Our new Warmth Resilience software makes use of AI-enhanced satellite tv for pc and aerial imagery to assist cities handle dangerously excessive temperatures (and hopefully assist cut back associated well being results). The software combines AI-powered object detection with different fashions to investigate components like how a lot inexperienced area a metropolis has or how properly the roofs on buildings replicate daylight. This helps city planners and native governments work out which cooling interventions, like planting timber, can impression temperatures most, all the best way right down to a neighborhood degree. To start out, we’re piloting the software in 14 U.S. cities, the place officers are utilizing it to find out which neighborhoods are most vulnerable to excessive warmth and develop a plan to assist. As temperatures rise globally, particularly for these residing in city warmth islands, AI will be a part of the answer.
Google Analysis has partnered with leaders within the hearth neighborhood to construct FireSat, a constellation of satellites designed particularly to detect and monitor wildfires as small as a classroom (about 5×5 meters). With FireSat, authorities will have the ability to entry high-resolution imagery that’s up to date globally each 20 minutes, serving to them reply to fires as rapidly as attainable. This can handle a big drawback in firefighting: Till now, firefighters have had to make use of satellite tv for pc imagery that’s both low decision or solely up to date a number of occasions a day, making it exhausting to search out fires till they’ve grown bigger than a soccer discipline. As soon as launched, emergency responders will obtain this important data when fires are probably simpler to comprise.
We made our bioacoustic basis mannequin Well being Acoustic Representations, or HeAR, obtainable to researchers. HeAR is designed to assist researchers construct fashions that may take heed to human sounds, like coughs, and flag early indicators of illness. This expertise has the potential to assist display screen for situations like tuberculosis. TB is treatable, however yearly hundreds of thousands of circumstances go undiagnosed — actually because individuals don’t have handy entry to healthcare companies, particularly in nations with out adequate medical sources. This sort of AI could assist. For example, an India-based respiratory healthcare firm is exploring how HeAR may enhance their early detection of TB based mostly on cough sounds.
