About a decade ago, the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command was focused on finding a way to monitor security threats in real time.  They needed a solution that would give them instant access with visual input over multiple streaming datasets.  At the time there was nothing available that was fast enough, could handle that much input, or be reliable.  In 2009, Amit Vij and Nima Negahban were contracted by the US Army to find a solution.  So they built their own database combining the use of GPU and CPU that parallelly explores and visualizes data in space and time, a system that went on to become patented.  Slowly Amit’s and Nima’s system became incorporated into other businesses.  In 2016 they received an initial round of funding to officially form Kinetica in San Francisco, CA.  Today the Kinetica Active Analytics Platform is being used to analyze data for companies like Amazon, Google, IBM, and many more.

Recently Kinetica has begun working with the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI) to help clean up the Bay Area waterways.  As stated on their website, “SFEI is one of California’s premier aquatic and ecosystem science institutes. Our mission: provide scientific support and tools for decision-making and communication through collaborative efforts. We provide independent science to assess and improve the health of the waters, wetlands, wildlife and landscapes of San Francisco Bay, the California Delta and beyond.”  They have received a lot of media attention over a study they put out about the massive amounts of micro plastics polluting our water.  It is estimated that 50% of plastics used end up being carried away into creeks, streams, rivers, and the oceans from stormwater runoff.  Tony Hale from SFEI said, “Considering the size of the problem, there’s relatively limited infrastructure in place to capture and treat stormwater.”

This plastic gets into the ocean and breaks down into small bits, micro plastic, that is then consumed by sea creatures.  As members of the food chain, these micro plastics are also being consumed one way or another by humans on a regular basis.  To monitor trash being transported by stormwaters SEFI sends out crews to collect and analyze as much trash as possible.  Hale went on to say, “Most ground crews working for stormwater programs monitor trash once a year, twice if we’re lucky.  So what we can learn about trash and its impact on communities is limited by the number of people we can afford to send out.”  This is why they have begun to use drones equipped with cameras to start monitoring trash accumulation in the Bay Area.

With the drones SFEI is no longer limited to collecting data once a year.  Now “we can track all of the trash in a creek, river, or stream, examine how it’s distributed, and then apply machine-learning algorithms to analyze those images as often as we want”, Hale said.  The HD cameras on the drones pick up every detail necessary for data collection.  They can preform a job that is all together unpleasant and unsanitary with no complaint.  The drones are saving SFEI and their sister organization The Southern California Coastal Water Research Project countless hours and dollars while providing them with far more data to analyze.  And this is where Kinetica comes back into play.

All of the data being collected by the drones needs to be analyzed so that proper solutions can be met.  After sending out the drones SFEI was left with some 35,000 images.  Going through all of that manually would never work, to be able to put into place a treatment plan they needed a way to go through all of the information in real time.  Using Kinetica’s Active Analytics, all 35,000 images were organized, analyzed, labeled, and categorized.  What would have taken months to compile was completed in about 18 hours by Kinetica.

Now SFEI can use all the information collected by the drones to better understand what types of plastics cause the most damage, where they are originating from, and how to best collect them to prevent the further deterioration of our water supplies.  Hale said that, “Our mission is to help city planners find the best ways to filter their stormwater and stop contaminants such as trash and plastics from entering their protected wetlands and public waterways.”  Now, with the combined efforts of drones and Kinetica’s analytics system they have a chance to make an ecological difference.

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