AI is Protecting Firefighters! It’s Becoming the First Line of Defense

Firefighters say that the worst fires are the ones that we generally don't see coming. Amidst the chaos of saving human lives from an unprecedented fire, firefighters have been striving toward public safety, keeping aside their own security. Now, firefighters need not worry about their own safety and security. The advancement in artificial intelligence is enabling firefighters to protect human lives, by maintaining their safety. AI is becoming the first line of defense, the first responders to deadly, life-threatening situations with the much-needed warning information.

Flashover is basically the phenomenon of a deadly fire where nearly all combustible items in a room ignite all of a sudden. Reports have found that these situations are the primary causes of firefighter deaths. But AI can definitely provide much assistance by becoming the first responder in these cases. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and other institutions have created a Flashover Prediction Neural Network (FlashNet) model to forecast lethal events and save valuable time before they erupt.

FlashNet secures an accuracy of over 92% across more than a dozen common residential floorplans in the US and came out leading while competing with other AI-driven flashover predicting programs. To predict these events, existing tools generally relied on either constant streams of temperatures or leverage ML to fill in the missing data in events when heat detectors fail to perform under high temperatures. But this AI system is advanced and does not succumb to any external factors.