AI Tech to Improve Disaster Response

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

The United States Pentagon’s AI center is working to develop technology that could help significantly improve response in a wildfire disaster.

The United States Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) is working to integrate AI and automation in an effort to increase the nation’s first responders ability to respond to and combat wildfires.

Wildfires are often fast moving, being able to travel dozens of miles over several days. They are also relatively hard to predict, keeping track of where they are and where they are going could be a challenge for the first responders.

To combat this, the U.S. Department of Defense plans to fly sensors over wildfires in California to collect video data of the blaze. Computer algorithms will then detect which frames of the video captured actually have an active wildfire in them.

Usually, first responders manage to create a map of the wildfire and its expected direction of travel at the end of each day to be shared with the relevant agencies. However, with the help of the computer algorithms and airborne sensors, the Department of Defense believes first responders will be able to update and share the wildfire map every hour with the relevant agencies.

The AI computer algorithms truly help first responders cut times. Large wildfires often create a massive amount of data for first responders to analyze, AI can help significantly cut the amount of work for the human analysts.

Nextgov.com reports that the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is planning to test the technology within the next few months.