The funding brings the national innovation focus of AI to aquaculture and coastal cleantech.
With the backing of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy Program, Canada’s Ocean Supercluster (OSC) has announced $20 million in funding across nine AI-based ocean projects
“We want to augment the AI sector–and in ocean there is incredible opportunity to do this,” OSC said in a statement to BetaKit.
Announced last week at the ALL IN conference in Montréal, OSC’s commitment accompanies other recent Pan-Canadian AI Strategy announcements, such as Scale AI’s $21-million commitment to AI-backed healthcare solutions.
In its 2021 budget, the Government of Canada committed an additional $443 million to drive the adoption of AI across Canada’s economy and society for the second phase of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy.
OSC, which focuses on accelerating the development and commercialization of Canadian-made, ocean-based solutions, was allotted money through this program to support oceans-based AI projects.
“We want to augment the AI sector–and in ocean there is incredible opportunity to do this,” OSC said in a statement to BetaKit.
The largest OSC-provided allotment gave $5 million to the HydroAware project, meant to expand hydropower and safeguard habitats using AI-powered fish monitoring. Led by Innovasea in Bedford, N.S., the project is meant to help hydropower companies comply with legislation such as the Fisheries Act and Species at Risk Act, which require safeguarding fish populations from harm via infrastructure.
The cleantech-focused lithoscope project, led by Scient Analytics, received $149,000 of its total $451,000 project value from OSC. The project is said to bring in non-destructive imaging technologies to tackle seafloor sediment samples, which hold crucial information about the subsurface environment, including the suitability for offshore infrastructure like wind turbines.
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$1.5 million, the second-largest allotment of OSC-provided funding, went to the scalable fisheries monitoring project led by Vancouver-based OnDeck Fisheries AI. The project is supposed to enable AI-based electronic fishery monitoring programs that will watch fishing boats to see when and where fish are being caught.
Other projects funded will use AI to remotely analyze ocean biomass for seaweed farming, oversee oyster farming, and monitor fish location and health.
OSC said the projects are led from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia and will play a role in helping advance ocean sectors, inform decision making and increase global competitiveness.
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