SMART app: help us identifying marine litter with your smartphone

In celebration of World Oceans Day yesterday, the SMART team launched the SMART app to help identify marine debris. Society can now help scientists identify marine plastic debris, thus contributing to the development of new methods to track plastic in the oceans.

How can you actively contribute to this cause? If you have a smartphone with a Portuguese subscription you can download the application and whenever you see marine debris just use the application to identify the accumulation. The application records your geolocation, but also allows you to describe the characteristics of the debris accumulation (size, predominant color and area of accumulation). By using the app you will be contributing to the creation of a European reference repository, essential for training algorithms to detect this debris from space, and developing a tool to monitor plastic pollution in the oceans.

Why the app?
"We need to validate the plastic accumulations predicted by machine learning algorithms through in situ observations, and we quickly realized that we could expand this concept more broadly. This is how we came up with the idea of the mobile application, as a solution to this need," says Leonardo Azevedo, coordinator of the SMART project and one of the people responsible for developing the application.

The SMART project, winner of the first edition of the AI Moonshot Challenge, promoted by the Portuguese Space Agency, is a consortium of national universities and research centers, which responds to the challenges presented in the first edition of the AI Moonshot Challenge (2020): to make a difference in the fight against ocean pollution, with solutions that join the possibilities of space technologies to Artificial Intelligence.

"The AI Moonshot Challenge was a unique opportunity to address a problem of extreme relevance in our society, contributing scientifically to this research topic and producing results with practical impact.", Leonardo Azevedo