California wildfires have, in 2020 alone, burned over 4 million acres, damaged or destroyed more than 10000 buildings, and caused more than 30 fatalities. The destructive impact of these fires is projected to only worsen unless innovative solutions are researched, demonstrated, commercialized, and adopted. Our group’s vision is to build a collaborative team of researchers to leverage the massive advances in machine learning and drone technologies and build a network of drones for wildfire detection and fighting. The objective of the system is to automatically detect a wildfire within the first ~5 minutes of its creation and extinguish it before it grows over ~0.5 acres in size.
List of group members (Ph.D.s): Yue Hu
Publications
- Yue Hu, Xinan Ye, Yifei Liu, Souvik Kundu, Gourav Datta, Srikar Mutnuri, Namo Asavisanu, Nora Ayanian, Konstantinos Psounis, Peter Beerel. “FireFly: A Synthetic Dataset for Ember Detection in Wildfire.” 5th Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response (ICCVW’23).