The world is on fire. Literally, most of the time. Predicting such disasters before they get out of hand, or even before they occur, is the key to maintaining a reasonable quality of life into the next century. It's a big global problem. This is also one of the challenges Alphabet believes can help solve the problem.
Google parent company Moonshot Factory X this week officially announced Project Bellweather, its latest effort to apply technology to some of our biggest problems. This means using AI tools to identify natural disasters like wildfires and floods as quickly as possible. If implemented correctly, it could be a game-changer for first responders.
“Bellweather is the moonshot of ,” project director Sarah Russell said in a social media post. “Traditionally, applying AI to geospatial problems has been extremely difficult and expensive, but our team has leveraged the latest advances in machine learning (and some directly solid engineering) to We used it to rethink our entire approach.”
Project Bellweather's coming-out party coincides with news that the U.S. National Guard's Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) will utilize the organization's “prediction engine.” According to the research team, current technology can delay response times by hours or days, which can cause untold damage to life and property.
“Right now, our analysts have to take the time to sort through images and find images that cover the areas hardest hit by natural disasters,” said Guard Col. Brian McGarry. Point out. “We then need to correlate those images with the surrounding infrastructure and label all relevant features. Only then can significant damage be highlighted and sent to first response teams. ”
The Bellwether team has created two tools so far. The first is designed to predict wildfire risk “up to five years in advance.” The second is a response tool that helps first responders “identify critical infrastructure” during natural disasters and extreme weather events.
Google has previously explored the use of machine learning models and AI to predict natural disasters. Project Bellweather's partnership with the National Guard could be an important validation of that effort.