Contest winners seek technological solutions to help save the St. Lawrence River

Can artificial intelligence be used to help predictwater quality? Could an app for fishermen help signal the presence
of invasive species?

Technology, and how it can help save one of North America's mostthreatened waterways, was a focal point of a two-day Montreal summitfocused on the St. Lawrence River.

The event included a contest forteams to develop innovative solutions to water management.

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The winning entry, announced Friday, was a Quebec-based team thatdeveloped a statistical computer model that uses a combination ofopen data and artificial intelligence to predict whether the river'swaters would be safe for swimmers.

Team leader Emile Sylvestre said the platform takes ininformation provided by cities and Environment Canada such asrainfall, overflows and ocean currents and uses it to predictwater quality at different beaches along the river.

Best-yet, Sylvestre said the model called Info-Baignade learns as it goes.

"Our model is based on artificial intelligence andthus itlearns, as more open data and sampling tests are entered, to makethe most precise predictions possible in order to constantly improvethe model," said Sylvestre, a PhD student at Montreal's EcolePolytechnique.

'We want to democratize the river'

Sylvestre says the team hopes to work with cities who can use theinformation to make decisions on water management and let citizensknow whether the water is likely safe for swimming at any givenmoment.

Complex as it sounds, the goal is simple: to get people morepeople jumping into the river.

"We want to democratize the river," Sylvestre said. "Right nowcitizens are scared of going in, because they don't know the stateof the water."

Other top finishers in the contest included a system of flexibleunderwater pillars to prevent riverbank erosion, an app to providefishermen with information on local species, and a project to usedrones to take water samples and photographs for scientificanalysis.

One of the conference's stated goals is to work towards having ahealthy river by 2030.

Earlier this year, an American environmental group placed the St.Lawrence on its annual list of the most endangered rivers.

American Rivers said the biggest threat was from "harmful" damoperations that are threatening fish, wildlife and local
communities.