Halmos College to Host Diver-operated Underwater Satellites Seminar

On Wednesday, March 11 at 10 a.m., Joost den Haan, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of PlanBlue will be presenting a seminar entitled, “Efficient seafloor monitoring using diver-operated underwater satellites”. Dr. den Haan has been an active diver and scientist for many years. He has monitored the seafloor all around the world, during his M.Sc, Ph.D, and postdoctoral research. He experienced first-hand how time-consuming and tedious seafloor monitoring is both under water as well as back in the lab. With this in mind, a few years ago, he founded the seafloor monitoring company ‘planblue’ (www.planblue.com), which develops underwater satellites. This technology combines hyperspectral and RGB imaging with artificial intelligence and underwater navigation, and make seafloor monitoring much more efficient, as the seafloor data is standardized, objective and analyzed much faster. As a result, seafloor monitoring becomes cost-efficient at high quality. The aim of planblue is to build a universal seafloor database, which informs scientists, coastal managers, politicians, also the general public and industry on the importance of our seafloor and provide them with a tool to visualize and simplify complex data. This technology will help speed up climate legislation, but also help tackle other global critical problems, such as plastic waste pollution on our seafloor.

For more information, please visit www.planblue.com, or check out Dr. den Haan’s personal TEDx story on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocsjpCP0AZA.