The world is on fire. Literally, many times. Anticipating such disasters before they get out of hand—or better yet, before they happen—will be key to maintaining a reasonable quality of life for the next century. It’s a big, global issue. It’s also one Alphabet believes it can help address.
Google parent Moonshot Factory X was officially unveiled this week Project Bellwether, his latest bid to apply technology to some of our biggest problems. Here that means using artificial intelligence tools to identify natural disasters like fires and floods as quickly as possible. If implemented correctly, it could be a game changer for first responders.
“Bellwether is X’s moon for understanding and predicting changes across the planet so that every organization, community or business can ask smarter and more timely questions about the natural and built environment,” says lead of Sarah Russell’s work at a social media post. “Until now, it has been extremely difficult and expensive to apply artificial intelligence to geospatial queries, but our team has leveraged some of the latest advances in machine learning (as well as some simple engineering) to rethink the whole endeavor.”
Project Bellwether is coming the party coincides with news that the United States National Guard’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) will use the agency’s “prediction engine.” According to the groups, current technology has the potential to delay response times by hours or days, causing untold damage to human life and property.
“Right now, our analysts have to spend time sorting through the images to find the ones that cover the areas most affected by natural disasters,” notes Guard Col. Brian McGarry. “Then they have to correlate those images with the surrounding infrastructure, highlight all the relevant features, and only then can they highlight the significant damage and send it to the first responders.”
The Bellwether team has created two tools so far. The first is designed to predict fire risk “up to five years into the future”. The second is a response tool that helps first responders “identify critical infrastructure” after a natural disaster or extreme weather event.
Google has been exploring using machine learning and artificial intelligence models to predict natural disasters for some time. Project Bellwether’s collaboration with the National Guard could well prove a major validation of this project.
