Our Journey to Cleaning the Oceans with Machine Learning
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Remember the plastic continent floating in the Pacific that shocked the world 3 years ago? Research shows that, in the last ten years, we have produced more plastic products than in the previous century. If no action is taken, by 2050, plastic will likely outweigh all fish in the sea. In the end, the bitter pill will be for everyone to swallow.
The Ocean Cleanup is a non-profit organization developing and scaling technologies to rid the oceans of plastic. Their mission is to close the sources of plastic pollution & clean what has already accumulated in the ocean in order to remove 90 % of floating ocean plastic. For them, technology is essential to help identify, classify & locate the garbage patches & their content.
At Kili Technology, we keep the belief in using tech for good. To help The Ocean Cleanup in their mission, from December 5th to 9th, we gathered 500 devoted data scientists to join our image annotation challenge and labeled a massive dataset of polluted ocean photographs. Participants from 60 different countries teamed together behind one goal: create the highest quality dataset to help The Ocean Cleanup in their purpose. Ultimately, this growing dataset will help The Ocean Cleanup determine where to deploy cleanup in an extensive area with an uneven distribution of plastic debris.
To make this challenge come true, and give our participants the best experience possible, we partnered with great data-science tools - Weights & biases, OVHcloud, and Isahit.
Who Won the Challenge?
Throughout the week, 500 data scientists achieved these results:
And amongst our 500 participants, 2 teams have made the best performance! Huge congrats to our final winners of the challenge:
Many of our winners are experts in Machine Learning that came to lend a hand.
Lara has a background in applied mathematics and information technology. She works primarily in the banking industry in analytics, CRM, and customer lifecycle management.
Nick has a background in data science and analytics with several years of industry experience with a passion for using his skills to unlock value & stories from data.
Mardi is a senior consultant and machine learning engineer with more than 15 years of experience in the development of technology-based solutions.
Ronald applies data science and cognitive AI to help organizations make better decisions and improve business processes. He works with clients across industries and NPOs to unlock insights from tables, images, documents, phone calls, and more.
We found the challenge a great experience to be a part of and appreciative of the opportunity provided by the challenge to leverage our skills for a worthwhile cause that we’re all extremely passionate and proud to have contributed towards. None of us had used Kili before, yet we all found the Kili platform easy to get hands-on with. The documentation is really good and helped us get up to speed quickly and can see the enormous value it brings to Computer Vision projects. While we found the AI notebook experience of using the OVH image to be seamless.
None of us had used Kili before, yet we all found the Kili platform easy to get hands-on with. The documentation is really good and helped us get up to speed quickly and can see the enormous value it brings to Computer Vision projects. While we found the AI notebook experience of using the OVH image to be seamless."
A massive thank you to our 500 participants who put in great effort in this challenge and helped The Ocean Cleanup save the marine environment!
Stay tuned for upcoming challenges by joining our community.
