Name: How A.I. is fighting wildfires
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In California an AI tool uses more than a thousand mountaintop surveillance cameras to look for early signs of wildfires.

Firefighters are using AI to find wildfires before they explode.

How A.I. is fighting wildfires

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In California an AI tool uses more than a thousand mountaintop surveillance cameras to look for early signs of wildfires.

Firefighters are using AI to find wildfires before they explode.

Tech & Engineering

How A.I. is fighting wildfiresPublished: July 11, 2024Mike Marcucci: Once we started having these devastating fires, we needed more intel. The need for intelligence is just overwhelming in today's fire service.Speaker 2: Over the past 20 years, California has installed a network of more than a thousand remotely operated pan tilt Zoom surveillance cameras on mountaintops.Speaker 3: Vegetation fire, highway 29 at Dodon Road.Speaker 2: All those cameras generate petabytes of video. Cal Fire partnered with scientists at UC, San Diego to train a neural network to spot the early signs of trouble. It's called Alert California.Phillip SeLegue: So here's one that just popped up. Here's an anomaly.Speaker 2: Cal Fire's Staff Chief of Fire and Intelligence, Phillip SeLegue, showed me how it works while it was in action detecting nascent fires, micro fires.Phillip SeLegue: That looks like just a little hint of some type of smoke that was-Speaker 2: Based on this, dispatchers can orchestrate a fast response.Phillip SeLegue: AI has given us the ability to detect and to see where those fires are starting.Speaker 5: Transport 1447, responding via MDC.Speaker 2: For all they know, they have nips, some mega fires in the bud.Phillip SeLegue: The successor of the fires that you don't hear about in the news.Speaker 2: Artificial intelligence can't put out wildfires just yet. Human firefighters still need to do that job.

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