Marine technology & AI

How can technology be used to help us understand, protect and increase engagement with the ocean? That’s the question we’re constantly asking ourselves, and the answers are almost infinite. MARE-Madeira’s marine technology team sits at the intersection of marine biology and conservation, hardware and software design, electrical engineering and bioinformatics. Our ability to create is limited only by our imagination.

In collaboration with the University of Madeira, we give students the opportunity to design and build IoT sensors for acoustic sensors, telemetry or radio communication tags and accelerometers. Our students collect data and apply AI to automate classification, model animal behaviors and predict migratory patterns; others create apps for mobile phones with which students, citizen scientists and the general public can interact.

Together, our work seeks to provide solutions for some of marine research’s greatest challenges, such as identifying and collecting marine litter in an automated way, developing less invasive ways to monitor megafauna and monitoring sound pollution to inform conservation and reduce human impacts on animal telecommunications. We’re also working hard to make our citizen science apps as user-friendly and engaging as possible, to attract more of the public to marine research. This will help us accelerate our collective understanding and conservation of the ocean.

Learn more about our marine technology work by visiting the Wave Labs website.

Leadership