A Colorado Springs startup that began by helping the local police find illegal marijuana grows is now using drones and artificial intelligence to map seagrass meadows in Florida to measure climate change.
Computer Access Technologies (CAT), founded by and is headed by Ed Rios, former CEO of the National Cybersecurity Center in Colorado Springs, has grown to 24 employees and has contracts pending for next year totaling more than $10 million with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), other federal agencies and the National Black Farmers Association. Rios started the company early last year after selling his previous firm, CyberSpace Operations Consulting, to Florida defense contractor Arctos.
“Data can solve so many problems, but I started the company because I saw a lot of poor technology decisions were made on the use of data by not using the right data,” Rios said. “The first thing we started doing was collecting data (with drones) to assist the Colorado Springs Police Department, working with the Marijuana Enforcement Division to help detect illegal black-market activity.”
CAT had planned a law enforcement symposium with the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs on data use, but the event was postponed and later canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The company later won a contract to help a rural Iowa hospital recruit employees, using data analytics and artificial intelligence to identify the hospital’s 20 best job candidates from more than 6 million potential hires. That prompted CAT to focus on small to mid-sized clients, offering them the same technology that is available to large corporations at an affordable price, Rios said.
That focus resulted in CAT using drones in projects completed earlier this year for crop monitoring for the National Black Farmers Association, monitoring protected Native Alaskan lands for NOAA, surveillance for counter-narcotics investigations, monitoring illegal fishing in Asia, Europe and South America and monitoring for pollution and industrial contaminants in river runoffs, Rios said.
In CAT’s latest project, the company’s scientists and engineers are using drones to map seagrass meadows in a bay near Sarasota, Fla., to detect changes in the ecosystem resulting from climate change, Rios said. Seagrass can capture carbon emissions faster than tropical rain forests, but seagrass is disappearing at a rate of about 7% a year, studies have found. The company uses drones to monitor algae blooms, vegetation and marine species and uses artificial intelligence for mapping and detecting changes in seagrass.
The company specializes in taking large amounts of data from drones, sensors and other sources, analyzing it with artificial intelligence and machine learning to help clients make more informed decisions, Rios said.
Contact Wayne Heilman 636-0234 Facebook www.facebook.com/wayne.heilman
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