Montreal company recognized for AI tool to track whales from space

Whale Seeker founder Emily Charry Tissier explains how Cetus uses AI to monitor whale populations from space.

A Montreal company is being recognized for a second time for an AI-powered system that monitors whales and other marine mammal populations from space.

Whale Seeker’s Cetus is among UNESCO’s International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI) top 100 projects, which includes AI programs in education, finance, agriculture, climate and other milieus.

The project has been described as “outstanding.”

“Cetus, an AI solution by Whale Seeker, revolutionizes whale conservation with satellite-based detection technology,” the IRCAI says on its site. “By harnessing AI and high-resolution satellite imagery, Cetus accurately detects and classifies whales for global monitoring.”

What does it do?

Cetus uses AI and satellite imagery to spot and classify massive marine mammals across vast and often remote ocean regions, “areas that can be difficult or impossible to cover with traditional aircraft or vessel-based surveys.”

The startup says that it will help governments, NGOs and maritime operators design protection measures and “make better, evidence-based decisions.”

A “Whale Seeker Certified Routes” initiative will thus help create mammal-safe shipping routes, which will use the Cetus platform to analyze risk-reduced routes.

“This problem of knowing in a precise space and time where those marine animals are is important for, yes, conservation, marine protected area management, but also for shipping, also for fishing,” said Tissier. “What we discovered is that we really need to look if you want to have an impact on the ocean. We need to take these tools that we’ve been using but develop a system and a community around them.”

‘Meaningful validation’

Whale Seeker CEO Emily Charry Tissier called the designation “a meaningful validation of our approach: building ethical, scalable AI that can be used in the real world to better protect marine mammals.”

“We’re particularly proud to be on this list because they’re looking at the ethical rigour as well as the technical rigour,” she told CTV News. “Being the first certified B Corp in the world to use AI in service of wildlife, we’ve maintained that. We’ve gotten recertified. We’re maintaining those ethical standards as well as the technical ones. And so we’re particularly proud to be recognized for that.”

B Corp certification means that the business meets the highest standards in social and environmental performance, public transparency and legal accountability.

Tissier was among the 100 brilliant women on the Women in AI Ethics (WAIE) list in 2023. She, along with biomedical engineer Antoine Gagné-Turcotte and field biologist Bertrand Charry, founded Whale Seeker in Montreal in 2018 to bridge “the divide between profitability and sustainability by making marine mammal detection fast, accurate, and accessible.”

Tissier explained that Whale Seeker is a signatory on the Montreal Declaration for Responsible AI. The company works to be energy efficient, diligent in acquiring images, treats employees fairly and ensures their clients use their tools appropriately.

“We work in industries that can do some harm to the environment through the actions that they’re doing (mining, off-shore drilling etc.), but we’re there to make sure that that harm is minimized and is documented, and we make sure that everyone is following the rules,” said Tissier.

It is the second time the Montreal start-up has found itself on the list.

Its 2022 aerial image analysis tool Möbius was also designated as “outstanding.”