Main point: “Today’s tools are warning residents, triggering mitigation and helping first responders react more effectively. As artificial intelligence (AI) advances, sensors proliferate and data collections grow, prediction and detection technologies are likely to become more precise and effective.”
More about it:
- “The goal is “using AI to predict disasters in advance, thus enabling responders to take swifter actions to prevent or mitigate them.”
- AI “is most reliable at analyzing events for which the root causes are well understood, plenty of data is available to train the algorithms and instances are recurrent enough that the models’ predictions can be compared against reality and fine-tuned.”
- “Disaster responders need to balance a desire for early alerts against their need for accuracy.”
Why it matters: “Instead of an operational infrastructure grounded in post hoc fundraising and service delivery, a future humanitarian system could orient around an operational structure that flexibly increases capacity for rapid response as a crisis worsens.”