Why Google chose Patna for a flood forecasting project in India: Sella Nevo

Sella Nevo, a software engineer who specializes in machine learning (ML) research and development, currently leads the Google Flood Forecasting Initiative that aims to provide flood forecasts and warnings in developing countries. He was also one of the co-creators of the ML model used in Google Duplex. In a phone interview from Israel, Nevo--a keynote speaker at the Mint Digital Innovation Summit explains why Google chose Patna in India as a pilot for his project, and how the company plans to scale up this model not only in India but globally too. This Flood Forecasting Initiative is Google's effort to provide high accuracy, high resolution flood forecasting. It's not global yet, and our focus is in using the Google's machine learning (ML) expertise and our computational power as well as our access to various types of resources and data to substantially improve flood forecasting systems, their accuracy, their lead time and so on.