Google parent Alphabet Inc's (NASDAQ:GOOG) 'moonshot factory' has launched a tool powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to identify wildfires, flooding and other natural disaster more quickly.
The moonshot department, known as X, but not related to social media network formerly known as Twitter, unveiled what it called Project Bellwether on Wednesday.
“Bellwether is X’s moonshot to understand and anticipate changes across the planet, so that any organization, community, or business can ask smarter and more timely questions about the natural and built environment,” project head Sarah Russell wrote.
“Until now, it’s been epically hard and expensive to apply AI to geospatial questions, but our team has harnessed some of the most recent advances in machine learning (plus some straight-up solid engineering) to re-think the whole endeavor.”
Project Bellwether's 'prediction engine' will be used by the United States National Guard’s Defense Innovation Unit, looking to improve on a process that currently can take hours or days to detect disasters, leading to a greater chance that large-scale damage will ensue.
“Right now, our analysts have to spend time sorting through images to find the ones that cover the areas most affected by natural disasters,” the National Guard’s colonel Brian McGarry said.
“They then have to correlate those images to surrounding infrastructure, label all the relevant features, and only then can highlight the significant damage and send it forward to first responder teams.”
Project Bellwether has two disaster-soecific tools so far, one to forecast wildfire risk “up to five years into the future” and the other a tool to help first responders identify critical infrastructure in the wake of natural disaster or extreme weather.
The X team is made up of a diverse group of inventors and entrepreneurs, according to its website, who have with collective aim of building and launching new technologies, with the goal of making a 10-fold impact on the "world’s most intractable problems, not just 10% improvement".
Another public project is Taara, which works to bring "fast, affordable connectivity" using narrow beams of light to deliver high-speed, high-capacity connectivity over long distances, similar but different to fibreoptic cable in the ground, but sent between two small Taara terminals to create a link.