In a project for the Defense Department's Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), computer scientists have turned to artificial intelligence and aerial imagery to construct a detailed damage assessment solution. The tool can be used remotely and automatically to determine the amount of damage to buildings and structures from a natural disaster or catastrophe. The prototype, known as the xView II model, was tested this fall, with the goal of rolling out a more finalized operational version next year. In the last few years, the U.S. military has seen an enormous amount of weather-related damage to some of its facilities, including the destruction at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida, from Hurricane Michael in 2018; extensive water damage at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina, from Hurricane Florence's torrential rains in 2018; and flooding of the Missouri River and area creeks that impacted one-third of Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, in 2019. Meanwhile, this fall, California's wildfires raged over 4 million acres causing irreparable damage, while repeated hurricanes barraged the Gulf Coast.

USGIF's GEOINT Community Week brings together the defense, intelligence, homeland security, and geospatial communities at-large for a week of briefings, educational sessions, workshops, technology exhibits and networking opportunities. USGIF is looking for volunteers to share our Intro to GEOINT presentation at your local schools during GEOINT Community Week. This is a great way to give back by helping EdGEOcate our future leaders. We have prepared presentation materials for you that are geared toward upper elementary through lower high school grades and provide an overview of GEOINT--geography, maps, satellites, imagery, remote sensing, GIS, and careers. The presentation takes 45 minutes to one hour and is highly interactive with games, Q&A, stories, videos, and much more.

Inundated with more data than humans can analyze, the U.S. military and intelligence community are banking on machine learning and advanced computing technologies to separate the wheat from the chaff. The Defense Department operates more than 11,000 drones that collect hundreds of thousands of hours of video footage every year. "When it comes to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR, we have more platforms and sensors than at any time in Department of Defense history," said Air Force Lt. Gen. John N.T. "Jack" Shanahan, director for defense intelligence (warfighter support) in the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. "It's an avalanche of data that we are not capable of fully exploiting," he said at a technology conference in Washington, D.C., hosted by Nvidia, a Santa Clara, California-based artificial intelligence computing company. For example, the Pentagon has deployed a wide-area motion imagery sensor that can look at an entire city.