Angola was chosen as one of the 18 new countries that will have Google FloodHub, the information platform of the Google aimed at future floods.
The arrival in the country of the flood forecasting system created by Google comes as part of an expansion of the platform to new countries, which conducts an event on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in New York.
"There is a sense of urgency with climate change“, said the Vice President of Engineering and Research at Google, Yossi Matias, in an early presentation session.
"Our AI team uses machine learning [ML] to predict the direction of the water“, explained the official, stressing that last year alone, the system sent 115 million flood alerts to millions of inhabitants in risk areas, such as India and Bangladesh.
"With technology, we can effectively address this problem.“, considered Matias, noting that the company's analysis showed that early warning systems manage to prevent 43% of deaths and 35% to 50% of the economic damage associated with floods.
This expansion to nearly two dozen countries comes at a time when the Mountain View giant is creating a centralized platform with information about floods, Google FloodHub. Information will be included in the search engine and maps for “help more people stay safe in flood situations."
A similar predictive mechanism is being used to monitor and predict the evolution of large fires, which Yossi Matias says was the catalyst for this work.
"It was one of the factors that motivated me to look into this“, he said. 🇧🇷There is an expectation that the frequency and scale [of fires] will increase because of climate change“, he reiterated.
Therefore, the company is working so that its ML models can identify and follow fires in real time, predicting how they will evolve to help populations and assist the work of firefighters. This system is being used in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Australia.
