Between November 2020 and April 2021, four of our student ambassadors from S.4 joined the Ocean Park Conservation Chill Club Ambassadors Scheme to use the Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) technology Coral Restoration. 

The activity allowed the participating students to implement A.I. technology to help researchers to integrate coral census data. Through attending seminars about coral conservation, conducting ecological surveys and4 participating in workshops about A.I. object identification and recognition, our student ambassadors helped to establish a Hong Kong coral A.I. identification system, thereby enriching their knowledge of coral diversity as well as contributing to marine conservation firsthand.

Team leader Katie He summarized that “in this program, we have learnt about using A.I. to protect coral reefs and to conserve other marine creatures. Firstly, we familiarized ourselves with the basic functioning of A.I. We then explored and collected some labelling images at Ocean Park. Then, we used a teachable machine to train the A.I. model and used an online platform called ‘Make Sense’ for labelling more than 1000 images taken by the A.I. machine. Lastly, we went to Ocean Park again to test the results. As we have hoped, the A.I. model could spot out most of the sea cucumbers and corals. This discovery will help the research team to figure out the position of each of the species for better preservation of corals, which are very important in our ecosystem.”