Inspiration
Ship strikes are the #1 human cause of large whale deaths. Since I was a kid, I've loved marine life and whales (because they are the biggest animals)! The North Atlantic Right Whale has fewer than 350 left, and over half of known deaths are from ships. Shipping companies have little to no tools to prevent these strikes, so we want to change that.
What it does
DeepRoute merges 7.7M ship positions from NOAA with 310K whale sightings from OBIS into an interactive map. You can draw a potential route and it will instantly try to find a safer one and measure the economic impact of the difference. A neural network trained on 18 features also predicts risk for any ocean location in any month.
How we built it
Python data pipeline processes 10.3 GB of AIS ship data and 310K whale sightings from the OBIS API. SciPy KD-trees find 10.4M close encounters between ships and whales. I then used Folium to generate an interactive map with route analysis running client side in JavaScript. PyTorch is used for the neural network. I also used Claude as a coding assistant.
Challenges we ran into
10GB of raw data didn't fit into my memory, so I made a single pass processor Finding encounters between millions of points was big O of n squared previously, KD trees made it seconds instead of hours Slow-down zones kept rendering on land, fixed by requiring whale observations in each cell
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The routing feature is super cool and useful because of the real world application for real shipping companies. The large amount of data and compatibility for expanding the dataset is also super cool.
What we learned
The gap between raw government data and something actionable is huge. NOAA and OBIS publish great data, but nobody had combined them into a tool a ship operator could actually use. I also learned that making conservation economically viable changes the debate a lot.
What's next for DeepRoute
Real-time AIS feeds instead of monthly snapshots, satellite tagged whale tracking for live alerts, and a mobile app for ship bridge officers.
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