Artificial intelligence has for three years now served as a kind of gut check for Alberta Wildfire staff making decisions about how to allocate resources.
Years ago, the provincial agency in charge of wildfire response in Alberta’s protected forests identified a potential use of AI: predicting where wildfires would break out the next day.
“Their observation was that they spend money on trying to be preventative and a lot of the time, those resources just idle,” recalled Graham Erickson, a machine learning developer at AltaML, an Edmonton-based software company that has contracts in both the public and private sectors.
Protected forests cover more than half of Alberta and are divided into 10 regions. Each region is overseen by an officer or manager whose responsibilities include suppression planning.
“We call fire a science and an art – and this is kind of (the) art piece,” Olivia Aftergood told CTV News Edmonton …