

Drones using artificial intelligence will be deployed off beaches in New South Wales, Australia, to detect sharks and warn swimmers.
The new drones will patrol beaches and use artificial intelligence to detect sharks in the water. It’s not the first time drones have been used in Australia to detect sharks, but what makes the new drones interesting is that they do not rely on human operators controlling the drones to look for sharks. Instead, they use artificial intelligence software so they can spot sharks by themselves. To improve the results, additional software is also deployed to analyze the video feed from the drones to doubly make sure that sharks aren’t missed.
Nabin Sharma, a research associate at the University of Technology, told Reuters that AI is better than humans when it comes to spotting sharks with humans only having a 20 to 30 percent accuracy rate in shark spotting. AI-driven software has up to a 90 percent detection rate. “It’s not about replacing human beings all together, it’s about assisting human beings to get the work done in a better way with more accuracy,” he noted.
Shark spotting is a serious business in Australia, a country where most of its population lives along the coastline and swimming at a beach is a common pastime for many. Although shark attacks themselves actually aren’t all that common in Australia, and mostly involve surfers, which look like seals to sharks, media hysteria has made preventing shark attacks a serious concern in the country.
Despite Internet memes suggesting that everything will kill you in Australia, the United States topped the list for shark attacks in 2016, with Australia coming in second place. Within the United States, Florida is the state with the highest number of shark attacks.
The new, AI-powered drones will be deployed off beaches in Sydney and northern New South Wales starting Sept. 1.
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