Introduction
Beaches play an essential role in many beachgoers and beachlovers. Smart beaches are visitors, safeguards and lifeguards friendly, assuring active diagnosis, early warning, and actionable interventions of undesirable and dangerous beach conditions for improving beach public safety, amenity, and benefits. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science play a crucial role in enabling smart beaches.
Smart Beaches Project
The Smart Beaches Project was funded by Australian Government’s Smart Cities and Suburbs Program that encourages collaborative, cutting-edge projects that improve the liveability, productivity and sustainability of Australian cities, towns and suburbs. The Project involves the Redhead Beach and Blacksmiths Beach in Lake Macquarie and Manly Beach and Shelly Beach in the Northern Beaches Council LGA, as well as the University of Technology Sydney.
Smart Beaches Analytics
We led the Smart Beaches Analytics project, which aims for data-driven smart beaches for proactive safety and risk analysis and prediction and better beach planning and management. The Project explored opportunities of data-driven findings to
- Enable automated collection of multiple sources of data and repositories about beach safety, condition, risk and behaviours;
- Analyze risk factors on beaches associated with various aspects, e.g., weather, water conditions, events, and accidents;
- Enable deep analytics of the dynamics, relations, interactions between data attributes and consequences on beach safety and risk;
- Enable early prediction, warning, recommendation and explanation of beach safety and risk;
- Enable interactive mitigation and interventions with manager and user’s communications and interventions and feedback.
The Project involves various beach data, including:
- Beach weather data
- Lifeguard and safeguard events
- Water conditions
- Beach conditions
- Beach events and activities
Smart Beach Analytics Platform
A smart beach analytics online platform was built as a result of this project, the platform can be accessed by http://www.datasciences.info/beachanalytics/.
