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Blackline Safety to Make Debut at 2023 EGYPS Exhibition in Cairo

Blackline Safety to Make Debut at 2023 EGYPS Exhibition in Cairo
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Blackline Safety to Make Debut at 2023 EGYPS Exhibition in Cairo

Blackline Safety to Make Debut at 2023 EGYPS Exhibition in Cairo

Blackline Safety Corp. (TSX: BLN) , a global leader in connected safety technology, announced it will be exhibiting at the 2023 EGYPS exhibition, where it will showcase its suite of ground-breaking connected safety devices.

The event is taking place at the Egypt International Exhibition Center, Cairo, from February 13 to 15 and expects to attract more than 500 exhibitors and 32,000 attendees.

Blackline Regional Sales Manager Samy Karam Gerguis has also been invited to give a presentation at the adjoining EGYPS Technical Conference on February 13 at 2:30 p.m. (Room 1, Session 1), where he will provide unique insight into “How to improve health and safety in the energy industry by using connected wearable technology.”

The EGYPS 2023 Technical Conference brings together global oil, gas, and energy professionals to showcase the latest technical opportunities and challenges, breakthrough research findings, innovative technologies and industry solutions, creating an excellent learning and networking hub for the industry’s technical experts, The Associated Press reported.

At the exhibition, attendees will experience first-hand Blackline Safety’s full suite of award-winning connected solutions, including the new G6 wearable single-gas detector. Featuring cloud connectivity and data insights, the G6 wearable single-gas detector helps users quickly respond to—and prevent—safety incidents and manage compliance. The company’s flagship G7 wearable personal gas detectors will also be on display.

These devices for personal gas detection and lone worker monitoring include built-in connectivity, out-of-the-box deployment, easy integration into existing operations, and a broad gas sensor portfolio from which to choose. Rounding out the exhibit will be the G7 EXO Area Monitor, the world’s first direct-to-cloud area portable area gas monitor that offers rapid deployment, configuration flexibility and versatile mounting systems for placement anywhere.

Commenting on the benefits of Blackline’s solutions, Ahmed Fathi, Engineering Products Head of Department at Blackline’s Oman Distributor of the Year, Mohsin Haider Darwish (MHD ACERE) commented, “As a deep-rooted distributor of fire and safety solutions since the 1980s, MHD ACERE could quickly see the potential of Blackline’s unrivalled connected safety technology. Since day one of our partnership, we have demonstrated to our customers how the product can support them to widen the scope of worker and workplace protection. Customers appreciate what we offer and believe in it. They see it working anytime, anywhere, without special network limitations or configuration requirements. We are proud to represent Blackline Safety.”

Behind every Blackline Safety solution are Blackline Live & Blackline Analytics, award-winning connected safety software that enable organizations to know the moment something happens and manage it through to resolution with world-class emergency management tools. Reports are automatically compiled using data streamed directly from the field, meaning users can monitor, configure and deploy their fleet any time, anywhere.

Blackline Safety is a technology leader driving innovation in the industrial workforce through IoT (Internet of Things). With connected safety devices and predictive analytics, Blackline Safety enables companies to drive towards zero safety incidents and improved operational performance.

Blackline Safety provides wearable devices, personal and area gas monitoring, cloud-connected software and data analytics to meet demanding safety challenges and enhance overall productivity for organizations with coverage in more than 100 countries.

Armed with cellular and satellite connectivity, Blackline Safety provides a lifeline to tens of thousands of people, having reported over 185 billion data-points and initiated over five million emergency alerts. For more information, visit BlacklineSafety.com and connect with us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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AI Will Eavesdrop on World’s Wildest Places to Track and Help Protect Endangered Wildlife

An endangered Geoffrey's spider monkey that had been rescued and living in the care of the Alturas Wildlife Sanctuary in Dominical, Costa Rica, on March 17, 2023. (AP)
An endangered Geoffrey's spider monkey that had been rescued and living in the care of the Alturas Wildlife Sanctuary in Dominical, Costa Rica, on March 17, 2023. (AP)
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AI Will Eavesdrop on World’s Wildest Places to Track and Help Protect Endangered Wildlife

An endangered Geoffrey's spider monkey that had been rescued and living in the care of the Alturas Wildlife Sanctuary in Dominical, Costa Rica, on March 17, 2023. (AP)
An endangered Geoffrey's spider monkey that had been rescued and living in the care of the Alturas Wildlife Sanctuary in Dominical, Costa Rica, on March 17, 2023. (AP)

The endangered Geoffrey’s spider monkeys that dangle high in the rainforest canopy are elusive and hard for scientists to track.

So biologist Jenna Lawson hid 350 audio monitors in trees across Costa Rica's lush Osa Peninsula to spy on them.

The devices recorded the sounds of the forest and surrounding countryside for a week, collecting so much data that Lawson could have spent years listening to it all.

Instead, she fed it into artificial intelligence systems trained to instantly recognize spider monkey calls and detect where the animals traveled. One of the world’s largest acoustic wildlife studies when Lawson began the project in 2021, it revealed troubling findings about the health of a treasured wildlife refuge.

More of this AI-assisted wildlife surveillance is "urgently needed" as some 28% of all plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, according to a paper published in the academic journal Science this summer.

Researchers from Dutch and Danish universities showed that machine-learning techniques can "handle huge amounts of data and uncover sound patterns, allowing for faster, cheaper, and better ecological studies" that can aid in biodiversity conservation. But many technical challenges remain.

Tech giant Microsoft's philanthropic AI for Good Lab announced this month it is hoping to answer some of those technical challenges with a new kind of hardware and computing system for eavesdropping on the planet's wildest places.

"Those remote places are also the most important places on the Earth from a biodiversity perspective," said Microsoft's chief data scientist, Juan Lavista Ferres, in an interview last week by video call from Colombia, where a research team was preparing to test the new approach.

Powered by the sun and energy-efficient AI computer chips, the devices can run for years rather than weeks without human intervention. And they can regularly transmit their data online via low-Earth orbit satellites. It's called Sparrow, short for Solar-Powered Acoustic and Remote Recording Observation Watch.

Pablo Arbelaez, director of an AI-focused research center at the University of the Andes, said a first Sparrow test will happen in a jungle preserve along Colombia's largest river, the Magdalena. Eventually, the researchers hope to get a better idea of how deforestation — and efforts to reverse it — is affecting the population behavior of jaguars, blue-beaked paujil birds, spider monkeys and other endangered species.

Another project closer to Microsoft headquarters will monitor forests in Washington state's Cascade Mountains. By late 2025, Lavista Ferres plans to have devices on all continents, from remote corners of the Amazon rainforest to gorilla habitats of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That will then be "open-sourced" to make it accessible to a wide body of researchers in real time, but with measures to obscure sensitive location data.

"What we don’t want is these devices to ever be used for poachers to understand where the animals are," Lavista Ferres said.

It was a concern about encroachments on Costa Rican spider monkey habitat that led Lawson, then at Imperial College London, to undertake her ambitious bio-acoustic study three years ago. She persuaded landowners to let her place recording devices on their properties outside Corcovado National Park, a jewel of Costa Rica's decades-long efforts to preserve biodiversity by encouraging wildlife tourism.

"She basically realized the spider monkey is in a really critical situation," said local environmentalist and bug scientist Jim Córdoba-Alfaro. On a follow-up visit last year, he and Lawson trekked across a private reserve with an Associated Press reporter to observe the monkeys and check on the audio monitors.

Compared to the charismatic capuchin monkey and the notoriously loud howler monkey -- both commonly seen or heard throughout Costa Rica — spider monkeys are far more wary of humans and the changes they bring.

"They’re the most sensitive of the primates that we have here," said Lawson. "The spider monkey would be the first animal to leave when there’s signs of trouble. They would be the last animal to come back once forests are restored because they need mature secondary and primary forest to be able to survive."

The Royal Society of London in March 2023 published Lawson's findings of what the audio monitors revealed: the spider monkeys weren't going anywhere near paved roads or the plantations harvesting palm oil and teak wood that bisect the region's protected national parks. That meant government-designated wildlife corridors meant to extend their range through and beyond the Osa Peninsula were not working as well as designed. She came back to present those conclusions to local officials.

After hours of searching, a troop of spider monkeys appeared — peering down at the humans who found them. Within moments, they were on their way again — extending their lanky arms and prehensile tails to grasp at trees and propel themselves across the canopy with spidery acrobatics.

Unattended acoustic detection of animal sounds is valuable not just in rainforests but in a wide variety of ecosystems, according to the Science paper published earlier this year. For example, it could help sailors avoid colliding their ships with large baleen whales heard to be passing through a shipping channel.

Lavista Ferres said there are still numerous challenges to overcome, from humidity that can fray jungle monitors to elephants in African savannas unintentionally knocking them off a tree.

Lawson said using the audio monitors to capture the spider monkey's distinctive whinny enables biologists to study a larger area at lower cost, but also provides a truer account of how the monkeys behave without scientists following them around.

"We’re reducing our influence on their behavior," she said. "And also — they don’t want us here."