'Grand Challenge' Grant to Provide Seed Funds in Partnership with New Bedford Port Authority
NEW BEDFORD, Mass., May 9, 2019 (Newswire.com) - Spherical | Analytics (S|A), in collaboration with the New Bedford Port Authority as part of the New Bedford Ocean Cluster, recently won a competitive grant worth nearly $600,000, with $250,000 provided by the State of Massachusetts’ Seaport Economic Council (SEC) “Grand Challenge.”
Grant funding will be used to seed the Marine Databank (MDB) powered by S|A’s Immutably™ for Maritime Trust Platform and managed by the New Bedford Port Authority.
With the power of Immutably™ for Maritime, data will be cryptographically proofed and ledgered using blockchain and other digital technologies. Contributors can know their data will be safe, and users can trust that the data and its sources are legitimate. Only those trusted sources of data will then be fed into network graph analytics, machine learning, and visualization services that will then be made available to MDB participants under carefully negotiated terms and conditions.
The MDB will also include a public information access portal.
“By bringing S|A together with the subject matter experts at the New Bedford Port Authority, the commercial fishing fleet and their partners as well as UMASS SMAST, we are making good on the promise of technology to materially and persistently support fleets, scientific communities, regulators, risk/ finance partners and coastal communities as they work to make gains in sustainable fisheries for food security, oceans health, and overall health and wellness on the planet”
The SEC “Grand Challenge” provides grant funding and technical expertise to organizations and groups that seek to use innovative technological solutions to solve coastal and marine environmental and economic challenges throughout the state of Massachusetts. The grant is funded through the Office of Lieutenant Governor Karyn Polito.
“The Port of New Bedford continues to evolve as a leading center of marine science innovation, and today’s announcement is further evidence of that,” said Mayor Jon Mitchell, who chairs the New Bedford Port Authority. He added, “Dozens of businesses located in and around New Bedford have been tracking, and continue to track, hundreds of individual data points for a variety of purposes. These data points are sitting in a number of physical and digital spaces, creating a highly underutilized data environment. At the same time, there are hundreds of public data sets that are also sitting in a variety of physical and digital spaces. Our goal is to find ways to capture the latent value of all this data, and put it toward productive economic use for our industries and residents.”
In addition to partnering with the New Bedford Port Authority (NBPA) and the New Bedford Ocean Cluster (NBOC), S|A is also working closely with many other local institutions including the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School of Marine Sciences and Technology (SMAST), the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, the Green High Performance Computing Center, and Baycoast Bank.
“We are excited to be given the opportunity to work on such an exciting project with Spherical Analytics and SMAST,” says Ed Anthes-Washburn, Port Director of the NBPA. “Through this project, we can basically turn our fishing fleet into a fleet of research vessels that are on the water 365 days a year collecting data that could provide additional streams of revenue for fishermen.”
In 2017, under the name ImpactLABS, S|A partnered with the then-New Bedford Harbor Development Commission to establish the New Bedford Ocean Cluster, joining the Icelandic Ocean Cluster Network. Founded by Thor Sigfusson of Iceland, the Icelandic Ocean Cluster Network has branches across the Atlantic in New Bedford, Maine, Iceland, and Norway.
“Spherical | Analytics was created to serve as the world’s most trusted source for environmental data to be applied to a new generation of sustainable enterprises, climate risk mitigation and resilience initiatives,” stated Dan Harple, Founder and CEO of S|A.
“By bringing S|A together with the subject matter experts at the New Bedford Port Authority, the commercial fishing fleet and their partners as well as UMASS SMAST, we are making good on the promise of technology to materially and persistently support fleets, scientific communities, regulators, risk/ finance partners and coastal communities as they work to make gains in sustainable fisheries for food security, oceans health, and overall health and wellness on the planet,” stated Chris Rezendes, Chief Business Officer at S|A.
Spherical | Analytics aims to provide the world’s highest pedigreed Environmental Trust Platform. S|A’s platform delivers all-source ingestion, cryptographic proofing services, distributed ledgers, network graph analytics, and machine learning. S|A provides enterprise-class digital trust platforms to a wide range of resilience-seeking public and private partnerships, enabling them to solve big environmental challenges both locally and globally, profitably and securely.
To learn more about Immutably™ for Maritime, S|A, or how these software solutions can enhance your impact, visit us at:
Website: www.sphericalanalytics.io
Twitter: @SphereAnalytics
Email: info@sphericalanalytics.io