The BRGM is partnering one of the six projects selected under the "Investing for the Future" call for expressions of interest (EOI) in artificial intelligence.
4 December 2018
Award-winners under the "Investing for the Future" programme's call for expressions of interest (EOI) in artificial intelligence

Award-winners under the "Investing for the Future" programme's call for expressions of interest (EOI) in artificial intelligence.

© DINSIC

The aim of one of the award-winning projects under the call for expressions of interest in artificial intelligence is to improve environmental policing. The BRGM is partnering this project together with the French Biodiversity Agency (AFB) and the Ministry for the Ecological and Inclusive Transition (MTES).

Testing uses of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve public services.

The call for expressions of interest in artificial intelligence projects was launched in June 2018 under France's "Investing for the Future" programme, with the aim of testing artificial intelligence in public services. Of 52 candidate projects, 6 were selected. These will be developed and tested over a 10 month period.

Artificial intelligence to improve environmental policing

Among the six selected projects, the French government chose the proposal jointly submitted by the AFB, BRGM and MTES to achieve more closely targeted and more effective environmental policing.

Each year, State agencies and public operators (AFB, National Office for Hunting and Wild Fauna, National Parks, etc.) devote more than 2000 full-time equivalent jobs to environmental policing. This project aims to improve the effectiveness of policing by identifying and prioritising policing in risk-prone areas, so that more time can be allocated to follow up on action to remedy non-compliance.

Based on analyses of environmental data, artificial intelligence will be deployed to create models capable of predicting cases of non-compliance and thus improve the selection of zones where policing is required.

A project conducted under the BRGM-AFB Inside partnership

This project comes under the scope of INSIDE, the research and innovation cluster on information systems for water. Created by the AFB and BRGM, this cluster is engaged in three main research and innovation fields: organisation and architecture of distributed information systems, assessment of new data acquisition and distribution solutions and implementation and coordination of interoperable data services and processing.

BRGM expertise in environmental data management

Within the project to improve environmental policing, the BRGM has two main responsibilities:

  • to supply a data infrastructure capable of combining data on water and algorithms,
  • to assist the AFB and DINSIC (the interministerial directorate for the digital environment and information and communication systems) in developing intelligent predictive algorithms based on data science.

To fulfil these tasks, the BRGM will build on it expertise in environmental data management (Hub'Eau, Big Data on the environment, distribution of digital services for water management such as ADES, BNPE and Naïades) and on its experience in research projects on machine learning.