Our new Warmth Resilience device makes use of AI-enhanced satellite tv for pc and aerial imagery to assist cities tackle dangerously excessive temperatures (and hopefully assist cut back associated well being results). The device combines AI-powered object detection with different fashions to research components like how a lot inexperienced house a metropolis has or how effectively the roofs on buildings mirror daylight. This helps city planners and native governments determine which cooling interventions, like planting bushes, can impression temperatures most, all the best way all the way down to a neighborhood stage. To start out, we’re piloting the device in 14 U.S. cities, the place officers are utilizing it to find out which neighborhoods are most liable to excessive warmth and develop a plan to assist. As temperatures rise globally, particularly for these dwelling in city warmth islands, AI could 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 potential. This may tackle a major downside 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 just a few occasions a day, making it arduous to search out fires till they’ve grown bigger than a soccer discipline. As soon as launched, emergency responders will obtain this vital data when fires are doubtlessly simpler to include.
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 hearken to human sounds, like coughs, and flag early indicators of illness. This know-how has the potential to assist display for situations like tuberculosis. TB is treatable, however yearly hundreds of thousands of circumstances go undiagnosed — actually because folks don’t have handy entry to healthcare providers, particularly in nations with out adequate medical sources. This sort of AI might assist. As an illustration, an India-based respiratory healthcare firm is exploring how HeAR may enhance their early detection of TB primarily based on cough sounds.
