Dr. Ketil Malde is a former bioinformatician, now working on data analysis using deep learning at the Institute of Marine Research (IMR) in Bergen, Norway. He is also assistant professor and member of the machine learning group at the University of Bergen. Currently he is visiting SCAI in Paris.

AI for sustainable marine management

Oceans cover 70% of the globe, are home to half of our global biological production, and play an important role in global climate’s regulation. In order to protect the marine environment and secure sustainable exploitation of marine resources, high resolution monitoring and accurate models of physical and ecological processes are necessary.

As imaging and other sensor technology advances, our ability to collect data on ocean life is improving rapidly. Simultaneously, increasing data volumes, heterogeneity and complexities pose a challenge to analysis. To meet these challenges, this collaboration will develop our capability to apply new analysis techniques from artificial intelligence and machine learning to important marine data, including plankton imaging, fish otolith imaging, and acoustics.  

Marine laboratories, including the Laboratoire d’Océanographie et du Climat (LOCEAN), the Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranche (LOV), and the Institute of Marine Research (IMR) in Norway have already started to use methods from AI and computer vision to automatically process marine data. During this project Dr Malde from IMR will stay with SCAI until early April and from April to June, with LOV in Villefranche, located in one of the three marine stations of Sorbonne University. The goal of his stay is to expand data processing capabilities in the marine sciences by integrating new algorithmic developments in unsupervised methods and explainability of AI systems. His stay at Sorbonne University is supported by three institutes: SCAI, ISCD, and the Institute of the Ocean.

Dr. Malde also gave a presentation during the ISCD-FORMAL online mini-conference on Machine Learning for Marine Sciences. His talk has been recorded and is available here.