In Episode 3 of Season 16, Sabrina Szeto speaks with Dr Cormac Purcell, astrophysicist turned geospatial scientist at BolgiaTen.
BolgiaTen’s project, developed through the GenAI for Geospatial Challenge, focuses on marine domain awareness: helping users understand where vessels are, what they are doing, and whether their reported movements can be trusted.
The project addresses a major challenge in maritime intelligence. Automatic Identification System, or AIS, data is widely used to track vessels, but it is based on an open trust system and can be affected by GPS jamming, spoofing, or deliberate manipulation. This matters because incorrect or falsified vessel positions can have real consequences, from insurance risk and sanctions compliance to dark port calls, ship-to-ship transfers and activity in protected marine areas.
In this conversation, Cormac explains how BolgiaTen combines AIS data, vessel context, ownership and maintenance information, and Earth observation data from open and commercial sources to build a more reliable picture of vessel behaviour.
The episode also explores the role of generative AI in the project. BolgiaTen uses foundation models to accelerate vessel detection in Earth observation imagery and generative AI to support a natural language interface for the analysis pipeline. What once required specialist analysts to process imagery, interpret results and answer business questions can increasingly be supported through an agentic interface that helps orchestrate the workflow.
Cormac also shares how AWS cloud credits helped the team move beyond an isolated prototype towards a more professional deployment pathway, closer to the environment used by their partner Lloyd’s List Intelligence. The credits supported experimentation, integration and a higher technology readiness level prototype that can be tested with customers more quickly.
The conversation also covers the importance of customer education: helping business users understand what Earth observation can and cannot do, how resolution, cadence, coverage and cost shape what is possible, and why clear communication of uncertainty is just as important as the underlying science.
Host: Sabrina Szeto
Guest: Dr Cormac Purcell
Organisation: BolgiaTen
Project focus: AI-enabled maritime domain awareness
Series: Scene From Above, Season 16 – GenAI for Geospatial Challenge Takeover
