California-based utility companies are increasingly investing in artificial intelligence for wildfire mitigation but say they are struggling to collec

California’s AI-Powered Wildfire Prevention Efforts Contend With Data Challenge

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2022-05-12 14:00:06

California-based utility companies are increasingly investing in artificial intelligence for wildfire mitigation but say they are struggling to collect enough data to train the AI.

Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric Co. and PG&E Corp. say they see promise in AI algorithms that use images captured by drones and other means to detect anomalies in infrastructure that could lead to wildfires. However, they say it will likely take years to gather enough data to deploy the algorithms at scale across their infrastructure, where they would augment ongoing manual inspections.

It is a common problem for niche industries that don’t have ready access to massive data sets, said Gary Marcus, co-author of “Rebooting AI,” adding that the effective use cases of AI today typically work because we “beat them to death” with data.

“I think we are probably a couple of years out from, we’ll call it, greater penetration,” said Todd Inlander, senior vice president of information technology and chief information officer of Southern California Edison, adding that the company’s AI algorithms are currently capable of identifying a number of specific conditions they have been trained on.

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