The Earth’s Ocean covers nearly 70% of the Earth’s surface, therefore, it is fundamental to our life support system.

However, this core system is at threat as a result of global warming. This is affecting not only our oceans, but everything around us – rise in sea level, increased storms and temperature stratification. By continuing as we are, it is expected that by 2100 cities such as New York and Shanghai will have swamped and displace 187 million of our population.

Microsoft’s AI for Earth

Microsoft’s project is a five-year $50 million commitment, which has already helped support 236 projects since its creation only 2 years ago. This plan puts Microsoft Cloud and AI tools in the power of those wanting to solve global environmental changes by awarding grants to projects who address one or more of the following:

1. Climate
2. Agriculture
3. Biodiversity
4. Water

The data obtained through AI can can help researchers discover the health of our oceans – temperature and sea levels – which can then be turned into actionable intelligence. Research teams like the IMT Atlantique team are using Microsoft Azure to get multiple ready-to-use resources to build 3D models of the ocean’s surface. These models will help test and validate new ideas, in addition to obtaining a deeper comprehension of the changes of the ocean’s surface.

And that’s not all…

Advances in AI could be a major breakthrough in solving major global and environmental crises – from climate chance, to animal endangerment to disease containment – projects in all 3 areas are already underway.

Further examples of how AI is enhancing our planet

1. Distributed energy grids – building on predictability of supply and demand for renewables across a distributed grid, improving energy storage, efficiency and load management and creating market incentives.
2. Smart agriculture and food systems – through automated agriculture and data collection, decision making and corrective actions via robotics allow early detection of crop diseases and issues. This helps provide timed nutrition to livestock, optimisation of the agriculture industry, lowering the use of water, fertilisers and pesticides which can cause damage to important ecosystems and increase resilience to climate extremes.
3. Weather and Climate prediction – transforming weather forecasting and improving our understanding of the effects of climate change. This field traditionally requires high performance energy-intensive computing, but deep-learning networks which run must faster and incorporate more complexity of the ‘real-world’ system into calculations.
4. Smarter disaster response – AI enables you to analyse simulations and real-time data of weather and disasters in a region to seek out responsibilities and enhance disaster preparations, provide early warning and prioritise response throat coordination of emergency information capabilities.
5. AI-designed intelligence – can be used to simulate and automate the generation of zoning laws, building ordinances and floodplains, combined with AR and VR. Real-time city-wide data on energy, water consumption and availability, traffic and people flows weather could create an urban dashboard to optimise urban sustainability.

Summary

Therefore, it is clear that AI is no longer a vision of the future. It has, in many instances, entered business offices. AI is not only changing how businesses work, but also how it transforms the traditional thinking and meaning of teamwork, competition and innovation. One thing is for certain, AI is set to change business and our environment for the better.