In recent years, the interest in the study of seas and oceans has dramatically increased as they are considered of primary importance for forecasting catastrophic events or for supporting blue economy, as well as the marine tourism, improving the tourist reception or enhancing any marine-related activity. This led to the development of IT platforms that allow to monitor the marine environment and provide a number of services to different kinds of final users, whether they are private individuals interested in the status of the seas, or companies whose business depends on the marine environmental monitoring.

The SmartWave project, funded by Regione Sicilia (European Regional Development Fund) and coordinated by the University of Palermo, aims to develop a novel IT platform to observe and predict phenomena that characterize the marine environment, while also providing the consumer with a unified portal to collect, access and analyse marine-related information.

To achieve this goal, one of the main challenges of this project is to aggregate and standardize heterogeneous data from multiple sources in order to offer very accurate information to private or business consumers.

The Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano will develop and validate intelligent algorithms for the analysis of large amounts of georeferenced data. More specifically, the research activity will involve the design of a prototypal version of the SmartWave platform followed by its testing and performance characterization.