Annual Report
2022
Shaping and strengthening our direction
2022 was a transformative and momentous year for HUB Ocean. I joined as Chief Executive in January and led the team on a journey to strongly sharpen our vision, mission, and place globally. Together, we created a plan to unlock valuable ocean data, build the technology backbone, and put the data to work for ocean health and wealth.
The year’s most defining moment was probably the release of the Ocean Data Platform for private preview. We gathered skilled scientists from various backgrounds and professions for the first tests and explorations. The Platform showed immense promise as a solution for addressing our users’ core pain points, and we received great feedback that we used to improve it.
New partnerships and collaborations accelerated our efforts to unlock the power of ocean data. This report shows how we anchored ourselves in what we deem core gravity nodes for impact across our focus areas. Leveraging this network, we launched new initiatives and continued to build on existing ones, strengthening our array of data-driven projects for positive change.
The year culminated in our first Annual Partner Event, where leaders from science, industry and decision-making came together to take stock of the year and explore new possibilities. I can attest that these organizations understand that engaging with partners like HUB Ocean is vital to truly allowing data to have an impact.
We participated and presented at 60 events, strengthening our presence on the global stage at events like the World Economic Forum´s Annual Meeting in Davos and UN Ocean Conference in Portugal. On the day of hybrid participation, we repeatedly encounter the importance of being physically present to connect with relevant actors.
We built a dedicated team with a shared vision and a deep commitment to our mission. Prioritising alignment within our team and advancing diversity when recruiting new team members were key priorities. We welcomed six great minds for a team representing twelve different nationalities and gender balance.
I am incredibly proud of our accomplishments so far, and I look forward to seeing where we go from here. We have a strong team, a sharp vision and plan, and deep commitment and dedication that will propel us forward into potent delivery in the coming year. I want to thank all our partners and supporters for your continued belief in our mission.
Kimberly Mathisen, CEO
Our ocean impact
We are connecting data, but also people and technologies, nurturing collaboration and partnership with the ultimate goal of rewiring industry and healing the ocean.
Gry Ulverud, Chief Growth & Impact Officer
Ocean data can describe, for example, water temperature, ice density, population numbers of certain species or shipping routes. Industry, governments, and science use this data for their reasons.
At the intersection of the three lies HUB Ocean, gathering open, closed, and dispersed ocean data and making it accessible via its Ocean Data Platform.
Finance / Spatial Finance / TNFD / GDFA
We have developed a proof of concept in collaboration with Copenhagen Business School, Green Digital Finance Alliance, S&P Global, and WWF Denmark, proving it is possible to provide blue metrics to Nordic financial institutions. It overlays several types of data: environmental, geolocated asset-level, and financial ownership data. This enables financial institutions to measure the risk from a shipping company’s activities in marine protected areas.
Shipping
Klaveness, Mercuria, and Rederiforbundet successfully tested our Ship Emissions Tracker, validating its use case to analyse global emissions from shipping. We are working with the First Mover’s Coalition of the World Economic Forum, Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center, and Green Digital Finance Alliance to accelerate zero-carbon shipping.
Aquaculture
Our Salmon Lice Monitoring App makes it easier for Norwegian fisheries to monitor and take action on occurrences of salmon lice. The solution receives and unlocks data from Norwegian salmon farming industry locations, which develop solutions to reduce the industry’s footprint, secure biodiversity and increase access to nutritious food.
Renewable Energy
On the way to unlocking decades of ocean data from the oil and gas industry, we’re working with Aker BP on sharing environmental survey data from the Norwegian Sea.
We also are facilitating more data sharing from existing operations, such as IKM's remotely operated vehicles used to monitor offshore infrastructure, which capture valuable ocean bottom data. We are collaborating to deliver useful data to scientists that can use it.
Supporting the fast but responsible growth of offshore wind is hugely important, and we have exciting projects to share that will come in 2023.
Iliad, Digital Twins of the Ocean
Iliad is a large consortium of 56 partners funded by the European Commission to build digital twins of the ocean. Pilot projects developed by teams across the world help scientists to predict changes in the ocean and test intervention methods. We participate in one of the pilots, “Water Quality”, for which we livestream data from the Trondheim fjord and onboard additional ocean data.
HUB Ocean leads the development of ILIAD data architecture. Multiple components in various work packages include APIs, catalogue, model integration and many more. To ensure the synchronisation of these components, HUB Ocean chairs ILIAD Technical Task Force. Open synch API is the component that we build ourselves in collaboration with Mimiro and Open Geospatial Consortium to make it a certified standard.
Unlocking ocean data
“We are certain that privately-owned industrial ocean data must be unlocked for science to increase understanding of the ocean through improved analytics, modelling, and prediction. Fueling ocean models with relevant, accurate and detailed ocean physics data can enhance the prediction of hurricanes, storms, floods, droughts, and heat waves”.
Anna Silyakova, Science Lead
UN Ocean Conference
The 2022 UN Ocean Conference themed around “Scaling up ocean action based on science and innovation through partnerships and solutions”. The Conference aimed to unlock ocean-based solutions to address some of the most defining issues of our time, from climate change to economic inequality. HUB Ocean used this milestone event to meet with partners through more than 20 bilateral meetings and participated in a number of panels and dialogues.
Workshop on sharing industrial ocean data
HUB Ocean is managing the first pillar related to the Special Emissary’s work, whereas REV Ocean the two latter. We hosted a workshop with the IOC of UNESCO with 20 leading ocean scientists from Europe, the US, and the Middle East to outline specific use cases where industrial data sharing would benefit their ocean models. Future workshops will populate use cases revolving around improving modelling and forecasts of extreme weather, mapping of turbidity and currents, as well as modelling of sea level rise and coastal erosion.
UN Ocean Decade Data Coordination Group
Established under the Secretariat of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, the Data Coordination Group brings together 25 experts from 12 countries and is responsible for coordinating the UN Ocean Decade. Implementing a “digital ocean ecosystem” is a dynamic, collective, and continuous process, incorporating established approaches and technologies as well as those that are only just emerging.
The main achievement of 2022 has been to develop a strategy to catalyse cooperation between data generators and users from diverse stakeholder groups including governments, UN entities, scientists, philanthropy, as well as industry and the public. HUB Ocean has played an active part in this endeavour.
UN Ocean Decade Special Emissary endorsement
A key milestone towards unlocking industrial data is Kjell Inge Røkke's new high-level role as a Patron of the Ocean Decade Alliance and the UN Ocean Decade Special Emissary for Industrial Ocean Data. The Special Emissary’s commitment will be based on three main pillars:
To unlock priority industrial ocean data from industry sources, making it accessible for science, decision-making, policy, and management
To develop a system to offer free research vessel time for early career researchers around the world
To support the co-design and implementation of Decade Actions related to plastics and the mesopelagic ecosystem.
Ocean Data Action Coalition of the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy
HUB Ocean and Microsoft are leading the Ocean Data Action Coalition. The vision is a globally shared data revolution that will contribute to sustainable ocean management worldwide. Since launching in 2018, 17 world leaders have joined together to realise the mission of sustainably managing 100% of the ocean area under national jurisdictions.
The Ocean Data group works with topics of trust, governance, traceability, and creating value in data sharing with participants identifying specific challenges. The goal is to see companies make real commitments to ocean data sharing. In 2022, HUB Ocean and Microsoft have freed up ocean data both from satellite data and industrial actors and work has been invested in joining forward with the work done under the auspices of the UN Decade for Ocean Science.
Highlights from the
Ocean Data Platform
For the Ocean Data Platform, 2022 was the year when we went into the Private Preview to demonstrate the most basic capabilities, but not least to get important feedback and direction from our community. We extend a big “thank you” to our testers and supporters from almost 50 different organisations worldwide.
Jo Øvstaas, Head of the Ocean Data Platform
Technical Progress
Thanks to the data pipeline newly built with open-source frameworks (Prefect and more) and self-service data upload features, we now can extract and transform oceanographic and industrial data at scale.
Ocean data is easier and much faster to work with due to the smart use of cloud-optimised storage formats (ZARR, GeoParquet and more).
We have started making a unique, fully open, human- and machine-readable data catalogue with APIs, plugins and semantic technologies.
Now it is easier to work with advanced data science through our cloud-based infrastructure based on Dask/JupyterHub and Kubernetes frameworks. There is no need to download large data files anymore – queries, analyses, and visualisations can now be done directly in a web browser.
With a strong belief in the power of data visualisation, we have rolled out the "Ocean Data Explorer" where we prototyped and tested data visualisation solutions in 2D (maps and tiles), 2.5D (MapBox), and 3D (Unreal Engine).
Through close collaboration with our partners and the use of platform technology, we have deployed 5 custom web apps: Safer Ocean Economy, Salmon lice data, Vessel emission tracker and Vessel emission simulator, and Portfolio eViewer.
Private Preview
We welcomed our community to the Private Preview. We had 48 active testers from diverse, highly reputable ocean organisations.
Most interest in the Ocean Data Platform came from community members focusing on Marine Research and Development Education, Capture Fisheries, and High-Tech Marine Products and Services.
Our online Slack community grew by 115% to 350 members. Our participation in international conferences resulted in 2x online lead generation for those interested in the public launch of The Ocean Data Platform, currently around 1,200 international community members.
Chris, Climate Solutions Engineer, Sustainable Global, US
Great, highly usable exploratory platform in my explorations thus far. The Jupyter Hub environment is fantastic, it makes exploration of the data easier and gives me the power to easily decide if I want to pursue a data source further.
Jorge, Post Doc Fellow CSIC, ES
Thanks for this fantastic private preview week! I really enjoyed analysing the shipping dataset. I wanted to assess the routes and the temporal evolution of shipping in the Arctic Ocean, particularly in a period where not only the ice extent, but also the global health and the geopolitics, may influence this activity.
Going forward, we aim to roll out more exciting features and offer access to more datasets. We look forward to having you, our existing and new users, on board to change the fate of the ocean together.
Building our community
If you get people the tools, the information, and the data that they need, you never really know what type of creative solutions people will come up with. It is really interesting to see other people’s perspective on how data can be used.
Tara Zeynep Baris, Product and Data Scientist Lead
Partner Event
In November, we invited our partners and friends to our very first Partner Event; leaders from industry, ocean science and regulators worldwide joined us in Oslo to learn and discuss how we can use ocean data for the benefit of all. We need to have these interdisciplinary dialogues between sectors so that we listen to each other and make decisions together.
Women in Data Science
To encourage more equality within Data Science, our Product and Data Scientist Lead, Tara Zeynep Baris, led a workshop to analyse the NOAA Coral Reef Watch dataset at the Women in Data Science Conference. Groups were encouraged to explore the dataset to answer a specific question about the state of coral reefs. Participants were provided with trained models for predicting coral bleaching.
BRAIN NTNU
In March 2022, BRAIN NTNU, a student group focused on AI at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, organised a hackathon that we jointly ran with Microsoft’s Planetary Computer.
Around fifty participants split into ten groups were tasked with building AI models to identify ocean features through satellite data. Different groups focused on detecting coral reefs, ports, aquaculture facilities and ocean trash. To do so, they could combine satellite imagery from the Planetary Computer and other ocean data from the Ocean Data Platform.
The winning group used AI to find the most efficient way for ships to collect trash from the ocean.
Citizen science app for seafarers
Mercuria is one of the world’s largest independent energy and commodity groups, with more than 500 seafarers working on its group company vessels globally. Seafarers have a unique opportunity to collect ocean data and observe things that the rest of us cannot.
That is why Mercuria and HUB Ocean are developing a citizen science app for seafarers to help collect relevant ocean data while onboard. The proposed solution, which includes both a web app and a mobile app, has the potential to make a meaningful contribution to marine conservation and science efforts, promoting a more sustainable future for our oceans.
Partnership with the World Economic Forum
The World Economic Forum provides a central platform to exchange ideas, share experiences and collaborate on projects, through our membership and affiliation to the Centers of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR).
Through our founding partner Aker, HUB Ocean attended the annual Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum for the first time, which created an excellent opportunity to meet some of the world’s most influential leaders and thinkers shaping the way to a sustainable future.
We also contributed to the agenda of the C4IR Conference called Global Technology and Governance Retreat 2022 where the focus was on harnessing the potential of technologies from the fourth industrial revolution.
Additionally, HUB Ocean supported the World Economic Forum’s UpLink ocean data challenge to recognize innovative small organisations making a difference in this space and elevate them to a network of partners to scale their ambitions. The winners were announced early in 2023.
Communications and People
Strategic storytelling is key in our communications toolbox, and all our activities are centered around this. For a fairly small team, we’re punching well above our weight.
Vigdis Hvaal, Head of Communication, People and Learning
Events and outreach
For 2022, our communication activities were focused in two areas: building our position through digital platforms and participating at key events.
Momentum continued to grow across all platforms. We created new types of content, such as the #dataforgood concept and CEO monthly newsletters. We reached new audiences, exemplified by a 59% increase in followers on our preferred platform, LinkedIn.
In 2022, the HUB Ocean team attended more than 60 events, with our CEO presenting at half of them. Some of the larger events we were present at included the UN Ocean Conference, the annual meeting in Davos, Nor-Shipping and COP27 in Egypt.
Our People
HUB Ocean’s diverse group of experts draws on various personal and professional backgrounds.
We strengthened our team with six new members from January to December 2022: our new CEO, two people working within communications, one person within legal and two people working directly on the Ocean Data Platform.
Gender parity was achieved with 13 out of 26 staff members being women. In the management team, 3 out of 5 are women, the CEO included.
The number of nationalities increased with our colleagues coming from Germany, Nigeria, Canada, Norway, Pakistan, India , Indonesia, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, France, Iran, and the United States.
We work continuously to build and strengthen our company culture through transparency, communication, and involvement.
Financial status
A milestone in moving to a more self-sustained funding model has been achieved: we have onboarded first paying customers to one of our products, the Lice Data Portal.
Martin Styrmoe Moen, CFO
Operating Expenses
Revenue
Our partners played a crucial role in making a significant impact in the year 2022. AKER ASA is HUB Ocean’s primary funding source. In addition, we have witnessed growth in our revenue from strategic partners such as Microsoft, Accenture, Mercuria, and BAHR. An important contribution has also come from the EU and public sector sources.
2022 was a year of transformation and progress for HUB Ocean. Having set out on a journey of unlocking ocean data, building strong partnerships and assembling a dedicated team, we are ready to advance our mission for a healthier and sustainable ocean. We are looking forward to continuing this momentum in the years to come.