Fusing Firefighting Expertise with the power of AI

Come see Bintel and Athena's Microtalk at FACO's Colorado Wildland Fire Conference in October at Snowmass.  We'll discuss our approach and offer guidelines for the firefighting community on how and where to think about the benefits of artificial intelligence.  Both firms have been in AI for a long time and have some strong opinions about what it can and can't do.

Athena and Bintel operate at the intersection of two very different worlds: Artificial Intelligence (abstract) and Wildfire (very real). While true in all disciplines, in the wildfire domain, mention AI and you’ll get two completely opposite reactions.  At one end are the AI evangelists that believe AI is the answer to “managing” wildfire risk. At the other end are the veteran firefighting professionals who feel AI is something less than useless.  

FACO Wildland Fire Conference
Despite the abundance of wildfire data available from various sources and the buzz around the potential benefits of AI, effectively harnessing it for mitigation strategies remains a challenge. We will describe the benefits of fusing the two worlds into a solution (CWPPs) that will help communities plan smarter, faster and less expensive mitigation strategies.

Athena Intelligence has leveraged AI technology to develop a cutting-edge conditional, geospatial profiling algorithm. This innovation revolutionizes wildfire risk assessment by transforming disaggregated data into actionable insights. "Good AI" starts from good data engineering and although the core data Athena uses is science based and "real", it requires significant "data engineering" to transform it into "computable, machine-ready" data for AI. 

But AI is purely a "data driven thing" and there isn't a practical means to get the experience and wisdom of "on the ground operators" into the machine. Our AI (“Augmented Intelligence”) uses more sources, more recent data, and regional processing to deliver more accurate analytics to the decision maker, but we don’t stop there.

Bintel’s geospatial platform is critical to the usability of these advanced analytics where it can be fused with other situational intelligence. Inspired by work in military intelligence, Bintel's platform is the foundation for “Living” Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPP) and a continuous, collaborative GIS environment for wildfire professionals.  With over ten years of AI experience, Bintel’s GIS platform integrates Athena with existing GIS tools, file formats and new developments in EO, GeoINT and data collection.

Topics: artificial intelligence, Government, Earth Friendly, Mapping, Wildfire, Geospatial, Risk Assessment, collaboration, cwpp

Tom Marsh

Written by Tom Marsh

Tom has served as CEO of Bintel since cofounding the company in 2019. Before that he was COO of ai-one inc. where led the projects for NASA Marshall, SwissRe, Boeing and FedEx. For the past 15 years he has specialized in artificial intelligence applications for enterprise and government with a critical integration of Subject Matter Experts, AI, data, and visualizations. For FedEx this included topic classification and visualization of customer experience data collected weekly from survey data on FedEx.com. A project with an Army military intelligence group involved the development of a sophisticated intelligence platform that included GEOINT and provided situational awareness for an allied military. His current mission is to bring that caliber of solutions to counties in the West.