By Alexander Castro
Butterflies! Beetles! Ants, moths, cockroaches and other grubs! Lauren Decker thought bugs would be her life’s work. She told her first grade teacher she’d be an entomologist one day.
Childhood fantasies tend to lack in specifics, however, and Decker’s dreams of entomology were slowly squelched. By the time she arrived at the University of Washington as an undergraduate, Decker realized the sheer variety of sciences she could study. Decker remembers thinking, “I don’t know what kind of scientist I want to be now!”
You might say she still works with bugs, albeit not the squishy kind. Debugging is only part of what Decker does as chief scientific officer at PolArctic LLC. Working alongside the company’s CEO (and her sister), Decker is in charge of programming sophisticated frameworks that map, model and predict the ever-changing Arctic.
Coding can be demanding, solitary work, but it’s a good fit for Decker: “I am very much a ‘Sit in my office and program’ kind of person,” she says. “It’s so ingrained. My dad’s a programmer. I’ve been programming since I had to sit on his lap so I could reach the keyboard.”
So what does Decker do in her office all day? “I’m doing exactly what I wanted to do in terms of AI and [machine learning],” she says. She’s coding new technologies for businesses, governments and even Indigenous communities to better decipher a capricious (and climate ravaged) Arctic.
One hot product from PolArctic is Ice3, a neural network algorithm that can render high-resolution predictions about Arctic ice. Using historical data and trends, the algorithm helps determine where ice may break or freeze. It’s a valuable tool for trades like fishing. Crabbers, for instance, tend to congregate at the ice edge, where frost poses a tangible and present threat.
“You don’t want to be overwhelmed by it and have your crab pots frozen in,” Decker explains. With Ice3, fishers can make smarter moves about where to set up camp. So too can ships or barges that steer through narrow rivers to deliver heating oil and other supplies to Alaskan communities.
Decker notes that AI was hardly on people’s radars when she started attending GSO in 2006: “There wasn’t a data science degree when I was going through school. It seems like a lot of tools and a lot more people are moving in that direction now.”
Her graduate work in physical oceanography still involved the same methods she uses today: data visualization, modeling and of course programming. This skillset proved almost immediately useful: Decker defended her Master thesis and interviewed for her first postgraduate job on the same day in 2009. Both went smoothly. Decker scored an oceanographer position at Applied Science Associates, a scientific data and consulting firm located only a mile from GSO in Narragansett.
A Family Business
Decker was cozy in this role until she started getting calls—calls from inside her family. Her sister Leslie Canavera, an Air Force veteran with experience in satellite tech, had an idea: You love what you’re currently doing, but let’s apply it to the ocean, in the Arctic.
“She started calling me every day. I would go on a walk and talk with her about it,” Decker says. “It took like a year for her to convince me.”
PolArctic is a neatly split venture, with Canavera handling the business end and Decker the science. Like many siblings, Decker and Canavera were close as kids, or, in Decker’s words, they were “make-snowmen-together kinda people.” Born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, Decker and Canavera are both Indigenous; specifically Yup’ik.
Decker recently incorporated Indigenous knowledge of the best fishing spots into a training set for an AI model. This combination of ethnography and AI isn’t a novelty, but indeed a rarity in the AI sector that remains largely white and male. PolArctic hasn’t gone unnoticed in this regard. One example: the Women in AI Awards, where both members of PolArctic scored some honors in May 2022.
Bringing It Home
Amid increasingly public debates about AI, many of them now centered around creative work or automation, PolArctic offers products with clearly defined purpose and utility.
The data PolArctic provides is not only dynamic and responsive enough for commerce, but in some cases, it’s remapping areas that have never been friendly or easily accessible to humans.
Consider PolArctic’s Coastline Evolution & Nearshore Approximation (CENA), an AI engine designed for “near shore bathymetry.” It identified a previously unknown subsurface reef in Hudson Bay, Decker says, and it’s also charted parts of Prince William Sound that hadn’t been mapped since 1939.
“The Arctic coastline is poorly charted,” Decker says, explaining that big ships can’t navigate it effectively. “With CENA, you can look at that really shallow range.”
The utility of CENA surely helped convince the National Science Foundation to award a Small Business Innovation Research grant in early 2020 for coastline modeling and bathymetry. Grant money in hand, Decker and Canavera went networking for PolArctic right as the pandemic emerged. Landing back in Seattle, the sisters found an airport full of “people wearing masks.” No need to recap the quarantine era, but For Decker, it was “an excuse to program for six months.”
They initially thought PolArctic would work mostly with governments, but this hasn’t proven true: “[We’ve] ended up working a lot more with business-to-business contracts …Turns out there’s an enormous gap for the businesses that work in the Arctic being interested in sea ice forecasts,” Decker says.
The businesses Decker mentions are mostly shipping and fishing companies—two powerhouse industries in such a remote, wet and cold part of the world. Tools like Ice3 help relieve some of the anxieties that come with Arctic commerce.
There are other Arctic anxieties too, most of them related to the fragility of the Arctic itself. By generating top-shelf, actionable data, PolArctic seeks ways for businesses to work sensibly and with minimal ecological impact.
“That’s really our big thing: How do we do this responsibly?” Decker says.
In the Arctic proper, laws prohibit commercial fisheries, but fishing remains a plentiful, profitable trade in the subarctic. Places like Dillingham and Bristol Bay have seen a recent crash in crabbing. But other fish “are doing really well … salmon has skyrocketed,” Decker says. “The ocean itself is becoming a really great place for salmon to thrive.”
The salmon are thriving. Lauren Decker is too.