RightShip part of Singapore Maritime Institute R&D collaboration to drive maritime digitalisation and artificial intelligence

A collaborative research programme involving RightShip was among a raft of projects set to benefit from research and development (R&D) funding announced by the Singapore Maritime Institute (SMI) at the 12th Edition of the SMI Forum, held on 11 October 2022.


Themed ‘Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence: Sparking the Maritime Sector’, the event’s guest of honour was Mr Chee Hong Tat, Singapore’s Senior Minister of State for Finance and Transport. In his opening remarks, Mr Chee announced that a series of grants totalling around $22 million will be given to address various issues around decarbonization and digitalisation.


Jointly launched by SMI and Maritime Port Authority (MPA) on 28 April 2022, and supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore, the Maritime Artificial Intelligence (AI) Grant Call is a follow-up to the series of Memorandum of Understandings (MoUs) signed during the 2021 SMI Forum.


Addressing industry-wide gaps and opportunities arising from the increased use of automation and autonomy in the maritime industry, one of the initial proposals was made by our Senior Data Scientist, Anshit Malik. Organisations such as RightShip are asked to be industry sponsors to ensure that real-world issues are being tackled by academic experts.


Anshit said: “Charterers, insurers, ports and financial institutions must look at a multitude of factors including historical incidents and vessel data to determine the risk profile of a vessel to make key decisions on chartering, safety, sustainability and sales. Data incompleteness and poor data quality increases the difficulty of assessing the risk rating of a vessel.


“This problem has a huge potential impact on human and environment safety. We asked how AI could solve the problem using a combination of subject matter expertise and powerful machine learning algorithms to achieve better accuracy, along with stability and explain ability.


“We’re absolutely thrilled that our project ‘AI Based Vessel Risk Profile Estimation and Classification’ is being led by contributors from A-Star (Dr. Xiuju Fu) and the National University of Singapore (Dr. Meng Qiang) with an initial research focus on establishing a multi-source vessel risk data mall.”


RightShip’s vision is a zero-harm maritime industry, and projects like this actively contribute towards achieving that aim.