S · A
Sensing
Seeing what is there. A camera at altitude, and a model that reads every frame.
About
Measurefirst.
Most decisions about the waste reaching the sea are made on numbers nobody measured. This is an attempt to fix the measuring.
Ask how much wastereaches the sea, and youget a guess.
You will usually get a figure derived from a transect walk: a volunteer counting items in a few sample squares, multiplied up. It is careful work, but it is a sample, it is slow, and two people doing it produce two different answers.
A drone flies the same stretch in minutes and records every frame, at high tide and low, in every season. The problem stops being collection and becomes reading, which is a problem computers are good at. Done on shores, on the creeks that meet the sea and on the rivers upstream, it shows where the waste comes from, not only where it lands.
What we care about
Four rules the work is held to.
- 01
Tight boxes over impressive ones
The headline detection score was already high before the biggest fix. What was wrong was box tightness, and that is what the mass estimate rides on.
- 02
Sourced numbers
Every reference weight has a citation. Our own estimates were off by up to 59% when we checked them, which is why we stopped estimating.
- 03
Stated uncertainty
Mass is called an estimate everywhere it appears, because that is what it is.
- 04
Humans in the loop
Every prediction can be corrected, and each correction makes the next survey better.
The name
A · F
Accounting
Saying how much. A count, a footprint and an estimated mass, per class, per survey.
SAAF is built at IIDA Labs, a focused research organisation. Sensing and Accounting of Aquatic Floatables is the long form of the name.