DoD's Joint AI Center to open-source natural disaster satellite imagery data set

As climate change escalates, the impact of natural disasters is likely to become less predictable. To encourage the use of machine learning for building damage assessment this week, Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute and CrowdAI -- the U.S. Department of Defense's Joint AI Center (JAIC) and Defense Innovation Unit -- open-sourced a labeled data set of some of the largest natural disasters in the past decade. Called xBD, it covers the impact of disasters around the globe, like the 2010 earthquake that hit Haiti. "Although large-scale disasters bring catastrophic damage, they are relatively infrequent, so the availability of relevant satellite imagery is low. Furthermore, building design differs depending on where a structure is located in the world. As a result, damage of the same severity can look different from place to place, and data must exist to reflect this phenomenon," reads a research paper detailing the creation of xBD.