May 19, 2021
Scientists are using data from Google Maps and satellite images to power artificial intelligence applications that can automatically identify characteristics of city’s buildings that would be vulnerable in an earthquake, hurricane or tsunami.
Researchers from the National Science Foundation’s SimCenter, an engineering community focused on modeling the impact of natural hazards, built the Building Recognition using AI at Large-Scale suite of tools. BRAILS creates enhanced building databases for cities by running artificial intelligence-powered simulations on high-performance computers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin.
"We want to simulate the impact of hazards on all of the buildings in a region, but we don't have a description of the building attributes," said Charles Wang, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and the lead developer of BRAILS told TACC News. "Using AI, we are able to get the needed information. We can train neural network models to infer building information from images and other sources of data."