prolonging the inevitable. Big changes rarely occur unless someone (or really a whole lot of someones) is willing to give up everything.

Coral reefs are pretty, but at the end of the day we like climate controlled dwellings, two-day deliveries, and a whole host of other modern conveniences a hell of a lot more.

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[Anonymous Coward]

If you think coral reefs are simply just "pretty" and contribute nothing else, then you're missing the point. The point is even in the summary up above.

Because coral reefs are an intricate network of hiding places, they're the optimal place for fish to give birth and young fish to grow up because all the nooks, and crannies, and stinging anemones they can hide in provide protection from predators and other threats. As such, coral reefs are the birthing grounds for much of the world's fish stock. Thus, you l

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[taylorius]

We won't - but at least we'll have terabytes of yummy data!

Coral 2.0

[taylorius]

Just train the coral to manufacture nanowires throughout the reef, these could form computing circuits, which could then be used to mine Bitcoin - and hey presto, the free market will have an incentive not to destroy it!