On August 7, 2023, the day before the Maui wildfires started in Hawaii, a constellation of earth-observing satellites took multiple pictures of the island at noon, local time. Everything was quiet, still. The next day, at the same, the same satellites captured images of fires consuming the island.
“When Ukraine happened, all the AI models failed miserably,” Juan Lavista, chief scientist at Microsoft AI, toldThe problem was that the company’s previous AI models were mainly trained with natural disasters in the U.S. and Africa. But devastation doesn’t look the same when it is caused by war and in an Eastern European city. “We learned that having one single model that would adapt to every single place on earth was likely impossible,” Lavista said.
This helped the AI system learn to compare every pixel in each set of images to see whether the corresponding three square meters that each pixel represented had changed before and after the fire. For example, if a pixel in the photography of a forest changed from green to gray in a matter of hours, the three square meters that used to be trees have most likely been burned.Microsoft and Planet
The AI imagery and maps have sped up the Red Cross’s preliminary damage assessment, helping the organization better understand the overall impact of the disaster, said Kasie Richards, senior director of Situational Awareness and Decision Support at the American Red Cross in a statement to. “The volume of information that can be synthesized would typically take us several days to process,” she said. “But this model has allowed us to operate in a more condensed period of time.