Utilizing AI to Remove Oceanic Plastic Waste-Introduction

Hi! I am Andrew Chang, a member of the Inspirit AI Student Ambassadors Program. I am a student with a great interest in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, and Computer Science in general. Ever since I was young, I was fascinated by how Artificial Intelligences seems to “learn” on its own and how it can be utilized in so many aspects of our lives.

I have always tried to learn about AI principles and techniques and have tried out multiple educational programs and courses, Inspirit AI Scholars program being one of them. Inspirit AI is an AI course for high school students taught by Stanford alumni that allows students to learn the basics of AI and practice applying them to real-life problems. The cohort I was in was taught by instructor Nathan Dalal and I participated in the real-time object detection project for self-driving cars for the later part of the course. I genuinely had a great time during the course and was able to learn a lot from it.

As the title suggests, this blog series will be about how AI can be used to reduce the amount of plastic debris from the ocean. The issue of plastic garbage contaminating the ocean has been a hot topic recently. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, there are almost 8 million tons of plastic waste floating in the ocean, making up about 80% of all marine debris. Many environmental agencies have searched for a method of combatting this pollution. One method that has been discussed recently is detecting floating garbage in the sea from satellite/aerial images. In the next blog post, we will look at how it first came into discussion among researchers and how it works.

I think the main audience of this blog series will be those who are interested in the use of modern technology to solve environmental problems.

I hope to explore ways to solve environmental problems using AI and dive into the AI principles and techniques that are used.

Andrew Chang is a Student Ambassador in the Inspirit AI Student Ambassadors Program. Inspirit AI is a pre-collegiate enrichment program that exposes curious high school students globally to AI through live online classes. Learn more at https://www.inspiritai.com/.