A year after the most destructive wildfire in the state's history scorched nearly 1,100 homes, Colorado lawmakers are considering joining other Western states by adopting artificial intelligence in the hopes of detecting blazes before they burn out of control.
A Colorado Senate committee on Thursday unanimously voted to move forward a bill to create a US$2 million pilot program that would station cameras on mountaintops, and use artificial intelligence to monitor the footage and help detect early signs of a wildfire. The bill will move to the state Senate Appropriations Committee next.
Vaughn Jones, who heads wildland fire management for Colorado's fire prevention agency, said the technology "allows us to take very aggressive early action and keep the impact down... not waiting until the end of the day to start playing catch-up." The Colorado program would support 40 fixed camera stations and six more mobile stations that can be moved to monitor ongoing fires, Ben Miller, the director at the Center of Excellence, which researches technology for firefighting, said at Thursday's hearing.
"The more you train the model, the better and better it gets," said Miller, who added that his agency is very interested in the technology but that it's still burgeoning and that a pilot program is a good place to start. Arvind Satyam, the chief commercial officer at Pano AI, said in an interview that the artificial intelligence uses a data set of over 300 million images that teaches it what is smoke billowing up from a fire and what isn't.
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