Can AI Stop Another Australia Black Summer?
- By Lachlan Colquhoun
- October 02, 2023
With the imminent arrival of summer, Australia is facing a renewed threat of bushfires, and this time, firefighters will have several AI and machine learning solutions on their side.
One of the lessons of the last wave of major bushfires in the “Black Summer” of 2019/20, in which 33 people died and 3000 homes were destroyed, was that technology should be harnessed in the firefighting effort.
In South Australia, for example, U.S. company Pano AI has spent much of this year installing fire monitoring infrastructure in the state’s “Green Forestry” triangle, comprising satellite technology, cameras and AI.
Fitted to existing fire monitoring towers and new towers constructed in the region, the solution detects fires through an AI algorithm, which is then confirmed by a human with an alert sent to emergency services to respond.
Pano AI chief commercial officer Arvind Satyam was born in Australia before moving to the U.S. He told ABC radio earlier this year that the solution came from watching the "Black Summer" bushfires.
"We use AI that's applied to ultra-HD cameras that are continuously getting a full panorama of the environment," Satyam said.
"We then use a smoke detection algorithm to work out exactly where the fire is and see how it's behaving so you can get resources to that incident quickly. It also understands where it is relative to structures, to assets, so you're able to coordinate a much faster response."
A forestry industry worth AUD680 million each year to the South Australian economy is at stake.
Inspiring startups
Australia has also generated some homegrown startups addressing the bushfire threat.
Firestory is a data analytics platform that aggregates data to advise on when to back burn at-risk areas and also scours satellite images to identify where fires can start.
The data is presented in a real-time form through a dashboard, which can help inform firefighting decisions over the lifecycle of a fire.
Carbonix is a drone startup founded in 2012 to design America's Cup Racing yachts and is now Australia's leading manufacturer in the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle space.
The company has been able to pivot towards bushfire prevention by capturing data on remote environments with its UAVs, acting on the recommendations of a royal commission into bushfires, which identified the potential of drones.
“We then use a smoke detection algorithm to work out exactly where the fire is and see how it's behaving.”
Carbonix is working with the Australian National University's Bushfire Research Centre of Excellence, using thermal cameras on drones to verify the existence of fires started in remote areas, mainly through lightning strikes.
The drones can help direct fire crews to the scene using only a fraction of the fuel and capital investment in conventional aircraft, which can burn up to AUD3,400 in fuel per hour and often can't fly for safety reasons.
Another startup is exci, which called itself the ‘Smoke Alarm for the Bush.’ The company was created by husband and wife team Gabrielle and Christopher Tylor, whose home was threatened by bushfires in 2020 on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.
The exact system is designed to detect bushfires automatically within minutes using satellite and ground-based sensor data analyzed by machine learning algorithms.
The exci system acquires imagery from ground-based cameras and sensor data from satellites. The data is processed by a sophisticated AI that detects signatures of fires, such as smoke and heat. If a fire is detected, reports are immediately presented to the relevant users, such as first responders or asset owners.
Even small fires are automatically detected within minutes with what the company claims is a "near-zero" rate of false positives.
The solution is in use in North America, where it shields 130 million acres with 1,000 cameras processing 1.5 billion images, and has been rolled out across 25 million acres in Australia.
Citizen science
Not all of the initiatives are from commercial technology vendors.
The National Bushfire Resilience Network (NOBURN) is a citizen science project empowering people to use mobile phones to collect information to help predict bushfire hotspots and minimize their impact.
Chief investigator Dr Sam Van Holsbeeck, who works with the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, explains that the NOBURN app encourages people out and about in their local forests to take photos, adding to the knowledge about forest fuel.
That data is processed by AI to help predict the probability, severity and burn area of potential bushfires.
The project is the culmination of two years of research through an alliance of world-renowned researchers in artificial intelligence, forestry, human factors and science communication at the University of the Sunshine Coast and the University of Adelaide's Australian Institute for Machine Learning.
The Australian summer doesn’t officially start until December, and already there are predictions that the country will face the biggest bushfire threat since the ‘Black Summer.’
The country will need to successfully implement and use this newly developed technology to the fullest if it is to be fully prepared and avoid a repeat of the devastation of only three years ago.
Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their business models. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/auimeesri