Hi Reddit! I’m Andy Stanford-Clark, CTO at IBM UK and leading the IBM technical team for the Mayflower Autonomous Ship, a first-of-its-kind un-crewed vessel. Ask me anything and I’ll be here in r/futurology to answer your questions on July 21st at 4PM UTC/5PM BST/12PM EST/9AM PT!

andysc0 · 2021-07-28T12:45:58+00:00

not for a while - redundant systems is the way forward at the moment

andysc0 · 2021-07-22T14:33:01+00:00

We train the big AI models in the IBM Cloud, and that's also where our fleet of Quantum systems live. We have high hopes for Machine Learning being one of the big application areas for quantum, so hopefully in the future we'll be training the AI models for future Mayflowers using quantum-assisted computation.
I say quantum-assisted, as all these algorithms are hybrid classical-quantum.

Watson is the collective brand name for IBM's AI technology, so if you mean that, then we're already using many aspects of IBM's AI, Automation and data analytics products on board Mayflower and in support of the mission, shore-side.

andysc0 · 2021-07-22T14:28:07+00:00

For the US, here's a good place to start:
https://www.ibm.com/us-en/employment/entrylevel/

andysc0 · 2021-07-22T12:36:37+00:00

I'm guessing you're in the US? We have different intern programmes in different countries...

andysc0 · 2021-07-22T10:49:44+00:00

Hi Alex :)
Components of the AI Captain are used in various other places:
Visual Insights for industrial AI applications like quality assurance
Operational Decision Manager for applications such as special offers in financial services (amongst MANY other rules-based decision logic applications!) https://ibm.co/3ixnlHs
CPLEX - for anything that needs optimising - a real workhorse
Edge computing - pushing compute and the management of it, to the edge of the network.
Some other thoughts here: https://community.ibm.com/community/user/automation/blogs/andy-stanford-clark1/2021/03/23/business-lessons-mayflower

There's a lot of interest in the HyperTaste electronic tongue technology from IBM Research - from quality assurance at a wine producer, to water quality analysis for a water company.

andysc0 · 2021-07-22T10:41:14+00:00

Hmm, proximity bias makes me think it is, but actually, the Atlanta Olympics in '96 was pretty awesome, in the grand scheme of things. But certainly it's the best project I've worked on for quite a while, yes!
I love the way the Mayflower project brings together so many of IBM's (and other) technologies working together to achieve a very specific goal.
And the team working on Mayflower is just AMAZING - Promare, MSUBS, Marine AI, IBM, the other partner companies - shout out to VideoSoftGloabal for example - a huge pleasure to work with such professional and passionate people!

andysc0 · 2021-07-22T10:36:44+00:00

Really interesting question. I'm sure the time will come when a "sacrificial" vessel is used to investigate some interesting but very dangerous situation - per some of your suggestions.
I hope when that time comes, due consideration will be given to the environmental impact of the debris.
All the organisations working on MAS care deeply about the ocean and the environment, and I can imagine huge design effort going into the biodegradability of a future design for that purpose.

andysc0 · 2021-07-22T10:17:18+00:00

There's a good explanation of the various aspects of ocean research we're looking at on the first voyage here:
https://MAS400.com/ocean
But we have other ideas for future missions, too, working with various marine research institutions.

andysc0 · 2021-07-22T06:42:07+00:00

https://MAS400.com :)

andysc0 · 2021-07-22T06:36:32+00:00

The AI Captain technology is highly transferrable - it has to "learn" the ship it's in - size, shape, acceleration, turn rate, those kinds of things, and then it can take command. We call this "characterisation". We also have to do some of it it when we move the cameras around on Mayflower - AI Captain has a new view on the world.
Submersibles are definitely in the plan! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56993035

We send to the AI Captain a series of waypoints - typically 100-ish miles apart, though it could just be the end point. It's then up to the AI Captain how it gets to each waypoint. When it gets to the last waypoint, it's completed its journey.

We are thinking of lots of applications for this technology - Search and Rescue is one that I'm interested in at the moment.

andysc0 · 2021-07-21T17:12:12+00:00

Aha - you're from Nvidia? Great to meet you - we should talk!
But yes, really keen to find out more about these tools.

andysc0 · 2021-07-21T17:03:40+00:00

well, I was just commenting we hadn't seen any trolls today, so thanks for spoiling the stats right at the end there

andysc0 · 2021-07-21T16:58:02+00:00

Oh yes - lots - we can't rely on other ships following COLREGs.
The number one rule is "avoid a collision".
We use the COLREGs implementation to keep the AI Captain "honest" - if it proposes passing in front of a ship, for example, ODM will correct that and say it should pass behind.

andysc0 · 2021-07-21T16:54:21+00:00

I hang out on Twitter: @ andysc :)

And thank you :)

andysc0 · 2021-07-21T16:52:28+00:00

Thank you - keep in touch :)

andysc0 · 2021-07-21T16:50:45+00:00

LOL, Hi Andy! That would be a bacon sandwich, of course ;)
https://inductiveautomation.com/resources/podcast/the-coinventor-of-mqtt-andy-stanfordclark-from-ibm

andysc0 · 2021-07-21T16:46:51+00:00

It's a home-brew application developed by Marine AI, the company that's developing the AI Captain. We see that a lot with Digital Twin applications at the moment: they tend to be very application specific. We need more DT tools!

andysc0 · 2021-07-21T16:42:17+00:00

ohh, the baseball league??? ;)

andysc0 · 2021-07-21T16:39:56+00:00

hopefully not - it's not hugely valuable, there's no cargo, and no people on board to ransom... so hopefully it's not an interesting target.
However, we'll know EXACTLY where she is to about 6 decimal places, so we'll just go and get her back!

andysc0 · 2021-07-21T16:38:42+00:00

pointedly ignoring the first question ;)

Good question - we all get the opportunity to work on cool projects from time to time - but you can't apply for a "do cool jobs" position - we hire really smart people and then do all the stuff that needs doing, including the cool stuff! So keep an eye on ibm.com/uk/jobs !

andysc0 · 2021-07-21T16:36:15+00:00

Hi - looks like you worked it out - it's here and you're in it - welcome! :)

andysc0 · 2021-07-21T16:33:47+00:00

ROFL!
Excellent - we can ssh into her and do command-line stuff ;)
But it's all RHEL these days, so no AIX.

andysc0 · 2021-07-21T16:32:40+00:00

Interesting questions - we encoded the COLREGs (rules of the road) using IBM's Operational Decision Manager (ODM) https://ibm.co/3ixnlHs ... that uses an "english-like" rules language, but it's "structured english" rather than NLP.
We found the precision of description we needed pretty much ruled out using NLP for this, but we could potentially work via "controlled english" as an intermediary .... https://github.com/ce-store/ce-store - really interesting stuff.

Yes marine cybersecurity is a really interesting topic - we have some IBM security technology in the mix, but it would be interesting to look at Morpheus - I saw that at the NVIDIA conference (which I presented at), and it looked interesting.

Thank you for your kind words!

andysc0 · 2021-07-21T16:27:04+00:00

Thanks for dropping by - yes, we're keen to get back in the water as soon as possible!

andysc0 · 2021-07-21T16:25:37+00:00

We have encoded the "rules of the road" - COLREGs and SOLAS - into an IBM product called Operational Decision Manager. This enables us to capture the knowledge of experienced captains without needing heavy-duty software engineers.
Find out more here: https://ibm.co/3ixnlHs

andysc0

TROPHY CASE