National Fish and Wildlife Foundation Grant awarded to A.I.S.

A.I.S., Inc. is excited to announce we have been awarded a grant under the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s “Electronic Monitoring and Reporting Grant Program” for a project “Developing an Innovative Electronic Monitoring Program for the New England Ground Fish Fishery by Integrating an Intelligent Discard Chute for High Volume Discards”. AIS is teamed with Integrated Monitoring (a leading cloud-based electronic monitoring company), the University of Massachusetts School for Marine Science and Technology (renowned fisheries research institution), and several New England based, high-volume groundfish fishing vessels for this project. This project is divided into three phases. In the 1st phase researchers will develop an ‘intelligent discard chute’ with integrated stereoscopic cameras to automatically count, identify, measure, and estimate volume of sub-legal ground fish in real-time during the context of regular high volume fishing operations targeting NE groundfish. The 2nd phase will utilize this discard chute onboard one large, high-volume fishing vessel in field trials where the data collected will be analyzed and compared against human observers. The 3rd phase will expand the field trial to additional vessels allowing for more data collection which will be used to further artificial intelligence algorithm refinement, integration of EM/VMS data into e-logbooks, and integration of AI algorithms to the review software. AIS would like to thank the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and our team partners for their hard work and responsiveness so far. We are eager to begin working on this innovative project!