Our new Heat Resilience tool uses AI-enhanced satellite and aerial imagery to help cities address dangerously high temperatures (and hopefully help reduce related health effects). The tool combines AI-powered object detection with other models to analyze factors like how much green space a city has or how well the roofs on buildings reflect sunlight. This helps urban planners and local governments figure out which cooling interventions, like planting trees, can impact temperatures most, all the way down to a neighborhood level. To start, we’re piloting the tool in 14 U.S. cities, where officials are using it to determine which neighborhoods are most at risk of extreme heat and develop a plan to help. As temperatures rise globally, especially for those living in urban heat islands, AI can be part of the solution.
Google Research has partnered with leaders in the fire community to build FireSat, a constellation of satellites designed specifically to detect and track wildfires as small as a classroom (about 5×5 meters). With FireSat, authorities will be able to access high-resolution imagery that is updated globally every 20 minutes, helping them respond to fires as quickly as possible. This will address a significant problem in firefighting: Until now, firefighters have had to use satellite imagery that’s either low resolution or only updated a few times a day, making it hard to find fires until they’ve grown larger than a soccer field. Once launched, emergency responders will receive this critical information when fires are potentially easier to contain.
We made our bioacoustic foundation model Health Acoustic Representations, or HeAR, available to researchers. HeAR is designed to help researchers build models that can listen to human sounds, like coughs, and flag early signs of disease. This technology has the potential to help screen for conditions like tuberculosis. TB is treatable, but every year millions of cases go undiagnosed — often because people don’t have convenient access to healthcare services, especially in countries without sufficient medical resources. This kind of AI may help. For instance, an India-based respiratory healthcare company is exploring how HeAR could improve their early detection of TB based on cough sounds.