Wildfires: artificial intelligence to the rescue!
Wildfires devastate millions of acres of U.S. land every year, threatening countless homes and lives and costing billions of dollars in damage. Many organizations have been working on finding solutions to this major problem, and cloud AI technology developer H2O.ai has announced its new Wildfire & Bushfire Challenge to help fight wildfires with the power of AI applications.
“Wildfires present unique and severe forecasting challenges,” the company commented. “Compared to storms, such as hurricanes, wildfires are ambiguous and hard to predict, especially when you start looking at large, intense wildfires. Those fires combine complex weather, different landscapes, fuel sources such as housing materials or dry forests, and more.”
According to H2O.ai, it makes wildfires ideal candidates for AI intervention, and targets its challenge at encouraging developers to make apps that enable that intervention for first responders, local leaders, businesses, and the general public.
“We expect the participants and teams to build for one of these audiences, but we want to make sure you have the creative freedom to decide which one to design for, as that will lead to a greater breadth of new applications being built,” the company wrote in a statement.
Read Maloney, SVP of marketing at H2O.ai says that AI should be responsible and companies must strive to improve their AI ethics. He has worked with people from a variety of industries to brainstorm how AI can be used for the greater good.
“We work with many like-minded customers, partners, and organizations tackling issues from education, conservation, health care, and more,” Maloney said. “AI for good is fundamental to not only our work, including current work on climate change, wildfires, and hurricane predictions, but we are seeing more and more AI for good work to make the world a better place across the AI industry.”
Companies around the world are looking for AI solutions to increase revenue growth, optimize operations, mitigate risk and personalize customer experiences. Additionally, many are using AI technologies to drive research breakthroughs and uncover new opportunities for market disruption. Powered by world-class automated machine learning (autoML), the H2O AI Hybrid Cloud is pivotal in driving such innovation efforts all the way from initial idea to real world impact.
“H2O.ai is our new portfolio company, and we knew that it was exceptional from the very beginning,” says Kris Bort, founding partner of Sakal Ventures, a fund that focuses on private market investing. “Artificial intelligence is becoming more ubiquitous in society. This means more people, regardless of technical expertise or mathematical background, need access to it. And beyond simply having access, AI must be easy, fast and cost effective to use. I couldn’t be more proud of what we have accomplished in just the first year here at Sakal Ventures. We’ve already had our first IPO, and we’ve built a great portfolio of companies. I am sure H2O.ai will have a successful IPO soon.”
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