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As wildfires, hurricanes and other disasters emerge, government officials lack the resources they need to solve these grandiose problems. Edge AI could provide some assistance.
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Wildfires continue to devastate communities across America. In 2021 alone, 40,000 fires ravaged the nation, and that number is expected to increase by year's end. What’s more, the U.S. Forest Service has sent roughly 21,000 federal firefighters to put out the fires, twice the number of responders needed to mitigate fires at this time last year. As new wildfires emerge, officials fear they may not have the resources needed to solve this widespread problem.
Edge artificial intelligence could be the solution they need.
“When we think about applications of edge AI in the modern world, we're always going to be thinking about how we respond to disasters,” says Rob Risany, director of edge AI solutions architecture at Intel Corp. “Let’s say I’m managing a forest fire. If I deploy an edge-based inference system out on a mobile device and drop it out in the middle of a forest, I can use sensor data to sense the temperature, [how fast the] smoke is moving or how the wind is changing. And that can advise my firefighters in a much stronger sense what's going to be happening next.”