CSE professor uses AI to predict ship emissions

In the fight against climate change, researchers look to ocean vessels 

Shipping accounts for a significant fraction of the total global carbon emissions, and University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering Professor Dan Knights is doing his part to identify which ships are the culprit and how much they’re emitting. 

“It is a giant black box which makes it hard to do any attribution of emissions to different operators and owners,” said Knights. “Fortunately, there is a subset of ships that are required to report their emissions to the European Union. Of the 100,000+ ships on the ocean, we have data for about 18,000 of them over the course of several years. 

“We have been using AI to train a model on this dataset to predict the emissions for the remaining ships.”

The goal of this project is to improve transparency in the shipping sector, as the world works to lower emissions in the fight against climate change.

“Once you know which ships are the worst contributors, you can find similar ships to make improvements and recommendations,” Knights explained. “Other future work could include analysis of routes and putting together an optimal path and cadence for shipping.”

Read the full story on the Department of Computer Science and Engineering website.