Using AI For Good: A New Data Challenge To Use AI To Triage Natural Disaster Aerial Imagery

Deep learning has revolutionized how we process the vast firehoses of data that define modern life. Yet, the daily drumbeat of AI headlines tends to center on the commercial applications of AI and how it is reshaping how companies do business. In a refreshing twist, a new open AI challenge by the World Bank, in collaboration with WeRobotics and OpenAerialMap, illustrates the incredible potential of deep learning for humanitarian applications, especially in the critical hours and days after a major natural disaster. One of the most exciting application areas of modern deep learning tools has been the use of neural networks to examine imagery at accuracy and detail levels impossible just a few years ago. Today state-of-the-art neural systems can examine hundreds of millions of images, cataloging them into tens of thousands of categories, estimating the location they were taken, their emotion, look in the background for pollution and natural disaster damage and even estimate the level of "violence" they portray, while creating new models is increasingly becoming point-and-click.