Dolphin Tank challenge: tackling climate change and sustainability with AI

With this in mind, as part of Day of AI Australia’s 2024 AI literacy program, earlier this year students were presented with the challenge: ‘How can AI be used to tackle climate change and sustainability?’.

Day of AI Australia is a free classroom program for teachers and their Years 5-10 students that provides foundational AI literacy. It’s a full day of lessons designed to be taught by any teacher and includes a lesson developed by UNSW on ethics and responsible use of AI), large language models and chatbots; and how AI is impacting industries and careers.

More than 190 teams of students from all sectors submitted ideas in Term 2, with six finalist teams chosen to work with experts from tech business, Rokt, and UNSW’s Computer Science and Engineering School to refine their idea and develop a prototype to pitch in what’s called Dolphin Tank – a slightly scaled back variation of reality TV show, Shark Tank.

Bold ideas this year have included an AI powered sea-cleaning robot, an eco-friendly traffic management system to reduce emissions and monitor air quality, an AI-powered drought detection and community alert system, an AI-powered drone to monitor a school garden and promote a healthy ecosystem, and a system which uses AI to monitor areas increasingly at risk of landslides and avalanches.

The remaining finalist, a team of four Year 10 students from North Sydney Boys High School, proposed an integrated system using a recurrent neural network to make commercial fishing more sustainable.

Vladimir Tosic, a STEM teacher at the school who specialises in engineering software, says from a teacher perspective, he ‘really loves’ these types of competitions.

“They motivate students to learn and apply knowledge to solve real life problems, firstly,” he tells EducationHQ.

“… but also students gain transfer skills, so for example, ‘how do you research a problem?’, ‘How do you narrow the problem and your solution down into something that is manageable?’, ‘How do you manage your project, particularly time management?’, ‘How do you create interesting deliverables - for example, whether it’s a video presentation or a short summary?’.

“So students through this project, gain very valuable skills for further studies and for industry, that they might not get from the strict curriculum that is more about textbook content and other types of more, let’s say, static knowledge.”

Tosic says his school’s team were particularly keen to try to alleviate the problem of over-fishing, and so looked at various possible ideas on how artificial intelligence can be used in this way.

“They also looked at what other people worldwide have been proposing, and have been finalising their idea and a prototype for that idea using some existing data sets,” Tosic says.

“So they have spoken with a practicing marine scientist, they’ve found some data sets from other parts of the world, [they] have basically been using this freely available information and leveraging some of the existing solutions, but ultimately trying to solve a problem that has not yet been covered by others.”

Tosic likes that students have to learn to adjust expectations and ambition with their ideas for these competitions.

“So, in the Year 10 team’s case, at the beginning, they were a bit too ambitious, right?

“They wanted to look at various aspects, at satellite images of fishes, of fishing boats, they wanted to look at historical records of fishing in particular areas, and also, water temperature and other aspects that impact on the on the quantity of fishes,” Tosic says.

STEM teacher Vladimir Tosic says students gain valuable skills from competitions like Dolphin Tank for further studies and for industry, that they might not get from a strict curriculum that is more about textbook content and other types of more static knowledge.

“But they’re now scaling that down to make it more realistic, and while what they started doing was a bit too ambitious for their level, it’s also good that they have learned about the problems, such as the importance of good data for machine learning systems, because if you don’t have good data, whatever program you write or whatever artificial intelligence algorithms you use, the solution will not be appropriate.”

Tosic says AI is embraced in many ways at his school, by staff and by students, with students particularly thriving with its many applications.

Students are learning how to develop AI systems, and some of their own, through major projects such as generating music scores and notes for sheet music (to help composers, not replace them, Tosic is keen to point out), and using AI to provide smarter routing of transport that takes into consideration not only congestion and shortest route per car, but also how to minimise overall CO2 emissions.

“In 2022, in a unit called Medical Technology, Year 10 students had a task to use artificial intelligence for medical diagnosis and two of our projects competed internationally and won awards,” Tosic says.

“So one project used existing (freely available) images of melanomas and images that are not skin cancer, and wrote their own artificial intelligence software for diagnosing whether it is melanoma or not melanoma, and what the probability is of that being a melanoma.

“And they won the second place in the world artificial intelligence competition for youths – and in the same year, another team that did the same thing, but with brain tumours, got the fifth place in the same competition.”

Dr Jake RENZELLA, a senior lecturer and Director of Studies (Computer Science) at UNSW says the Dolphin Tank, provides the university with the opportunity to focus its expertise on budding students in a “wonderfully collaborative and supportive environment”.

Natasha Banks, program director at Day of AI Australia, says the challenge and Dolphin Tank process is about empowering students to take on the challenges that will impact their futures – and have fun learning about AI in the process.

“Having such high calibre experts from UNSW and Rokt to work with these students is such a fantastic opportunity and we can’t wait to see what ideas they develop together,” she says.

The fully virtual Dolphin Tank event is part of National Science Week celebrations and took place virtually on Wednesday, August 14 from midday til 1.30pm AEST, when teams pitched to a panel of expert judges.