WORK FOR GOOD CUT - DIGITAL

GhostNetZero - WWF Germany
WWF Germany

Shortlist

Title:	GhostNetZero
Brand:	WWF Germany
Product/Service:	WWF Germany
Client:	WWF Germany
Agency:	Accenture Song Germany
Production Company:	Panthalassa
Sound Company:	Mikis Meyer
Creative Director:	Thomas Knüwer
Notes for Judging:	Lost or abandoned fishing gear account for up to 30% of the plastic in the sea. These “ghost nets” cause severe damage to marine life. For fish, crabs, mammals and seabirds. Ghost-Nets are extremely hard to detect because they are spread across the oceans world-wide. Finding a way to use technology to make the search and removal of this waste more efficient would make a huge difference to the environment in general and to saving ocean life in particular. GhostNetZero automatizes the detection of lost fishing gear in the oceans by using sonar data that is donated by companies, institutes and authorities who collect this data every day. A custom-built Convolutional Neural Network was trained to classify the sonar scans to detect ghost nets - with up to 95% accuracy. Through the platform and a diver app, findings are published with precise positioning so that government projects and professional divers around the world can take targeted action – based on the data initially fed into the CNN. Since the WWF is rather limited in manpower it was crucial to choosechoose a CNN for the AI learning process because it’s a self-teaching technology and doesn’t need hours of handfeeding of data into the system. GhostNetZero is just getting started - and relies on further data donations. Already, over 5 gigabytes of sonar data and more than 135 million square meters of seabed have been analyzed. The AI-driven detection is more than 75% faster than the previous manual search. 6 partner organizations are already participating - but the attention GhostNetZero has generated goes far beyond that.