US-headquartered multinational information technology services and consulting company Cognizant has begun a collaborative project with Tidal, a project inside X, Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory, to make Tidal’s ocean information platform widely available to the aquaculture market.
Until now, Tidal’s platform has only been available to select pilot partners – offering data-driven insights designed to improve the sustainability and efficiency of their operations.
Longer term, Cognizant and Tidal will explore additional ways to apply the platform to make an impact on so-called “blue economy” industries that depend on ocean insights, including blue transportation, blue energy and blue carbon.
Cognizant said that together with aquaculture – part of blue food – these component sectors represent a significant opportunity to decarbonise large ocean-based industries.
The partnership coincides with the launch of the Cognizant Ocean business group, which aims to drive sustainability, efficiency and growth in the blue economy.
Tidal has developed a digital technology solution that utilises innovations in underwater perception, machine learning, AI and automation to gather and analyse data. Cognizant will collaborate with Tidal to make these technologies more widely available to the aquaculture industry to help them make more intelligent decisions, build more resiliency into their operations, and run more efficiently in a strict regulatory environment.
For the past five years, Tidal has worked with aquaculture industry leaders to develop its solution, which includes a system of underwater cameras, sensors, machine perception tools and software designed to interpret complex ocean environments. The current platform has been built and validated using Tidal’s AI, which has been trained on 8 billion underwater observations of fish behaviour across 900 terabytes of operational video.
Through its longstanding relationships, Cognizant will help companies integrate Tidal’s technology into their enterprise systems, linking data from across their business to gather insights and make decisions that improve efficiency throughout the entire value chain.
“With digital technology ocean industries can not only become more resilient and future-proof in the face of a more unpredictable and rapidly changing environment, but they can help make oceans healthier and address humanity’s biggest problems – from food production to renewable energy to climate change,” said Stig Martin Fiskå, Global Head of Cognizant Ocean. “We welcome this important collaboration with Tidal to work together with clients to support their holistic, systems-level change.”
Ocean based-companies can drive better business outcomes and contribute to decarbonisation through lowering the carbon footprint of their operations, Cognizant said. For example, in aquaculture fish farmers can use machine perception tools and AI to automate feeding time in accordance with the hunger levels of the fish to reduce wasted feed, a significant carbon emissions source while improving growth metrics.
“To preserve ocean health, we need to take an innovation-driven and collaborative approach with aquaculture companies and other businesses that make their living on and in the ocean,” said Tidal Founder and CEO, Neil Davé. “Through our collaboration with Cognizant, we hope to build on our initial success in the Norwegian aquaculture industry, and eventually expand to other sectors of the blue economy to make a meaningful impact in ocean health and global decarbonisation.”
