- As a national strategy of Finland to develop autonomous technology and boost ICT sector, how do you envision University of Turku’s role in developing autonomous technologies for the shipping industry?
Prof Suominen: I think that we are going to have a very strong role given the initiatives that we have already started on. We have a autonomous shipping collaborative project with the industry and other universities in Finland. I think we are able to contribute significantly because we are a multi-disciplinary university where we look at the whole picture addressing various aspects such as legal, business, technology, ICT, etc. Autonomous shipping is a field that cannot be addressed with just a narrow technological view. So we are going to focus on that and our industry connections.
- With about eighty (80) members in the “new business ecosystem” that is largely invested by companies like Cargotec, Rolls-Royce and Wärtsilä, how can the industry-led initiative benefit from collaborations with academic institutions such as University of Turku?
Prof Suominen: Actually very much. In Finland, we have a lot of these structures in place. We already have a national innovation and technology funding agency, which requires the universities and companies to work together. We are all partners in a company called DIMECC, which is owned by many universities and private companies working in this field. So we have structures in place for this kind of actions.
- From increasing digitalisation in the maritime sector to a future vision of fully autonomous ships, what are the vital research capabilities and technologies to enable such transformation? What are the key challenges?
Prof Suominen: Ah, that’s an interesting question. We would need particularly ICT technologies, sensors and automated systems, communications, and control systems by man or even artificial intelligence. We have quite a wide range of topics we have to address. And it will depend on which way our thinking takes us in this particular field. We would likely start with augmented systems with man still in control, before moving towards lesser human involvement and eventually, who knows where we can go after addressing key fundamental questions.
Yes, I would say that first of all, this needs to be a global initiative. So we need to get regional agreement on what kind of rules we need? What kind of safety measures we need? What are the operational procedures? What are the accepted technologies? How do we approach the situation given the drastically different context such as Arctic shipping, ships calling at the Port of Singapore, or ferries in the Finnish Archipelago.
- How would the role of humans evolve in this transformation with increasing digitalisation and connectivity that are driven by big data?
Prof Suominen: That is a very good question because we are already noticing problems especially in the developed countries where there’s a lot of jobs that are disappearing. I believe that this trend will continue, thus now the question is: How do we train people in order to counter-act this? What are the needs of the future that we should already anticipate in our training of people? How can we bring in all members of nations into this vision? This is actually one of the key challenges we have to solve. Digitalisation, it’s everywhere. There are already so many things that are already in place that we don’t even realise. This is going to be a very big challenge as we are gradually moving into augmented reality, virtual reality, and then comes the question – how do you define a man within the context of artificial intelligence. So there’s actually quite a lot of challenges and it seems like nobody has clear cut answers to them.
Yes, and like I said earlier – this is a global thing. No one can solve these problems alone and there might not be a single solution for everybody. But there has to be say local versions or other types of different approaches or maybe even beneficial for us to have competing approaches. So international collaborations allow us to have a global community working on this. Higher education institutes, companies, government actors, NGOs, all have to work together. Let me take for example what we noticed in Finland. In the past, companies very often wanted to engage the universities in programmes where they collectively develop some products or future products for the universities. Now there are more and more companies that prefer this kind of open approach. They want to get the universities to think about this particular field – maybe autonomous shipping, digitalisation, communication. What would be the future trends? Let’s look at them together. And when we get the results, we publish them all freely so that anyone can take them up. So the companies benefit because it creates new markets for them. And for universities there’s new research.
- How could international collaborations in the area of digitalisation and autonomous ships create new opportunities for the global maritime sector?
Prof Suominen: Take for instance, Arctic shipping. We have been discussing the possible use of new sea lanes that might be more appropriate for shorter distances or for other reasons. On the other hand we are talking about more automated port and ship actions. All of these will in one way or another lead to the outcome where certain old business models will disappear and new ones will emerge. This will be a very interesting development but it requires a lot of work, a lot of new ideas and a lot of collaborations. This would facilitate better ease of determining the good ideas for implementation.
For Finland, international collaborations have always been very important. We are a very small country with only about 5.6 million people, so we have to connect. We believe in education and research – those are our resources. It means that it’s actually the human beings and their ideas, those are the resources we have to cultivate. If we do this under an international context, then I think even small nations can do achieve in a changing world under a much bigger context.