Modeling to solve marine mysteries

MODEL CITIZENS: Applied Science Associates founders Craig Swanson, left, and Malcolm Spaulding, center, with CEO and President Eoin Howlett. The environmental-modeling firm aggregates marine data, writes software and then uses it to model environmental impacts. /
MODEL CITIZENS: Applied Science Associates founders Craig Swanson, left, and Malcolm Spaulding, center, with CEO and President Eoin Howlett. The environmental-modeling firm aggregates marine data, writes software and then uses it to model environmental impacts. /

The U.S. Coast Guard receives thousands of reports of people lost at sea each year. In many of those cases the military service uses a program created by a South Kingstown-based company to track where the person could be in hopes of rescuing him or her alive.
From its humble beginnings in a one-room office with one employee, to a global company employing 90 people, Applied Science Associates (ASA) now serves a diverse clientele ranging from the world’s largest oil companies seeking to model oil spills to town councils in tiny communities exploring the feasibility of erecting a wind turbine.
Since 1979, ASA has carved out a niche of aggregating marine data from around the world, writing software and then using it to model the environmental impacts of development.
“Our job is [taking] all this data and making it understandable to a broad range of stakeholders,” said CEO and President Eoin Howlett, who joined the company in 1989.
Three University of Rhode Island professors and a graduate student started the company 10 years earlier. Led by ocean-engineering professor Malcolm Spaulding, the four saw an opportunity to apply the data-gathering and modeling techniques from academia to the private sector. The company’s first contract was with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which asked ASA to explore the environmental benefits of proposed projects that would limit the overflow of Providence’s combined sewer and stormwater system.
Craig Swanson, then a graduate student and now a senior principal, was the only employee and the ASA offices were tucked in an office building off Main Street in Wakefield.
(The other two founders, Frank White and Peter Cornillon, have since left ASA.)
Today, ASA’s original office could fit in the firm’s conference space, with room to spare.
ASA offices in South County Commons also contain a data center where ASA collects marine information from around the world. Nearby, biologists, engineers, computer programmers and others hunch over computers writing software or analyzing environmental impacts of dredging, installing an underwater cable, cleaning up an oil spill, building a port and more. About half the floor sits empty, room for future expansion, explains spokesman Lee Dooley. Back in the conference room, Spaulding and his team explain how the work is anything but dull. The company’s software was used to help map the Exxon Valdez oil spill. And software that grew out of the oil-mapping program helped locate a man who fell off a cruise ship sailing off the Florida coast. (The man survived after several hours at sea.) The company’s software was also utilized to help track the debris from Air France Flight 447, which went down off the coast of Brazil in June 2009. (Investigators are still searching for the black box.)
More recently, the company received a panicked call from the environmental protection agency in Abu Dhabi. A prince had some smelly water surrounding his residence and wanted something done about it. The team at ASA scrambled and two weeks later presented a set of recommendations.
Much of the company’s software stems from Spaulding’s original focus on creating software to model how oil spills behave. The underlying data and assumptions help serve as the basis for other programs like the one the U.S. Coast Guard and similar organizations around the world now use to track people missing in the world’s vast oceans.
Spaulding said he never anticipated that more than 30 percent of the company’s business would come from overseas. He thought – erroneously as it turns out – that the company would turn into a sleepy engineering firm conducting local and regional studies required for environmental permits. That’s anything but the case, Howlett said.
“We don’t do dull work and I get to work with really smart folks,” Howlett said.
Those employees often hold advanced degrees and come from schools like MIT, Tufts University and Penn State. They are also far-flung. In November the company opened an office in Shanghai, recently moved its Brazil office into a larger space to accommodate growth and also has offices in Australia and Dubai.
One professor in Singapore once labeled the company “the Microsoft of environmental modeling,” which Spaulding said demonstrates the wide impact of a relatively small firm.
“We’ve got a little juice,” Spaulding said. •

COMPANY PROFILE
Applied Science Associates
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Environmental
modeling firm
FOUNDERS: Malcolm Spaulding,
Craig Swanson
LOCATION: 55 Village Square Drive,
South Kingstown
EMPLOYEES: 90 (45 in United States)
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 1979
ANNUAL SALES: $11.5 million

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