Interview with Mariano Nieves, winner of the Aporta 2019 Challenge

Now that the call for the third edition of the Aporta Challenge is open, in this occasion focused on the field of education, we have talked to the winner of the 2019 edition, Mariano Nieves, who won thanks to his Optimacis solution. Mariano explained his experience and gave us some advice for this year's participants.

Full interview:

1. What does Optimacis consist of?

Optimacis is a project for the optimisation of the fresh fish market, which seeks to balance prices against monopsony situations.

The success of the project lies in the delivery of value for the three main actors in these markets:

• the fishing companies as producers
• wholesalers and hospitality companies as mediators in the delivery to the market;
• and the fish markets themselves as primary distribution centres.

The values for each actor are specific: in the case of fishermen, by means of advance knowledge of the most advantageous prices for sale; in the case of wholesalers and restaurateurs, by means of knowledge of the supply points with the greatest capacity; and in the case of fish markets, by means of advance knowledge of the expected influx into their facilities, for the internal organisation of resources.

2. What prompted you to participate in the Aporta Challenge?

Without a doubt, the institutional support of datos.gob.es is a reference in the Public Administration, given that the project has a marked character of sustainability for a group that usually requires additional resources to the exploitation.

It was not a preconceived project that came to take advantage of the call. On the contrary, the project was developed after reading the call for proposals. In all honesty, I even asked a formal question at the Red.es website to make sure that fishing was an area covered by the 2019 Aporta Challenge.

I thought that having the recognition and dissemination of the Aporta Challenge would boost my professional career, as it has. This is a value that I want to highlight to encourage other participants in the new call: there are currently many professionals with an impressive career, who can make their CV shine with success in the Aporta Challenge.

3. How was your experience?

The challenge was impressive. For those who know the exciting world of data, I think it is important to stress the importance of handling more than 3,500 predictive models in real time (well, with a 24-hour regeneration cycle).

This is supported by various sources of ingestion, highlighting the information from Meteogalicia and the State Agency of Meteorology, the ingestion in real time from two radar systems (actually, they are called Automatic Identification Systems) located in As Pontes de García Rodríguez and Vigo, and the daily extraction of the price data published from the Galician fish markets.

Shuffling all these sources of information in record time (with seven machines working in continuous mode 24x7), ingesting and monitoring the predictive models was a major effort for me, to which I dedicated the entire summer of 2019. And the months of September and October was dedicated to geolocation and machine learning tasks.

The main advantage that the challenge has given me has been to know sources of large masses of data that are available for projects of all kinds, with the solvency of the sources of the Public Administration.

4. What is the current status of the development of the Optimacis System?

We are already in a phase of promoting the solution, in order to coordinate with public bodies that promote sustainable projects in the field of fisheries at a state, local and regional level. The balance of the market conditions is being a factor that awakens interest in local administrations.

5. What advice would you give to participants in the Aporta 2020 Challenge?

Well, only from my partition experience of course. I think that the dedication and effort were decisive in my case, because the rest of the participants had a very high level to which I could not aspire. Most of them were groups of people, while my participation was of a personal nature. However, the fact that I was able to build this whole block of predictive models and carefully review the results was decisive.

On the other hand, I think it also helped that I took meticulous care of the presentation. The fact that I carefully wrapped the content was well appreciated, as I had a fully functional model.

6. Closing and farewell.

I want to convey all the encouragement to the participants of this call, and not hesitate to include dedication and effort because it is worth it. Not every day you receive recognition from a government institution like datos.gob.es. May the best one win!