Real-time Visual Analytics for Aquaculture

Given the global pressures on our common food sources including population growth, economic advancementand natural resource depletion, aquaculture is well placed to enhance nutritious food production and bolsterfood security. While the global aquatic harvest through wild capture has essentially flatlined since the 1990's,aquaculture is an industry that has grown continuously, supplementing the stagnation of naturally source fishproduction and thereby keeping this high-quality source of protein within financial reach of ordinaryCanadians. However, the difficulty of gaining approval for new sites for aquaculture is a severe limiting factorin Canada and it is important that those have been approved be optimized for productivity. Thus faroptimization has often been ad hoc in industrial settings and reliant on the intuition of workers in the field.There is a clearly stated desire from industry participants for more real-time data and means of analyzing thatdata to maximize production and minimize costs. This requires a two-fold effort: the development of cost andtime-effective hardware to gather the data and capable software to visualize and analyze the gathered data.This work will focus on the design of visual analytics for real-time aquaculture optimization. This will involvethe design of interfaces and visualizations to better analyze real-time aquaculture data and discover as yetunknown insights and relationships. This in turn will lead to product improvements that will enable farmerscan make decisions around both feeding and fish health.